> I must say that I find it rather tame compared to Japanese fiction.
It's definitely shades all over the world. I only really know about Japan's culture 12th hand honestly so the only thing that's really filtered down is that it seems kind of repressed in public having gotten a big infusion of US laws and ideas post WW2 and there's some issues with creeps in public?
> I find that in U.S.A. romance fiction, more often than not, the protagonist is the party who falls in love
I think a lot of that is due to the target audience being largely women so it's written from and towards what the audience wants to read. Most TV and movie romances show a predominantly predatory almost (sometimes explicitly) coercive romance especially in media aimed at men.
> It's definitely shades all over the world. I only really know about Japan's culture 12th hand honestly so the only thing that's really filtered down is that it seems kind of repressed in public having gotten a big infusion of US laws and ideas post WW2 and there's some issues with creeps in public?
Japan is a civil law country with an entirely different legal system than the U.S.A..
Japanese law knows the principle of “one witness is no witness” as many others do. In particular in sexual assault cases it is often the word of the accuser vs. that of the accused, in Japan as a matter of law that cannot result into a conviction absent further evidence, in the U.S.A. it can.
Another issue is that in Japan, confessions are treated far more seriously and the police is permitted to interrogate in quite extreme ways, often without a defence attorney.
So it often comes down to willpower, whether the defendant can keep protesting innocence when being sleep deprived and mentally worn down, without such a confession, a conviction is almost impossible, but with it, it is assured.
> I think a lot of that is due to the target audience being largely women so it's written from and towards what the audience wants to read. Most TV and movie romances show a predominantly predatory almost (sometimes explicitly) coercive romance especially in media aimed at men.
And in Japanese fiction the target audience's sex is irrelevant for this.
Romance fiction targeted at females will typically feature a female protagonist who initially despises the love interest, but is eventually won over, often still having rather mixed feelings about the latter.
This story is more or less the same in male-targeted Japanese romance fiction, except the protagonist is now male.
The only real difference is that, quintessentially, the female protagonist is conflicted and indecisive, on some level attracted to the love interest, but on another considering him very unsuitable, and in male-targeted stories, the protagonist is implausibly dense and fails to realize the love interest is in love with him, despite all the cues obvious to the audience.
It's definitely shades all over the world. I only really know about Japan's culture 12th hand honestly so the only thing that's really filtered down is that it seems kind of repressed in public having gotten a big infusion of US laws and ideas post WW2 and there's some issues with creeps in public?
> I find that in U.S.A. romance fiction, more often than not, the protagonist is the party who falls in love
I think a lot of that is due to the target audience being largely women so it's written from and towards what the audience wants to read. Most TV and movie romances show a predominantly predatory almost (sometimes explicitly) coercive romance especially in media aimed at men.