2021: Reflecting on Ayu's career

[saseal]

18years fan here. The bad press from 2008 onwards which caused the bad public perception has got to do what she did earlier in her career. If you look at her songs like "real me", "my name's WOMEN", you would realize that she is advocating gender equality, which is not something that the men in power look forward to, this is probably worse than promoting LGBT rights in their mind. There's are also other things that she did that is very "un-Japanese" like Max-Tom Avex CEO saga and some of her MV that outright diss her own company.
She was sitting on that powder keg for really long, and the deafness/voice is the spark that ignites it.

In the last decade, she is releasing way fewer songs and putting in less and less effort into it than ever for a simple reason: it's not going to make much money compared to holding concerts.