You know how you think you know a person then you follow them to a shady night club, and realize you actually know nothing about them at all? Anime can be like that too. Far too often an anime series starts off light-hearted and super cute, and then someone gets hit by a car or beaten to death with a bat, and everything kind of changes.
They’re the kind of shows that break your tiny trust to the point where you start watching innocent shows like Non Non Biyori or Barakamon and expect things to, at some point, turn horrible. They are the kind of shows that are terrible, and scarring, and gruesome – but so very enticing with their element of surprise that they leave you wanting more. They leave your mind twisted and crying in a corner, but completely addicted and looking for that next fix.
Best Anime That Aren’t What They Seem At First Glance
Puella Magi Madoka Magica
Madoka Magica looks so god-damned moe that you may have put off watching it for years. You don’t need more brightly-colored girls being cute in your life. That’s how waifus get jealous.
Regardless, when you finally get around to it, everything seems normal at first. They get their powers from a super cute cat-bunny creature and Akemi looks like the villain for trying to hurt it. Then they go on a hunt to kill some evil witches. It is going to be so adorable watching them go bop some baddies on the head with their little heart wands until…
Oh. Okay then.
Magical Girl Raising Project
After Madoka Magica, and its money-making popularity, there gave rise to the “dark magical girl genre” for a hot minute. We don’t get to many of them now, but there was a time when everyone was trying to catch that smoke. Magical Girl Raising Project is one from that time which succeeds at trying that same element of surprise. It starts as standard magical girls, then shortly after the main character becomes one (of course), it turns into a fun and bloody battle royale game.
It tries to briefly hint at a similar need for magical girls at the end akin to why Kyuubey was making them in Madoka Magica, but doesn’t tug too hard on that plot thread. Mostly it is just cute girls killing each other.
School Live!
If you don’t look close enough at the anime poster, i.e. see the ruined school building behind the characters, you can easily think School Live is yet another slice of life anime set in school. Of course, as you watch the first episode, you will continue thinking that. It is actually pretty ingenious of the animators when you realize what was actually going on.
Her happy school life is all just delusions. She lives at the school, not because it is a club, but because they are surviving a zombie apocalypse.
School Days
By all rights, School Days should have been a touching romance. It’s all shy stares and secret loves at first, then it goes downhill into man sluttiness, nice boats, and cutting open wombs to check for babies. It goes downhill at a pretty steady clip, too. It spirals, if you will. It was, if nothing else, a great way to parody the romance genre and scar its fans at the same time.
That’s what you get for believing in love, hopeful fools.
Higurashi: When They Cry
In Higurashi, it is kind of hinted that things are going to go a bit sideways when you have to listen to the meaty slapping sound of a baseball bat on flesh during the first few minutes, but still, it makes it no less jarring. You watch the main characters go to school and play games while an eerie mystery is built up. Suddenly, you are watching a girl just barely older than a baby stab her neck into a knife. Not stab a knife into her neck, stab her neck into a knife.
It is a show as shocking as it is confusing, but that’s more on the way it chose to tell the story more than anything.
If you want to get into Higurashi, or better make sense of it, it is the wort of anime that benefits from following a guide. Check out our Higurashi When They Cry Watch Order Guide
Shadow Star Narutaru
Shadow Star Narutaru is about a 12-year-old girl that goes to visit her grandparents and meets a starfish-esque “dragon” that she becomes friends with. She then goes home and proceeds to have battles with other kids that have these “dragons” as well. However, instead of a Pokemon-type romp, the series gets pretty dark, especially if you venture deeper in the manga. The graphic gore and sexual violence of young kids is kind of par for the course if you have seen…
Bokurano
Made by the same author as Shadow Star Narutaru, Bokurano, which is easily the more well-known of the two, shares a similar passion for abusing young children in every way possible. This time, it sets itself up in the mecha genre and follows the formula, for a time. Kids pilot a robot. Kids fight another robot to defend their world. Kids feel like great heroes when they win. It then quickly deviates from that when you learn the cost of piloting the robot that no one told them about.
Shiki
Shiki is kind of like a piece of classical music. It starts off light and with events that seem of no consequence. You know, a dead person here, and accident there, but no one really important. Then it just builds and builds, right up to the climax in which huge, catastrophic events are just happening one after another. It seems something like a murder mystery anime at first, but by the time you put an end to it, there is no question to its spot in the supernatural genre.
Now and Then, Here and There
You’d be forgiven in thinking that, at a glance, Now and Then, Here and There was just another shounen adventure series. However, not unlike the movie Bridge to Terabithia, your light-hearted child adventure is going to hurt your heart in the end. It is one of those shows that you finish up and just sort of sit there reflecting on and wondering how to went from being like the beginning of Naruto all the way to Grave of the Fireflies.
Nothing says “how the hell did we get here?” than watching child soldiers cart off young girls for future breeding.
Zombieland Saga
To be fair, Zombieland Saga didn’t keep up any facade very long. The big thing was no one knew what this series was going to be when it was announced. They had a title, and thought that title meant a zombie apocalypse sort of affair. We definitely didn’t think it would be an idol group made up of historical idols brought back to life as zombies, and then performing.
No one thought it was going to be that.
I’m glad it was though, because it is one contributing factor to it being a pretty amazing comedy, at very least. As for its quality as an idol anime, I don’t think I’m the right person to judge that.
Made in Abyss
There is a part of me who thinks the overall art style of Made in Abyss is meant to be a contributing factor in its occasional shock value. Made in Abyss features an art style that legitimately makes many of the grown-ass adults look like they are children and the children to look like, well, small adults, really. It then sets up an adventure story in which there is forewarned peril, but even thought doesn’t downplay that peril, viewers probably weren’t prepared for what would happen.
What anime series have shocked and surprised you by their sudden change? let everyone know in the comments section below.
