16 Anime About Bullying in All Forms

No one likes to be bullied or even goes out into the world hoping to be bullied, but it happens. It is in human nature to deal with our own insecurities by picking on someone else we perceive as different or weaker.

That doesn’t make it right, though.

As with many issues, some find it easier to sort through their feelings by seeing their situation presented and dealt with in anime. Of course, some of the solutions to bullying in anime are …bad and definitely not recommended. However, some series can actually be pretty inspiring when it comes to their portrayal of how to handle bullying situations.

Best Bullying Anime

Great Teacher Onizuka

Great Teacher Onizuka is all about an ex-biker and thug who becomes a teacher due to his less noble desire to hit on high school girls. However, his thuggish way of handling things ends up rehabilitating a bunch of problem students who, after an incident with their classmate, have pushed every other teacher away.

Bullying is some of the troubles in Great Teacher Onizuka, but there are a lot of young people problems within. Furthermore, the whole class started acting out against their teachers due to an event in the past that shows that sometimes even adults can be the real bullies.

Peach Girl

Peach Girl is girl drama turned up to the maximum.

Much of Peach Girl’s drama stems from a girl getting bullied (much of it done by her best friend) because she is tan and blonde from pool use. Both of these traits are indicators of a gyaru girl, which is basically like Japan’s version of loose women.

While bullied for her looks, the abuse ultimately stems from the romantic attention of various boys in her class. Jealous girls be jealous, as they say.

Another

Although Another is a horror series, the set up for the story is basically bullying with a purpose.

In Another, the class has to choose one person to completely ignore all year or people start dying – allegedly. The person that they have chosen is gloomy, but is also going through something pretty terrible outside of school.

If you look at Another – not as a horror series set up, but as the normal school life anime it was before people started dying mysteriously – what they do to her combined with what she is going through is actually wildly sad.

Magical Girl Site

Magical Girl Site is one of those “don’t follow this show’s solution to bullying” sort of affairs.

In Magical Girl Site, girls who are suffering some sort of abuse are contacted by a website that offers to make them magical girls.

The main character is chronically, violently bullied at school and most other characters have some sort of abusive situation. When you give those who have been hurt and taken advantage of access to magnificent powers, you can only imagine what horrors they would inflict on others even if some of them did start out with good intentions.

While it does not offer valid solutions to bullying, a little fictionalized violence for entertainment and not applied to real life never hurt anyone.

The Lost Village

The entirety of the cast in The Lost Village are people that are running away from something. The met on the internet, decided to go find a village no one can find, and try to live there.

Things go horribly awry, of course. However, in the mysterious setting where people start to mysterious die or disappear, much of the cast is forced to confront the problems that they have been running from.

Narutaru

Narutaru started out like a poor rip-off of Pokemon – then it got super dark! No one ever compared it to Pokemon again when the kids started dying.

Anyway, Narutaru and its bullying subplot is just a drop of darkness in the black pool. The main character has that protagonist-level earnestness that makes her immune to bullies. However, her friend gets the best grades in the class and is a prime target for them.

The bullied girl tries to bring her grades down to avoid torment, but then her parents also put pressure on her when she does not perform. As you would expect, eventually she snaps and shows someone an example of the unexpected viciousness that you find frequently throughout Narutaru.

Hell Girl

Hell Girl is a series of short stories about a website where you can trade your soul in order to drag another person’s soul to hell.

While not all stories deal with bullying, it is a very common set up across all the Hell Girl’s multiple seasons.

Hana Yori Dango

Hana Yori Dango starts off about a financially poor girl who goes to a wealthy and elite school on a scholarship. She is bullied by the girls, she is bullied by the leader of the boys that run the school, and then the leader of those boys falls in love with her.

While he tries to woo her, she is put off because… Well, he bullied her and he is kind of an entitled jerk. Although he wears her down eventually, the girls continue to try and bully her until the popular boy puts them in their place.

Hana Yori Dango is one of those romance anime stories that is fun to watch, but probably does not send the best message about real relationships. It does, however, do well to show that behind every bully, there is a heap of personal problems.

