Random Deceiving Anime That Prove You Shouldn't Judge A Book By Its Cover (15 items)

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  (#13) My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU

  • Slice of Life, Comedy, Drama, Romance, School

  My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU may look like a simple slice of life anime about a school club, but it goes a lot deeper than many viewers anticipate. Hachiman Hikigaya is a cynical teenage boy who is convinced that most people are trapped by a vicious social hierarchy that keeps them miserable and forces them to act against their true nature. At base, everyone is cruel and selfish, and everyone is hiding those emotions to save face. 

  In a different anime, Hikigaya would simply be proven wrong - but in My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, it's not just that he's wrong. It's that he's actively creating situations that prove him right because his own self-esteem is so painfully low. Because he sees himself as inherently worthless, he engineers situations in which he looks like the bad guy and other people treat him poorly as a result, thus allowing him to maintain his cynicism while protecting other people from social harm. He's also protecting himself from too much intimacy, which he fears because it could lead to his low opinion of himself being proven correct - something that his views on the social hierarchy protect him from.

  This isn't just reading between the lines - these things are explicitly addressed within the series. Hikigaya is such an emotionally complex character that he genuinely feels like a real person - a rare feat in any anime - and it's definitely not the type of complexity one would expect from its school club setting. 
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  (#6) Goblin Slayer

  Goblin Slayer seems like it's going to be a fun adventure series in a Dungeons & Dragons type setting. There's no reason to expect that it might be otherwise... but within the first episode, there's an assault scene involving a group of goblins attacking a woman. This scene has proved to be highly controversial within the anime community. Some feel that it establishes exactly how vicious the goblins are, and how justified the protagonist is for wanting to get rid of them, while others feel that the scene has little value outside of shock. Whether you thought the scene was successful or not, you probably weren't expecting it when you queued up the first episode. 
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  (#8) Clannad

  • Comedy, Romance, Slice of Life

  CLANNAD is supposedly a slice of life anime that features Tomoya, a male protagonist who forms relationships with his female friends before ultimately settling on one of them. For the first season, that's essentially what it is, but in the second season, things get painfully real in a way that few viewers expected. Tomoya marries his childhood sweetheart Nagisa, and Nagisa gets pregnant. There are a number of complications that one just doesn't expect to see in an anime.

  Nagisa's already precarious health takes a nosedive during her pregnancy, so Tomoya works himself into the ground trying to support the family. He has bonding moments with a boss who once used drugs to cope with depression. When the baby is born, Nagisa doesn't survive the delivery, and Tomoya is so devastated that he drinks himself into a stupor and leaves his daughter Ushio with Nagisa's parents. When she's five years old, he finally gets his act together - just in time for Ushio to pass away from the same illness that claimed her mother.

  CLANNAD isn't an anime that looks like it's going to get this real, but the fact that it does is one of the reasons it is so highly acclaimed.
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  (#2) Puella Magi Madoka Magica

  • Fantasy, Magical Girl, Drama

  By now, most anime fans know what to expect out of Puella Magi Madoka Magica, but that was not at always the case when the series first aired. What begins as an adorable magical girl anime filled with transformation sequences, pink, and glitter quickly becomes something much more dire. Over the course of the series, viewers get to watch the characters grapple with the reality that not only are the wishes they make in exchange for becoming magical girls likely to completely destroy their lives, but the witches that they're sworn to defeat were once girls just like themselves. The only thing that's cute about this show is the aesthetic - the content is anything but.
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  (#14) Punch Line

  Punch Line has one of the weirdest premises of any anime ever, and it's pretty easy to write it off as nonsensical ecchi anime with a completely absurd premise. For the first five episodes, that's exactly what it is. If Yuuta Iridatsu sees panties, his incredible powers will be activated, and the world will be destroyed. Sounds like a thinly veiled reason to draw anime panties, right? Wrong. Punch Line features one of the most tightly woven plots in anime history. Every single thing that happens makes some type of logical sense within the rules of its universe. What's more, the art is spectacular, the character development is spot-on, and it's just overall a really good series with a really good plot - something most people would never imagine given its wacky description.
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  (#5) Higurashi no Naku Koro ni

  Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni is another seemingly cheery anime about adorable high school girls being adorable - and if you look at some of the episodes, like the obligatory beach episode, it does seem to be that. If you didn't know it already, this show is one of the bloodiest shows in anime history. The true focus of this show is not cute girls doing cute things - it's Hinamizawa Syndrome, a psychiatric condition that impacts everyone in the village of Hinamizawa that causes a plethora of symptoms, the most noteworthy being a murderous rage. 

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