To the outside world, Mugi and Hanabi look like the perfect couple, but the truth is that they are only dating each other because they can’t be with the people they actually want to be with. For Hanabi, it is her childhood friend-turned-homeroom-teacher and for Mugi it is his older tutor that has been teaching him since middle school. In order to stave off the loneliness, the pair find solace in each other’s arms.
Romance anime is usually the realm of fuzzy feelings of love, but love can be messy and people in love can often be awful. Scum’s Wish fully lifts the veil that has rested over romance anime to interesting effect. If you are looking for more anime recommendations like Scum’s Wish, then head on down below.
Anime Like Scum’s Wish
For Fans of Scumbag Characters
Domestic Girlfriend
Natsuo is in love with his teacher, Hina. In order to try and forget his feelings, he goes to a mixer and meets a girl named Rui. Oddly enough, she asks him to do her a favor – to have sex with her. He does so, but soon he is faced with a unique problem. His father has remarried and he now has two new stepsisters that he knows too well – Rui and Hina
To be perfectly frank, both series are the kinds of dumpster fires you can’t stop watching. Don’t mistake me though, that is nothing but a compliment to both because it is what makes them unique. Both series feature characters that are often so unlikable in their actions that you love them for how honest they are. Most notable, these romance anime are both driven by sexual relationships rather than just feelings of love. They both also follow love triangles, though Scum’s Wish is a more complicated love polygon.
Nana
This is the story of two girls, both of which are named Nana. Nana Komatsu is a naive girl addicted to love who is moving to Tokyo to chase after her boyfriend going to school there. Nana Osaki is a proud punk rocker that is moving to Tokyo to become a rock star. By chance, they meet on the train. By even bigger chance, they end up wanting to rent the same apartment only to decide to rent it together.
Both Scum’s Wish and Nana are romance-driven drama series that highlight the realities of love rather than idealize it. As more mature, more down-to-earth romance shows, sex plays an important element, as does the fact that many of the characters are flawed and often awful people.
School Days
In a stroke of fate, Makoto Itou noticed Kotonoha Katsura on the train ride to school. Too shy to ask her out, he finds himself encouraged by his classmates Sekai Saionji who also has a crush on Makoto. What should have been blissful school days soon turns sour as a love triangle forms and both women find themselves unable to live without Makoto.
Both Scum’s Wish and School Days tell the tale of what happens when people bring physical relationships to life before people are mentally prepared for them. Of course, that is also used as an infinite well of drama. However, School Days gets a little more extreme and violent with its conclusion.
Flowers of Evil
Kasuga Takao is a bookish student, but when he goes back to look for his book in the classroom one day, he instead finds the gym uniform of his school crush. Without thinking, he takes it. Now all his classmates are on the lookout for a pervert and he is being confronted by a friendless girl in class that saw him do it.
The ugly, experimental rotoscoped art in Flowers of Evil is often enough to keep people from watching it. However, if they were to give it a shot, they would find a show very much like Scum’s Wish. A show infested with equally terrible people driven by base urges. In fact, that ugly rotoscoped art actually enhances the experience by showing physical ugliness on the outside the matches what is ugly and broken on the inside of the characters.
Paradise Kiss
Third year high school student Yukari is only into studying so she can get into any college outside of her boring town. One day, she meets a suspicious stranger with bleached hair and piercings. She tries to politely leave him, but ends up meeting his friends who are fashion design students for an art school. They want her to model, but she is afraid it will interfere with her studies. Still, she ends up agreeing and it leads her into another less boring world.
Both series are romances of a more mature tone. With that maturity comes a certain lifting of the veil on innocent love. The love isn’t innocent at all, it is often sinister, obsessive, and devouring. If you like romance anime that is a bit darker where the characters are often various shades of gray, Paradise Kiss is a very solid option.
For Fans of Taboo Romance
Netsuzou Trap
Yuma and Hotaru are neighbors and childhood friends. Nervous about landing her first boyfriend, Yuma goes to seasoned Hotaru for advice, but it turns out that advice becomes more like practice. And yet, this passion slowly drifts into the foreground as their secret tryst turns into real feelings.
