This is a poll done by the Kodansha, I believe, in line with the monthly FT magazine. I don't have perfect memory regarding this, but I think you could have voted for multiple people and around 11,000 people voted. The fact that it had 11,000 voted makes more valid than any forum poll to be honest. Forums generally have 20-30 active people. So this is how Japan sees things.
I tend to believe the english speaking fanbase is much of the same. We just get a lot more vocal criticisms. I've snooped around on the Japanese forums, and most of the time people are way too polite.
In fact the behavior of the Japanese is more politically correct because unlike the Westerners, who participate in forums, the Japanese participants of the forums if they are buyers and consumers of Mangas.
What am I going with it? The Japanese posters are true fans of the series, people who invest in them, people who are the target audience that focus on publishers and authors.
That is, the Japanese who are in the forums are because they really love something, they criticize it, but they are respectful because they know that like everything, it is a commercial product.
In their popularity surveys, they need to be able to vote for items that come in the magazines or on the Tankubons to prove they are legal consumers, which in turn makes you more intimate with the product and have more respect.
The western forum participant is the reverse, many do not buy the products or when they are licensed in their country, many seek to receive from a free without investing nothing for improvement, entocens cease to be a target audience because not investing, it is simply As if stealing someone's work to criticize it, worse without giving anything in return, I have often seen that if they consume and invest in the original material, tend to be less subjective and feel more intimate with the product, but are The less, some even complain about legal payment platforms claiming free, forgetting that without these platforms, many products might not arrive.
The Japanese audience is different, because the products are created for them in specific, we can not expect to believe that everything they like them will please us all.
Resuming on popularity surveys.
I remember that in the manga of Fairy Girls also became one where Lucy even won the first place.
Commercially sure that's probably one reason why companies were eager to jump on the franchise, but I swear a lot of the Lucy fans on twitter were female (not that I'm assuming their sexuality) who rarely drew her in fanservice positions :/
The wrong thinking of some with respect to saying that a personage is only popular by the "Tits" is clearly a way of thinking very misogynous and besides quite ridiculous, there are many personages with big breasts, and they are not in the lists of popularity, in addition , As you well quote, much of Lucy's Fandom is women. That proves that he who says such ridiculous things as these is wrong.
Same, it is the least, commonly when there is Hate, I read ridiculous as "It is a parody of Shounen" even if they do not even know that it is a parody and that Shounen is not a Genre as such, but an audience with a Broad spectrum of concepts
. Amazon reviews can be fickle but mainly are all the same opinion (usually positive), places like 2ch and 4chan are good spots to get an understanding of the japanese fanbase, or even twitter to be honest
