Top 10 Worst Anime Cliches

Is there ever that one cliché in anime that you by no means can understand why they keep doing this because it's so annoying? I'm not saying that the animes that do these clichés are bad, far from it. I like most of them, however, these tropes are pretty annoying in my own opinion. I'm sure you can agree on at least one of them and I know there might be some that I missed. However, this is just what I think of when I think of annoying clichés in anime. You're free to add one of your own too.
The Top Ten
1 Distracting Fanservice

Fanservice can be done well if it's fun or for comedic purposes. However, sometimes the creators decide to put in way too much fanservice that it becomes very distracting. High School of The Dead is one of them. It's an action packed anime about zombies all over Japan and yet so many times when the action happens, the fanservice gets in the way. It just takes you out of the moment and is overall unnecessary. Or that one female or male lead that's only there for fanservice and doesn't actually have any character development. Their whole existence is just eye candy for the audience and it makes them look like a tool.

2 Friendship Saves the Day

Ever liked an anime where everything seems to be perfect? The characters are likable, the action is great and the story is engaging? Then you get to certain point in the anime whether it be the end or not that you realize the writer didn't know how to properly end a fight? So what does the writer do? The power of friendship conquers all! You see this in certain animes like Fairy Tail (especially) and even Soul Eater did. Except they called it 'bravery' but you could replace it with friendship and it would be the same thing. I hate it when that happens. It can ruin the anime for me. Friendship can't solve everything, the world doesn't work like that. You have to be strong in the real way and that doesn't include suddenly becoming powerful because you're thinking about your friends. That's just lazy writing and could fail a show entirely.

3 Protagonist Lacks a Mom and Dad

This may seem small but have you ever noticed how the main lead either has one parent or no parents at all? This seems to be in almost every anime you come across. For some reason the main lead doesn't have their mom or dad. Whether they're dead, they abandoned them, a divorce or they are too busy to ever pay attention to their child. Here's a list of main characters with either one parent or none. Pokémon, Attack on Titan, Ouran Highschool Host Club, Kaichou Wa Maid Sama, Kotoura-san, Mirai Nikki, Naruto, Black Butler, Your Lie In April, Say I Love You, Soul Eater, Bleach, Fairy Tail, Clannad, Fullmetal Alchemist and Batman. (Okay, that last one isn't an anime but you get my point.)

4 Tsunderes

They are just awful people, why not be nice like in the anime Ore Monogatari (my love story). No Tsunderes there and its one of the best Romance anime's ever made.

They are all basically the same character so must so you can tell what will happen, man dose something (doesn't matter if its good or bad) gets blamed and most likely hurt and end result either proved right or wrong (mainly wrong) but no real sorry after for development.

You know after seeing this character in almost all anime, I think even the fans of this cliche should see by now that it has over stayed its welcome. If the man did something wrong he's Hitler "BUT" if the woman did something wrong then nothing happens (in fact something the man still gets blamed. If you really want "Gender Equality" then both sides should have the same ups and downs.

To be honest I never understood why people like Tsunderes, they are not cute they are just mean people, its not a good role model, please give me a good reason why they need to exist.

5 Generic Male Leads

It's not only like this in anime... it's basically like this in every second fantasy or scifi movie. Either they are unrealisticall strong action heroes or your average imperfect big mouths with a good heart that learn a lot along their way. The thing is, when you have a female character that fits this description, it's automatically more interesting because it doesn't fit the stereotype. Plus, female leads often have more developed personalities and background stories. Quite often, the villain will be a whole lot more relatable and interesting, or at least he has more of an attitude. I get that the male leads are often supposed to be a placeholder for YOU, the viewer, but it doesn't change everyone around you is more interesting.

6 Female Character that Thinks Someone Looking at Her is a Pervert

This should be #1. Poor gentlemen. They keep on getting abused just for looking at something or being a "pervert" when they are not a pervert. This is a cliche that needs to stop in anime. Take a look at many of the shows that has this cliche. Note: Some to many of these shows are good ones, so if any of you see your favorite in this list, just know that I'm not saying that they are bad. I'm saying that they have this cliche. Here goes: Sword Art Online, Your Lie in April, Akame ga Kill, Guilty Crown, Love Hina, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Soul Eater, Naruto Frachise, and many more.

7 School

I'm sure we all saw this one coming. How many animes do you think, take place in a school? So many! Even some of my favorite animes like Code Geass, Angel Beats, Another, Fruits Basket etc. I'm not saying it's bad but it's becoming very obvious that most of them take place in school. There is more to life than school. I watch anime to see an amazing adventure with characters. Not be reminded of why I hated school in the first place. We've all been to school. We all had exams, bullies, clubs and some good memories. Except I don't always want to see that. Especially since some anime is much more interesting if you take the school aspect out of it, like with Code Geass. I wanted to see Lelouch come up with clever ideas to stop his enemies and free Japan. Not him working in the student council room with whatever they were doing. There's plenty of good anime that don't take place in school like Wolf's Rain, Berserk, Attack on Titan etc. So it can be frustrating to see school anime sometimes.

