Falling in love and exploring romantic relationships is a big part of the human experience, and as such, romance has long been a beloved plot or at least part of a character’s story in anime. However, romance anime isn’t for everyone.
Admittedly, some romance anime have the most obnoxious plots fueled by unrealistic desires and expectations for relationships. There are actually profoundly few romance anime that explore love in a grounded and interesting exploration of two people getting to know each other on an intimate level.
No one is forcing anyone to watch romance anime, so finding anime without romance actually isn’t very hard. What is truly difficult to find is an anime with no romance. No person secretly pining for the main character as they are heroic. No sub-plot where a character is trying to woo someone. No side characters who get together.
Anime with no romance at all is difficult to find, but not impossible. If you are looking for anime with more romance at all for the main cast, try these anime recommendations.
Anime With No Romance
Bungou Stray Dogs
Bungou Stray Dogs, due to its large amount of creative characters, attract a whole lot of shippers, but doesn’t actually have any romance in it. One reason could be that predominantly male cast, but the series also shuffles characters in an out so frequently that even if a character does develop romantic feelings for the main cast, they probably won’t be back to explore them.
While Bungou Stray Dogs starts off as more of a supernatural-based mystery anime about a group of detectives at a private detective agency, it does tend to drift away from mystery over time. They are often still embroiled in cases, but those cases tend to have more of a focus on fighting rather than intrigue.
Mushishi
Mushishi follows a guy that travels around investigating and often solving phenomenon caused by small spirits named Mushi. Mushi are neither good nor evil, and as such can affect their surroundings in both benevolent and malevolent ways depending on certain stimuli.
As the main character is rather quiet and constantly on the move, he doesn’t form lasting relationships. No one travels with him. He simply goes one place with mushi phenomenon and eventually moves onto the next.
It keeps romance at bay, but also allows the series to tell a number of different tales with various degrees of poignancy.
A Place Further Than The Universe
When you get a group of girls together with a goal, usually that ends in comedy or just meandering about. A Place Further Than The Universe makes the bold move to set a lofty goal for a group of girls and then explore the surprisingly realistic way they reach it.
A Place Further Than The Universe is about a girl who wants to go search for her mother in Antarctica many years after she disappeared there. Her passion for it inspires a few other dispassionate girls to try and reach it with her.
Now, anime is the realms of fantasy. However, instead of concocting a fantasy reason that gets them there, it explores the realistic route that four teen girls could explore to go to Antarctica, and you watch them pursue it as they explore their own coming-of-age tales.
Not every series about teenagers needs to be about romance, and A Place Further Than The Universe shows that magnificently in the way it invests you in the characters without making anything about romantic love.
Barakamon
Slice of life anime is generally a pretty safe bet to keep romance at bay, but you do need to be careful. Slice of life anime can also be a haven for yuri-baiting in particular. A phenomenon where there is no actual romance happening, but they sure are trying to make you feel like there is.
Barakamon, featuring an adult male main character and a bunch of obnoxious children, keeps even shipping at bay by having there be no viable potential couples. Instead, you enjoy the main character overcome the stress and creative block that had been triggering his anger as a calligraphy artist by getting pulled into slice of life activities of neighborhood kids on a rural Japanese island.
This show is all about embracing that it is okay to not be so focused on your goals all the time, and that there is even some benefit towards your goals to take it easy. It is about enjoying moments in your life, even the small ones.
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken
Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken is one of those anime series that would best be described as “artistic” for the story it tells and the style it is told in. However, instead of being about lofty themes and thought-provoking dialogue, it is about three creative girls making anime in school.
While similarly romance-free Shirobako is about making anime professionally, Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken really nails home how hard it is to make an anime by having three school girls with no support and minimal technology do it.
Not only does it give some insight into the animation process, but it remains wildly creative in the way everything is presented. It remains a love letter to animation and the way it was once done.
Moribito
Moribito follows a female mercenary who is hired to spirit away a young prince that was marked to be sacrificed in order to prevent famine.
Instead of falling in love with her ward or some other person along the way, that mercenary steps in as a motherly figure that educates the sheltered young prince on the true ways of the world without sugar-coating things. You watch him experience life in a way that will help him become an excellent ruler when he is returned to his palace.
