Having social anxiety but still wishing to make friends, Hitori Gotou started learning the guitar to help lure people into talking to her. Years later, she has amassed great guitar skills, but is in high school with still no friends.
One day, she happens to meet an outgoing girl who just so happens to need a guitarist for her band. Gaining the nickname Bocchi, Hitori is recruited in and puts her heart into improving her stage skills to make the band a success.
There is a growing number of shows with socially anxious characters, but usually it is the same worn joke and provides little character growth. This series is still solid comedy, but cute girls doing cute things and music anime are both carried by characters, and this has some great ones. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Bocchi the Rock, head on down below.
Anime Like Bocchi the Rock!
For Fans of Social Anxiety
Hitori Bocchi’s Lifestyle
Suffering from extreme social anxiety, Hitori Bocchi has problems making friends. To make matters worse, she is going to middle school without her one and only friend.
Furthermore, her only friend will only talk to her if she makes new friends at this school. So begins her struggle.
Both series make the same jokes with the character’s name as both main character consequently have the same debilitating type of social anxiety that greatly interferes in their ability to make friends despite that being all they want.
While Hitori Bocchi’s Lifestyle is a lovely comedy, it lacks the same depth to the characters as well as a music focus.
Komi-san Can’t Communicate
It is the first day for incoming freshmen at the prestigious Itan Private High School. For Hitohito Tadano, he considers himself lucky to get in and angles to not make waves during his high school career.
However, he finds himself sitting next to the beautiful, beloved, yet cold and silent Shouko Komi, immediately earning the ire of his classmates. After a series of events leads to him being left alone with her, he discovers that she is not cold, but suffers from extreme social anxiety that prevents her from speaking.
After a long conversation through writing, he wants to help her reach her goal of making 100 friends.
Like Bocchi The Rock, Komi-san Can’t Communicate follows the trials and tribulations of a character with social anxiety.
However, while Komi has its interesting character moments and comedy, it takes social anxiety to extremes. In fact, it takes many of its characters to extremes.
This makes the characters more comical, but less relatable unlike Bocchi the Rock where each character flaws are grounded and easy to relate to without undermining comedy.
Watamote
Tomoko Kuroki is well on her way to becoming a full hikkikomori. The only problem is, she has to get through high school first.
However, her short lifetime of playing dating sims and watching anime hasn’t prepared her for the social interactions of real life. Still, Tomoko struggles through each day and the social interactions that they bring.
Bocchi the Rock is actually lovable for more than just being a cute girls doing cute things show. It depicts social anxiety in a relatable way as well as being the first show to display the difference between anxiety and just normal introversion.
Watamote is more the old approach to social anxiety where it is played to cringe-worthy extremes for the sake of comedy.
If you don’t get secondhand embarrassment, Watamote can be a fun comedy about anxiety and weebism.
Kimi Ni Todoke
Quiet and relatively timid, Sawako Kuronuma is misunderstood by her classmates. Due to her long black hair and shyness, they have taken to calling her Sadako, the ghost girl from The Ring.
Longing to make friends, she is drawn to Kazehaya Shouta, the most popular boy in school and his refreshing personality. However, when Kazehaya starts talking to her, Sawako’s lonely world begins to open up.
Unlike Bocchi the Rock, Kimi ni Todoke is not directly about social anxiety. Sawako doesn’t wear the label, but still has many of the social problems.
Both Bocchi the Rock and Kimi ni Todoke are about two friendless girls trying to break out of their shell.
The major difference is that Kimi ni Todoke is a romance, though the romance takes so long to progress, it often doesn’t feel like it.
For Fans of Cute Girls Doing Cute Music Things
K-On
Upon entering high school, Yui is immediately entranced by the Light Music Club. The problem is, she can’t play an instrument.
Deciding to join the club anyway, the other club members, despite disappointment in her lack of musical knowledge, allow her to join to prevent the club’s disbandment.
Today begins Yui’s musical education!
It has already been said that Bocchi the Rock is the K-on of the next generation. Both shows are about a few girls who decide to form a band, and the cute girls doing cute things struggles that go on after that.
The major difference is the main character in K-on is really the antithesis to Bocchi in every way.
Show By Rock
Cyan loves music and desperately wants to join a band, but she is too shy to ask to join one. One day while playing her favorite rhythm game, she is suddenly sucked inside her phone to the world known as Tokyo Midi City.
