What's wrong with referring to it by the Japanese title? I often look for the Japanese title specifically when looking for manga or anime.
If you get a Japanese copy of the manga, in Japan, it will say, at the top, “My Hero Academia” in English. There’s no excuse for using some other title. You can always add alternative names to your indexing system—just like you might search for “In Search of Lost Time” and find a book titled “Remembrance of Things Past”—but the English translation would never be called “À la recherche du temps perdu”. That would be silly.
I'm not sure what people expect to find searching for something by its romaji title.
For example, the following is the title as used in the Anime: "Graced by the Gods". However, a more literal translation (and the one the novel was originally (unofficially) translated under) was "The Man Picked Up By the Gods". Compared with the romanji "Kamitachi ni Hirowareta Otoko", which is much more consistent to find it by.
Separately, there's also titles that translate like: "I Came to Another World as a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None to Journey while Relying on Quickness"...
EDIT: Another advantage of using the Japanese names is you can use fewer words to search/refer by. For example, "The Irregular in Magic High School" is most often referred to simply as "Mahoka" by its fans. Same with Danmachi.
Or "Mahouka" whose author is a Japanese nationalist, at one point in the story has them nuke China, and the MC's sister is also in love with him. Huh, kind of a trend there.
"Danmachi" is too bad because the Japanese title is actually a pretty good joke, but it's hard to translate. It's like a pun on deai meaning "random encounter" in a video game but also "encountering" someone in a bar/on a dating app.
Or, more likely, people don't want to say the whole title because it's too long. Weebs being weebs are going to prefer the Japanese abbreviation sometimes.
Is there a version of Hanlon's Razor that goes "Don't attribute to malice what can be attributed to convenience?"
I think what you're describing are isolated cases. There are others like "Konosuba" and "Arifureta" which are still quite popular.
>Or "Mahouka" whose author is a Japanese nationalist, at one point in the story has them nuke China, and the MC's sister is also in love with him. Huh, kind of a trend there.
"Mahouka" never struck me as controversial either. In fact, if anything it was quite individualistic.
There’s also Higehiro recently in the “author is a pervert” category, but before that it was used for like 10 different anime about incest like OniAi. This wisdom comes to me from a marketing director at Crunchyroll.
I think Konosuba is just shortened because the actual name doesn’t really mean anything, but also doesn’t sound memorable when you translate it.
Domestic no Kanajo involves incest (well, step-incest) and better meets the argument of "author is a pervert" [1]. But yet there's no shortening of the title.
> This wisdom comes to me from a marketing director at Crunchyroll
Was an merely a opinion of his/hers as opposed to actual policy? And if it was actually a policy, do you think it might coincide with other elements (like how long the title of the source material is)?
[1] Although, for some reason, a woman writing a smutty telenovela script as a light novel doesn't generally register "perversion" to most people. I wonder why.
Similar cases happen in Western video games where they get "completely translated" including all UI elements; JP players actually expect those to be in English.
https://legendsoflocalization.com/games-with-famous-bad-tran...
"Boku no Hero" is also kind of hard to say out loud. But now that I think about it the use of "boku" (which is like an "androgynous" first person pronoun for boys or tomboys) probably means it's specifically about Deku's academic life.
You'll get plenty of search hits off it.
Conversely, Hagane no Renkinjutsushi is longer and harder to pronounce than Fullmetal Alechemist. I've never seen this name used in lieu of the translated English name.