Alongside having no romance, it is refreshing to see that female main character able to hold her own in battle as a veteran mercenary should be able to.
Land of the Lustrous
Land of the Lustrous follows gems personified as girls who fight off alien attackers that seek to shatter them and use the shards from their bodies to decorate themselves.
While having a non-human cast has never stopped romance in anime before, Land of the Lustrous has darker themes to explore other than love affairs. Its characters may have positive feelings for each other, but those feelings are never shown to be a romantic. Mostly you watch the main character continue to give pieces of herself away in order to better protect her friends who, once shattered too much, cannot be put back together.
As there truly feels like there is no one else in the world other than the main cast, you really feel the threat of them dwindling and being picked off. Furthermore, the world it takes place in exhibits more than the bare minimum of creativity.
Paranoia Agent
Thought-provoking anime is generally a good bet for being limited on romance. Paranoia Agent, an anime about a growing wave of paranoia built on a lie spreading throughout a city, has romance in the usual way you would see it in thought-provoking anime – showing us how gross humans are with our urges.
Paranoia Agent unfolds its story in a number of short character stories that all feed into the larger narrative. Very few of those stories are positive, and there is no happy romance happening here. It is, however, one of those anime series that is stuffed with symbolism and does require slightly more reflection to fully grasp what was going on. So, in that way, it is not appealing to everyone.
Buddy Daddies
As Buddy Daddies was often described a “gay Spy X Family” due to its two male main characters raising a child, you would be forgiven in thinking it has some romance. However, it really doesn’t. One main character is considered a player, but you never see him bring home any women. The other male main character is asexuality in its finest representation. And finally, the third main character is a child who doesn’t grow up and fall in love with the two strangers that raised her in an unexpected and so very welcome twist.
Buddy Daddies is about two bachelors with dark pasts that work as hitmen-for-hire. They end up finding a kid on one job and, after trying to return her to a mother that didn’t want her, end up raising her themselves.
The anime is half wholesome-yet-realistic parenting moments and half big, violent action. While it does add in a touch of drama as well, never does it become a romance story for anyone.
Psycho-Pass
You know what they say, you can’t have a male and female as partners and main characters without every moment of eye contact being considered romance. However, Psycho-Pass resists all opportunities to hook its main characters up and instead builds out a great cop drama in a compelling dystopian world.
As this series is a sci-fi police drama where the characters often become embroiled in different cases, romance does play a role on some occasions in the relationships of the criminals, but the main cast is always kept strictly business.
Moriarty the Patriot
Anime enjoys Sherlock Holmes stories on occasion, but Moriarty the Patriot is the first anime to really shake things up. The shake up in particular is following William Moriarty, the antagonist to Sherlock Holmes as the main character.
In Moriarty the Patriot, the titular William Moriarty works as a sort of sword of vengeance for hire. Those who have been wronged by nobility contact him and he carries out vengeance for them.
The series still explores the contentious relationship between Moriarty and Holmes, and while it may be a popular target for BL shippers, Moriarty the Patriot remains as dispassionate towards romance as all Sherlock Holmes literature.
Carole & Tuesday
Romance is typically pushed into sub-plots in Shinichiro Watanabe anime, like Spike’ tragic love for Julia in Cowboy Bebop or Jin’s love affair with Shino in Samurai Champloo, but in Carole & Tuesday, there is not a speck of romance to be found despite having two female main characters. So, good for him, acknowledging that two female main characters can have a full and complete story without falling in love with someone or each other!
Carole & Tuesday is a music anime about a runaway rich girl and a scrappy street girl who meet and bond over music, deciding to try to make it in the music industry together.
While the story is set on futuristic Mars and that futuristic setting does play a part in the plot, often Carole & Tuesday feels like a very modern music story about trying to make it big in a competitive industry – essentially when it moves onto the girls competing on a show that is “legally distinct from, but similar to” American Idol/Eurovision.
91 Days
Anime doesn’t tell too many actual mafia stories, and that’s fine because 91 Days is such a good mafia story that you don’t mind the lack of other options.
This series follows a man who watched his family be killed by the mafia family that his father worked for. Swearing revenge, he infiltrates the family to take it down from the inside. While that is a complicated task in and of itself, it is made more difficult due to the bond of camaraderie he forms with the son of the boss.