8 Filler Episodes

Stop these stupid episodes and pay attention to the plot. Why can't these shows take the plot seriously instead of some stupid filler?!

Oh yes. Fillers, I don't know but I'm a total perfectionist, my first ever anime was Naruto (fortunately or not) and thus, I had to watch all of the damn fillers even though they were boring to the very core (Ninja ostrich? What was his name again? Condor? Mecha-Naruto... Like seriously? ) but I had to watch it. I got so bored of the fillers that I gave up watching it on my third anime; which was Bleach. Fillers are so intolerable that they defeated my perfectionist personality.

9 Dark Edgy Character with a Dark Past

Ever see that one character who never reveals about themselves because they're afraid to hurt the people they care about? Or when they act cold towards them in order to keep them away or safe from their past? This happens a lot in anime but it normally doesn't bother me. However, I do see this a lot and my tolerance meter can only take so much of it sometimes. Even some of my favorite anime like Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Naruto, Attack on Titan, Kaichou Wa Maid Sama are capable of following this trope.

10 Edgy Edgy Edgy

Edginess is something you can't just abuse of, especially on characters, I can understand making a dark hero or something alike but sometimes it's just too much, batman, daredevil and red hood are clear example in western comics, while daredevil is somehow better the other 2 are kinda soulless, about videogames there are plenty of examples, half if of the cast of sonic for instance, this trope is kind of annoying, even in manga with characters like sasuke... less popular but annoying

Akame Ga Kill is a perfect example of this! It tries to be dark and mature but it backfires. That was my main problem with the show more than anything else. Besides the violence trying its hardest to shock the audience, the show had the characters have awful pasts and circumstances... and then suddenly it went back to its comedy, as if it never happened.

The Contenders
11 Beach Episode

In this anime called Infinite Stratos, the beach episode had no point. It was literally just to show the female characters in Bikinis, and naked at one point. Like the bikinis weren't even for kids, they were like an adult woman's lingerie.

Beach episodes can be done well, but popping them in just for filler is a surefire way to ruin the fun of them.

Seriously quit treating female anime characters as sex objects

12 Fragile Female Lead

This is mostly in Shoujo anime but I've found it in Shounen anime too. It's that one girl in an anime that can't do anything right but always promises to try her best even if she fails. Like how she's always getting bad grades, slowest runner in gym class, can't lift anything heavy, doesn't stand up for herself when being harassed or is very co-dependent on the male. I know we all have our flaws but it's hard to support a female character when she can't do anything by herself and is only there for the lead. Like Yuki Kuran in Vampire Knight or Erika Shinohara in Black Prince & Wolf Girl. Yuki is very dull and was only put in the show so that females can pretend that they're her. So they can imagine themselves as a woman in a love triangle with two handsome leads. Yuki isn't a character herself in my opinion. Erika is a pathetic character in my eyes. She allows Kyouya to call her a dog and forces her to do things to her. Just because she lied to her 'friends' about having a boyfriend. So now she has to pretend that Kyouya is her boyfriend despite him treating her like a slave. It's sad to see that.

13 Main Character Has Nothing Unique

Almost every anime harem scene in which the male lead has NOTHING unique about them.

Every Digimon Main male as Tai,Davis and the others.
Typical all shounen Characters!

14 Whoops! I'm a Pervert Now!

I absolutely hate this. I remember watching an anime called Demon King Daimo, and it looked really cool. In the first or second episode, a girl made some AWESOME magic that was well-animated. I wanted to watch the main character learn this at the magic school, but unfortunately the entire thing was this cliche. The next few episodes consisted of dumb side plots, like a girl he accidentally violated chasing him with a wooden katana in nothing but a white button up shirt. Or when he (main character) was forced to stay in some enclosed box that wouldn't open until morning because of some sort of punishment. And the constant explosions that left the above girl with tattered clothes. Not to mention this idiotic girl that was bad at magic and whose only strength was invisibility...and she had to take off her clothes to be invisible.
I hate it when an anime has a promisable storyline and instead shoves this perverted crap onto me.

15 Indecisive Boy with a Harem

I hate the cliche where every (or almost every) girl in an anime is in love with the same boy. It makes the girls seem hollow and lifeless, as if they cannot cope without being in love with an otherwise bland male lead, and also is kinda ridiculous how a boy can be the sole sexual icon for so many girls. Akame Ga Kill was ruined by all the female characters (except Akame and Najenda and kinda Leone) all fawning over Tatsumi. It adds nothing to any show and ruins potentially interesting female characters by having their only story to be lovesick, giving them no depth whatsoever.

