>>3807402Anon, it ran for like 17 volumes worth of manga across two magazines, had omnibus rereleases with new bonus art, two TV anime, a film, and a guest artist anthology featuring fucking boichi. Are you going to tell me all these releases that came out in Japan months or years before the US saw them were completely bankrolled by Adult Swim viewer counts? Did you even see the kind of shit fujos were drawing in the second half of the 90s? There were heroes absolutely coated in crosses (and belts).
The fact is Nightow is a westaboo who liked US comics and already collected US comic statues and other merch, so he was very active in visiting conventions and talking to Western merch companies to produce figures. This has always given this skewered view of Trigun having more US merch than Japanese (which really isn't the case now), and a strong presence in US anime culture. Saying it flopped in Japan is just repeating a tired rumour that's been said without evidence since before Trimax even finished. What counts as a flop? Something that attracted enough readers to last into double digit tankoban? Something that warranted an adaptation by 90s Mad House? Something that started airing/publication before you had easy access to Japanese anime news and fanworks on the internet, so you had no idea about it until it was big stateside? There's plenty of things you can point to as evidence of it being invested in by the Japanese industry and nothing to prove it failed to turn profit or upset audiences.
No it wasn't Naruto levels of popular, its legacy isn't that big, but to use a series brought up this thread as an example: Yami no Matsuei didn't even get social media posts from its publisher when its last volume released in 2017. There's no movie or TV series revival happening there, and it never received any physical merch beyond stationary, phone cards, a couple mirrors, a clock, some tshirts and a cushion cover. Was it a flop for having Christian iconography then? :^)