While Scum’s Wish also has some NTR to it, Netsuzou Trap is all about it. The primary relationship within is rather similar to the one between Hanabi and Sanae, though the boyfriends in Netsuzou Trap are all uniquely terrible people too. If you like sloppy, often unhappy relationships, both Scum’s Wish and Netsuzou Trap are all about them.
Citrus
After her mother remarries, fashionable Yuzu moves to a new city. However, with her all-girls school being strict and conservative, she immediately butts heads with the stoic student council president. Worse yet, later that night she discovers that the student council president is now her new stepsister.
Scum’s Wish has a certain aggressiveness to the sexual relationships and Citrus, despite being all about the relationship between two women, is like that as well. To be clear, the taboo element in Citrus isn’t because they are both women, but because they are stepsisters. Regardless, both Citrus and Scum’s Wish have complicated romantic relationships between characters who often have their own unaddressed problems. Much like how Hanabi often gets dragged into things despite being one of the more innocent characters, the same thing can be said about Yuzu in Citrus.
Kodomo no Jikan
As Aoki Daisuke prepares to teach his very first elementary class, there is nothing that could prepare him for the challenges ahead. It is his kind-heartedness that makes one of his 3rd grade students fall in love with him, and she is more aggressive than an elementary school girl should be about it.
While Kodomo no Jikan is meant to be a comedy and a drama, it is a highly uncomfortable one. Unlike Scum’s Wish, it deals with younger characters, but just as mature themes. While not every character is a horrible person, it does have a few select scumbags within. The thing to keep in mind here is that Scum’s Wish has its taboo romance between adults and high school-aged children whereas Kodomo no Jikan gets it from its taboo romance between adults and elementary-aged children. Both dubious, but one greatly more so.
Koi Kaze
Saeki Koushirou has dreams of becoming a wedding planner, but his own love life is in shambles. After being dumped by his girlfriend, his desire for love is dulled, but again awakened by a chance encounter with a high school girl. Unfortunately, as it turns out, this girl is his sister whom he has not seen since his parents’ divorce, and she is coming to live with him and his father.
Both shows deal with a fair bit of drama and mature themes, but does so in a mature way. While it is not quite as dramatic as Scum’s Wish, the subject matter in Koi Kaze makes it a romance of a more questionable nature. While Scum’s Wish isn’t about incest, it is, like Koi Kaze, focusing on romances between adults and high school children.
Sky of Connection
Twins Haruka and Sora Kasugano are coming back to a town filled with memories for them. After their parents died in a horrible traffic accident, the twins want to start over peacefully at their grandfather’s house. However, it is their own suppressed memories and emotions that come back to haunt them.
Both Scum’s Wish and Sky of Connection are about taboo relationships with a large emphasis on physical scenes. However, Scum’s Wish excels by developing its characters more. Often the relationships in Sky of Connection feel more like they just want to titillate you and move on.
Happy Sugar Life
Once with a reputation for messing around with men, high school girl Satou Matsuzuka has finally fallen in love – with a young girl she keeps locked in her apartment. Shio, this young girl, seems to have no other place she would rather be than in Satou’s arms. However, Satou is ready to do anything to protect their relationship.
Both series highlight seriously problematic relationships. While Scum’s Wish has many, Happy Sugar Life is more focused on just the main relationship. Both series highlight unhealthy attachment with Happy Sugar Life having issues added on due to the kidnapped love interests’ very young age. However, Happy Sugar Life, in a very School Days sort of way, dives into horror as it goes on.
For Fans of Unrequited Love
O Maidens in Your Savage Season
The girls of the literature club have recently been reading sexually charged pieces of literature. This combined with a newfound interest in adult relationships sends each member spiraling off into the world of sex and intimate relations.
O Maidens in Your Savage season is a bit like a younger version of Scum’s Wish. Not everyone is quite a terrible person, but some earmarks are there for it. What these series have in common is the number of messy relationships that often revolve around unrequited love, infatuation, and obsession. O Maidens can, unlike Scum’s Wish, have a few comical moments in between the heaping helping of character relationship drama, however. As O Maidens also follows younger characters, the relationships are not quite as explicit.