There she finds that music has more than just the power to inspire others, but it can fight monsters as well. With great musical talent and minimal self-confidence, Cyan finds that her dreams of joining a band are about to come true.
The girls in Bocchi the Rock are cute, but realistic. The girls in Show By Rock are a little more like anime caricatures of different types of cute anime girls.
However, despite that, both shows are about four girls who start a band with the main character being good at guitar but bad at self-esteem. Show By Rock, being more ridiculous in plot, can be a bit more unpredictable in what happens next.
Tari Tari
Each year, their school does a recital in which music students perform for their prestigious guests. Konatsu is in her third year and wants to perform her song, but after a screw up last year, she is barred from participating in the official choir.
In order to try and get around this, she decides to form her own singing club.
Where Bocchi the Rock is about a rock band, Tari Tari is about forming a singing group.
Both shows follow the band as they gather members, hit major hurdles, and overcome them – all of that done while they are still having cute high school girl antics.
While shows in the Cute Girls Doing Cute Things genre can be unrealistic at times, both shows maintain a nice grounded approach to all this as well.
Sound! Euphonium
Swearing off music after a certain incident, euphonist Kumiko enter high school looking for a fresh start. However, it turns out she is surrounded by people with a passion for instruments that end up dragging her into a band aiming for nationals, and not a very good band at that.
Both shows are well-animated music anime about a band that is having problems getting off the ground. In Bocchi the Rock, it is a rock band while Euphonium features a school band club.
Both shows are really carried more by their characters than the actual music, but Euphonium does have a much larger emphasis on character drama.
For Fans of Diverse Characters Bonded Through Shared Passion
Super Cub
Koguma is a student who has nothing. She lives alone, has no hobbies, and no friends. However, one day she stops by a vehicle shop in hopes of getting a motor scooter for her commute. Disheartened by price tags initially, she is sold on an old pre-owned Super Cub.
However, what she didn’t know is the many different ways that the scooter would open up her world.
Starting a rock band and buying a motor scooter have profoundly little in common, but what these shows really share is a main character. The main characters are both anxious, friendless, and desperately lonely.
However, they decide to explore a new interest that ultimately ends up making them friends that share that interest.
In Bocchi the Rock, her guitar skills eventually help her make friends while Koguma bonds with people after she gets her motor scooter that turns out to be a conversation starter.
Carole & Tuesday
This is the story about two very different girls with the same goal. Tuesday, a girl raised in wealth, and Carole, a girl just scraping by, both want to make music. A chance meeting brings them together, and together they may just make their dream come true.
While Carole & Tuesday is also a music show (with a banger of a soundtrack, I might add), one of the core themes of the show is how music can bring people from completely different backgrounds together.
In Carole & Tuesday, it initially brings together a poor struggler and a runaway rich girl who start a band. It is the same in Bocchi the Rock. Music and the desire to start a band bring together four different people, but their differences are in their social skills.
A Place Further Than The Universe
Upon discovering an old list she made in the last year of middle school, Mari Tamaki, who is now in her second year of high school, realizes she is not making the most of her youth. Whenever she tries to do something new, she is paralyzed with inaction.
Then one day she meets Shirase, a girl who’s mother went missing when she was in middle school on an expedition to Antarctica.
Knowing full well it is close to impossible, she works hard in order to go to search for her mother and invites Mari along for the ride.
Typically in these types of shows, the different characters are all bonded together by an activity. In Bocchi the Rock, they are brought together by music. In A Place Further Than The Universe, the girls are ultimately brought together by the desire to journey to a destination.
While Bocchi the Rock is a little more aimed at comedy, both shows are about a diverse group of girls bonding together in their pursuit.
Comic Girls
Kaoruko Moeta is a manga artist that wants to make a manga about high school girls. However, due to her lack of interaction with girls her own age, her manga is terrible!
Her editor suggests that she moves into a dormitory full of other female manga artists who are also in high school.
Through living with these other manga artists, hopefully she can find the hit manga inspiration that she needs.
Whereas a group of different girls are brought together by music in Bocchi the Rock, Comic Girls brings them together through the creation of comics, though they are not all making a comic together.
Like Bocchi the Rock highlights different levels of social skills, Comic Girls does something similar with manga authors of different genres. They each have their own quirks an attitudes that stem from the genre they work on.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Bocchi the Rock? Let fans know in the comment section below.
