>>4047913Alien Headbutt just was a bad fit for Jump, period. Something like that had worked in the magazine in decades, possibly since the 90s. I really liked it (until he had to rush the ending), and it got good buzz on /a/ and in the MangaPlus comments, so it clearly had way more good vibes amongst the foreign fans than it did in Japan. Feels like it would have made more sense in an edgier seinen publication like the one that ran Gantz or runs Terra Formars.
I really wish that I knew what was up with spokon in Jump. It's not like the genre is dead. Weekly Shonen Magazine's biggest hit in years has been Blue Lock, so there's still an audience somewhere lapping it up. I do think that Jump hasn't necessarily put forth too many worthwhile ones since Haikyu, but honestly the problem began before 2020. Haikyu ending wasn't exactly a surprise or anything. They should have started to line up a new spokon by 2017-2018. Most of the hits in the past had overlap periods.
The final years of Haikyu saw the quick deaths of the aforementioned Robot X Laserbeam (golf), Shudan! (soccer), Full Drive (table tennis), Momiji no Kisetsu (shoji), Double Taisei (shoji--Jump really wanted a shoji series in the 2010s), and the aforementioned Beast Children (rugby). I think one of the biggest issues that seems to plague spokon in Jump is how much it pushes its legacy franchises. It's hard to run a sport that already has an iconic series for that sport, but less mainstream sports run the risk of failing to catch an audience (but holy shit if it lands--Jump is often cited as having helped bring a new youth generation into basketball with Slam Dunk and into go with Hikaru no Go). It's possible to get a second hit for a sport like Whistle for soccer and Kuroko's Basketball for basketball, but a lot of the popular sports are already taken. For fucksake, a baseball series hasn't been able to take off in the magazine since the 70s after Samurai Giants and Play Ball.