91 Days keeps a serious tone and tells a pretty tautly-paced story of revenge. It is also very clearly set up to be an unhappy sort of affair for everyone involved. Romance wouldn’t have matched the tone, nor did they try to wedge it in there.
Asobi Asobase
As a comedy anime, you might expect a comedy anime about a trio of middle schoolers to enjoy some comedy about boys. What you get is a comedy about three middle schooler girls that act just as degenerate as middle school boys while having virtually no interaction with them.
They are unpopular with both genders, perhaps because of their rather glaring personality flaws, and that fuels the comedy.
Comedy anime so often turns to sexual comedy, but because these three girls are middle schooler and also pretty big losers, it keeps that at bay. However, that said, it is the exaggerated facial expressions and general awkwardness that makes this series great.
Daily Lives of High School Boys
What Asobi Asobase is to degenerate unpopular middle school girls, Daily Lives of High School Boys is to degenerate, unpopular high school boys. Love is, on occasion, a topic of conversation, but no one is swooning over the three male main characters.
Instead, the plot is more focused on the stupid and silly things that school boys do to pass the hours. While not quite as animated with the facial expressions as Asobi Asobase, it still enjoys a similar comedic intensity regardless.
Hunter X Hunter
Finding good shounen anime with no romance is a task. Sure, shounen anime are aimed at teen boys by going from one cool fight to the next cool fight, but in between there needs to be some human elements, like romance and building other meaningful relationships.
Hunter X Hunter remains the best shounen battler for resisting romance, perhaps helped mostly by the very young age of the main character. You can can watch a servant get crushed into a mist by a toddler and a catboy hanging out with a severed head, but having the main character fall in love is just too adult for Hunter X Hunter.
But really, the lack of love story in Hunter X Hunter is probably just more of a lack of viable people to fall in love with. The story keeps on a pace and most characters serve to push things forward. It is part of what makes Hunter X Hunter a good action anime.
Jujutsu Kaisen
Like Hunter X Hunter, Jujutsu Kaisen is another good shounen battler with a profound lack of romance. This time, it has all the earmarks that it should have a few love connections, but widely resists it. In fact, the only real love interest was cut from the anime and only the prequel movie features any kind of actual love story.
Regardless, the series managed to make a Naruto-like trio – fiery and silly main character, brooding dark haired boy, and “the girl” – without adding any romantic element to the mix. Furthermore, this time “the girl” is actually competent in battle and not a character frequently defined by her love of someone else.
Aside from that, Jujutsu Kaisen follows the pretty standard shounen battler formula of “battle, battle, training arc, battle, ect” with a particular flair for darkness and slickly designed characters.
Saga of Tanya The Evil
Like shounen battlers, if you are looking to avoid romance in the isekai genre, you will find yourself lacking choices. In isekai, you are lucky if it is just a romance and not a full harem in most instances. However, the Saga of Tanya the Evil may eschew a number of the usual isekai tropes, but in doing so, it also keeps romance out of its plot completely.
This series follows a shrewd Japanese salaryman that was murdered by a fired employee and reincarnated – after angering god – into the body of a young girl in a world in the middle of a magical-laced World War I-inspired conflict.
She may be cute and have a high magical aptitude that sees her drafted into the military, but the main character is still a psychotic Japanese salaryman on the inside. He is determined to use and discard anyone in order to secure himself a safe, comfortable position off the frontlines.
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0
Love is an old crutch that anime enjoys leaning on when it needs to evoke some emotions, but the nice thing is that if you don’t want a tragic romance, you can always lean on family!
Tokyo Magnitude 8.0 evokes Japan’s long-lasting trauma from horrific earthquakes by being about exactly that – a 8.0 magnitude earthquake hitting Tokyo. It strands two young kids out shopping in a commercial area of Tokyo and makes traversing a singular metropolis very much like traversing a whole country as the pair try to get back home with a kind-hearted stranger.
It is this journey that gives them license to show a number of different stories going on in this natural disaster, but few hurt more than the stories of the main characters.
Do you have more anime recommendations where romance isn’t a major element? Let fans know in the comments section below.