Girls Bravo

In Girls Bravo, the main character was small as a boy. As such, he was bullied by women.

Now, whenever a woman touches him, he breaks out in hives. So of course he gets sent to a world where men are rare and women are everywhere.

There is really no good message about bullying in Girls Bravo, but it is a charming and comical rehabilitation story for him.

Big Windup

In Big Windup, the main character is bullied fiercely by his middle school baseball team due to claims of nepotism and his lack of skill. He is so traumatized by it that he no longer wants to play the sport in high school, leaving his self-confidence and self-esteem in tatters.

As these “return to sports” anime stories go, he is immediately forced to join the school’s newly founded baseball team by a boy so determined to play baseball, he’d put anyone on the field.

Where Big Windup shines is that it shows the main character’s genuine skill that he forged from countless hours of practice as he tried to live up to his past team’s expectations. It wasn’t that he was bad at baseball, but his anxiety and his poor past teammates crippled his abilities.

Dear Brother

Not unlike the aforementioned Peach Girl, Dear Brother is ten tons of over-the-top girl drama and bullying.

Dear Brother is essentially what people fear when they transfer to a new school. Everyone there is mean and almost criminally abusive.

As a sweet, ordinary girl attempts to traverse these the elite social pitfalls of school hierarchy, she is penning letters to a past teacher that she refers to as her brother, documenting her troubles.

Flowers of Evil

Flower of Evil seems to have been created by someone who thinks humanity is so ugly that the art style needs to matches it.

The story in Flowers of Evil follows a boy that gets caught stealing a popular girl’s gym uniform by a quiet outcast girl in class. While that might sound like a good romantic set up, not in this show.

Instead, he allows this quiet agent of chaos to take total control over his life just so he can avoid being labeled a pervert by his class. Essentially, he gets bullied to avoid bullying.

While weird and occasionally uncomfortable to watch, Flowers of Evil does have a unique viewpoint as a coming-of-age story. It definitely embraces some cringe-worthy realities that people don’t like to reflect on.

Masamune-kun’s Revenge

In Masamune-kun’s Revenge, a former fat kid returns handsome and wholly narcissistic to try to woo the girl that rejected him as a child.

His plan is to make her love him, and then swiftly crush her heart with a rejection of his own. The girl herself is mean and actively bullies a servant that follows her around, but also has a vulnerable side that he starts to see during his laser-focused targeting.

Ultimately, expect more rom-com than drama and bullies getting what they deserve.

March Comes in Like a Lion

While the first season of March Comes in Like a Lion doesn’t really deal with bullying so much as it does portray crushing loneliness and depression, the second season places a pretty big spotlight on the issue. So much so that it was used in anti-bullying campaigns in Japan.

The bullying subplot in March Comes in like a Lion involves one of the side characters, but it is probably one of the better portrayals of how bullying hurts people and why some people bully that can be found in anime.

Lookism

There are a small handful of popular Korean webtoons being adapted to anime, and many them make South Korean teens seem like the worse bullies in the world. Nowhere is that more apparent than Lookism, an anime adaptation of a Korean webtoon about bullying, vanity, and thriving among all that.

Lookism follows a boy who is bullied because he is chubby and unattractive. However, one day, he suddenly wakes up as a hottie! The twist is that his old body is still sleeping, and every time he sleeps, he changes bodies.

From there, you watch him level up his life as a hottie, and attempt to survive as nottie while also unraveling the mystery of why he keeps body switching.

Viral Hit

Made by same author as Lookism, I’m starting to think Tae-Jun Park has some commentary about South Korean society.

Regardless, Viral Hit also follows an unpopular boy who is chronically bullied by people in his class. However, he eventually stands up to his bullies by fighting them. After the video goes viral, he and the bully he was fighting decide to make YouTube money by fighting other bullies.

Viral Hit does a great job of setting up an endless parade of easy-to-hate bullies – then showing you how to efficient beat them up as a normal guy.

Do you have any more anime recommendations about bullying? Let those looking for answers know in the comments section below.