Love and Lies
In order to encourage successful marriages and to combat the low birthrate, the Japanese government now assigns marriage partners at the age of 16. Unwilling to face the severe repercussions that come with denial, Yukari Nejima goes along with it, despite confessing to his long-time crush. However, is his reciprocated love doomed to be crushed when he gets his marriage notice?
Did you enjoy how super messed up every relationship in Scum’s Wish is? Love and Lies touches upon that, but doesn’t quite go as far. Essentially, both series are about love triangles that don’t necessarily play out in the traditional way that love triangles typically do in anime. It is more complicated, and it often shows the worst side of the characters.
Sing Yesterday For Me
After college, unsure of what to do with his life, Rikou gets a job at a convenience store. There he becomes visited by a high school drop out with a pet crow as well as has rekindled feelings for a senpai that visits the store one day. This is the story of the growth of several individuals as they take their first steps into adulthood.
Both series highlight messier romances that are of a more mature tone than your standard high school rom-com. Sing Yesterday focuses on young adult characters with non-school related problems while Scum’s Wish, despite having a school setting, focuses on very adult relationship issues. They are both about love triangles and shifting romantic interest between the character groups.
Golden Time
Banri Tada has finally been accepted into a private law academy in Tokyo, but due to an accident, he is without all his memories. During his freshmen orientation, he meets Mitsuo Yanagisawa who is consummately stalked by Kouko Kaga, a girl from his old school. Banri begins to hit it off with both of them. As they spend more time together, their fates seem intertwined, but for better or worse?
Both series are dramas, and drama anime that add in extra helpings of drama on top of that. While Golden Time plays out more like a standard dramatic romance anime, it does primarily focus on the love triangle that the main character makes for himself through amnesia and indecision. Like Scum’s Wish, the characters all have very noticeable flaws that often threaten to make them unlikable, but ultimately that is part of the charm.
Toradora
Ryuuji Takasu is a gentle student with a passion for housework, but his thuggish face causes his fellow students to think him a delinquent. Taiga Aisaka is small and cute, but with an attitude as fierce as a tiger. Both of these misunderstood students also harbor feelings for their crushes, and after a series of misunderstandings of their own, they find themselves in an unlikely alliance to get their crushes to notice them.
The obvious similarity between Toradora and Scum’s Wish is that both are shows about people who are together because they are in love with other people. However, while both have their share of drama, Scum’s Wish is messy and often unhappy. Toradora pursues a more wholesome conclusion.
White Album 2
Haruki Kitahara’s light music club is on the verge of disbanding due to lack of interest, an event that will crush his dream of playing at the school festival. However, as he solemnly plays “White Album,” the first song he ever learned to play, an angelic voice suddenly harmonizes with his lonely guitar.
Both shows focus heavily on the unfairness that often comes with falling in love during those youthful years. High school-aged people in love are often highly insecure, indecisive, and their romances are often doomed. Yet, even a bad romance affords the opportunity to learn and grow – this is what both shows display. White Albuym 2 (which can be enjoyed without watching the original White Album) doesn’t quite go as heavy with its relationship drama as Scum’s Wish, but lives in the same vein.
Rumbling Hearts
Initially, Takayuki Narumi befriended Mitsuki Hayase because Mitsuki’s friend Haruka Suzumiya had a crush on him. He grew close to Mitsuki, but when Haruka asked him out, he accepted in order to not hurt her feelings. However, as Takayuki and Mitsuki begin to realize their feelings, tragedy strikes that changes everything.
While Scum’s Wish regulates itself to more realistic types of relationships, Rumbling Hearts, as an older anime, is in love with its very over-the-top anime drama that used to be heaped on romantic drama anime like so many scoops of ice cream. It is a bit ham-fisted at times, but like Scum’s Wish, Rumbling Hearts portrays a complicated, messy, and occasionally unhappy love triangle.
Do you have more anime recommendations like Scum’s Wish? Let fans know in the comments section below.