16 Nosebleeds

It was funny once. But in 50% of anime shows and every second episode of it, it just becomes tedious boring and annoying.

Generally anime use tropes/jokes way too often!

There's no way a person can nosebleed that much when they're around something sexy. And how a person doesn't bleed to death because of this? I don't know

Do anime characters just have an infinite amount of blood in their body?

17 Awkward Falling Positions

These scenes are so annoying. How the hell do these situations even happen? Plus, the girl is never the one getting in trouble; it's always the guy. They can literally see the guy getting yelled at by the person who walked in, but the girl never does anything. They never think, "Hmm, I know that it wasn't like that, so maybe I should help explain that that wasn't the case." Nope, they just leave the guy to get punched, slapped, or whatever the mangaka can think of. At this point, they'd throw a whole missile at him over a misunderstanding.

18 Out-of-Proportion Boobs

Ouch! They look so painful and swollen! I'm noticing a trend and it seems that people have gotten desensitized to big boobs that are 3 handfuls or bigger so now in order to be considered big they have to be drawn head-sized or bigger. Imagine how bad that would feel!

Just... just STOP IT! STOP IT!
Somebody needs to install that Anti-horny Bonk Dog in anime production offices, except it's an actual human being holding a baseball bat.
Alternative punishment, the writers and artists have to run 2 miles each morning and afternoon with two bags full of meat fat equal in size to the biggest breasts in their cast attached to a chest harness.

19 Perverted Leads

GTO is comedy and it is all about pervert jokes. I hate all that in a regular show. But in its own show it made sense. It was hilarious and showed how ridicuously all that is. And iirc Onizuka transforms into a half-way normal person in the end.

They're annoying, nobody likes them and every girl wants to rip their eyeballs out. Could a character get much worse?

It's fine when it's a recurring character. but if you've got a main character like that it's a problem

20 Main Character is the Younger of 2 Brothers

In a plethora of animes, the protagonist or another central character is a younger brother. He has an older brother who has either gone bad, is mysterious, or has disappeared. (An exception occurs in Yu-Gi-Oh, where older brother Seto Kaiba is one of the central characters, and Mokuba is his younger brother.)

"Fatal Fury" ("Garou Densetsu" if you're in Japan) is an exception. There the protagonist is the ELDER brother, though the fanservice-y female lead is more interested in the younger one.

21 Shouting Out Names of Attacks

I am very, very sad to say this, but Code Grass is guilty of this. Occasionally Kallen or someone else in a Knightmare will yell out their attack. Why though? It might give enough time for the enemy to counterattack. It's annoying as well as pointless.

Imagine a character shouting "ICE ATTACK" then getting shocked when the opponent blocked it using fire. That is the most stupidest things in the world

Well in Naruto, you have to say it. Like, you can't undo a jutsu if you don't say release.

22 Bland Harem Leads

And usually too daft to even realize that literally every girl in their surrounding is into them. For bonus cringe, let one of the admirers be a sibling. Are incestuous tendencies on this list?

23 Wish Fulfillment Lead Protagonist
24 You Know How the Antagonist Killed All Those People and Tormented Me? Well Now that I Caught Him Let's Forgive Him

So many series are guilty of this and I hate it! In this image, I can agree that Obito was WAY too easily forgiven. He caused so much damage, killed so many people and caused a war. Yet the characters forgive him? That's just disturbing and unbelievable. Could you imagine if that happened in real life? The world would be scary place to live in.

It's absolutely bizarre how characters can commit terrorist level threats but get zero repercussions for it. Imagine if we let serial killers off the hook.

Don't forget Lucy from Elfen Lied.
Seriously, how did Kouta forgive her so easily?

25 Cat Girls

I guess my problem is that the very first character to introduce me to the concept of catgirls was Merle from Vision of Escaflowne. To this day she is still the original catgirl to me, not just because she was my first, but also because she was and still is the most "realistic" I've seen.

The stereotypical catgirl in almost all anime/manga are just completely human looking girls with cat ears and a tail. And way too often they still have human ears too. Like...why? Merle on the other hand actually looked like a different species. Full furry, claws, and moved like a cat. And there were other beastraces present too, so they just felt like part of this fantasy world. Also she wasn't just a gimmick. She was still kinda annoying in the anime (not so much in the movie) but at least she had a personality worth mentioning and didn't end every single sentence with a "nya".

So I guess I don't really hate the concept of catgirls, just the way it is executed most of the time.

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