Everyone loves an odd couple.
Some people may like completely different thing and act like completely different people, but at the end of the day, everyone has at least one common tie with each other.
Your hearts beat, your lungs breathe, and even the most oil-and-water personalities can find something they respect or even love about each other.
If you love seeing two personalities clash and find the common ground in between, then check out these beloved anime odd couples.
Best Odd Couples in Anime
Taiga and Ryuuji from Toradora
You will find more than a few odd couples in romance anime. After all, opposites attract is the butter for a lot of people’s bread. However, Toradora isn’t actually about opposites attracting, the main couple couldn’t seem more different, but those hearts beat the same red lonely blood.
Ryuuji has the face of a thug, but the heart of housewife. Taiga looks small and beautiful, but is a fiery tsundere like no other in her personality. Brought together though accidental circumstance, they decide to help support each other confessing to their crushes.
Veteran romantic comedy enjoyers know exactly how this set-up will go for them, but their two distinctly different personalities make lovable, surprisingly emotional chaos while getting there.
Tiger and Bunny from Tiger & Bunny
You mind as well call Tiger and Bunny ‘Odd Couple: the Anime’ because the oil and water relationship between the main characters is the foundation for much of this series.
In Tiger and Bunny, two professional superheroes are partnered up. Tiger, a rowdy veteran hero who has an unfortunate reputation for collateral damage, and his new partner Bunny, a more uptight rookie that is more about strategy than brute force.
Teamed up for their similar levels of power at first, Tiger and Bunny each prove to temper the worst impulses of the other, eventually settling into a level of contentious respect.
Haruhi and Tamaki from Ouran High School Host Club
Pretty boys are meant to date pretty girls. It’s in the rules, but rules are made to be broken.
Ouran High School Host Club is a shoujo romance that broke a lot of rules. The story follows a girl who attends a prestigious academy for the wealthy as a poor person on a scholarship. After a bubblegum incident and a uniform mix up leave her with short hair and a men’s uniform, she is mistaken for a boy and forced to join a secret host club where wealthy men that entertain wealthy women that takes place in the school in order to pay them back for accidentally breaking an expensive vase.
Over time, a romantic connection between this boyish girl and the dazzlingly handsome host club leader forms.
However, while there is no shortage of anime tomboys who struggle to embrace femininity, Haruhi rose to be something of a gender-fluid icon for not only embracing male fashion and interests, but not shunning feminine fashion and interests in doing so.
Like what you like.
Almost Every Captain and Lieutenant in Bleach
As a lengthy shounen action anime with an increasingly large cast, you would expect to find some odd couples in Bleach. However, what makes Bleach in particular more notable than a similar long-running shounen action series like Naruto or One Piece is that there is a fairly large organization in the series that is almost fully built on odd couple leadership dynamics.
In the Soul Society, each of the 13 different squads is lead by a powerful captain and their less powerful lieutenant. However, while a small handful of the pairs are similar enough in that they don’t seem very different, far more pairs are odd couples in every respect.
From the cool and aloof Captain Byakuya and his fiery Lieutenant Renji to the laid-back Captain Kyouraku and the stiff and formal Lieutenant Nanao all the to the sociopathic battle manic Captain Kenpachi and his sweet-looking, though equally bloodthirsty child Lieutenant Yachiru – Bleach packs a lot of odd couples into what will be a mainstay institution in the plot.
Nana and Nana in Nana
Not unlike Tiger and Bunny, an odd couple is the entire premise of Nana.
Nana follows two very different women named Nana who meet each other on the train to Tokyo. One is a rocker with a wounded heart looking to focus on her band on the Tokyo music scene, and the other is a naive country girl looking for love in the big city.
Their clandestine train meeting becomes even more so when they find out they wanted to rent the same apartment, so they decide to rent it together as roommates.
If you are looking for a more mature drama anime about the lives of young adult women where the drama feels as real as it is complicated and heart-breaking, no other anime series does it better.
Sunakawa and Takeo from My Love Story
In most romantic comedies, you can look past the handsome male lead and/or love interest and often see an athletic, less handsome best friend that supports him. My Love Story is a romance that twists that common narrative.
In My Love Story, golden-hearted Takeo who scares women away with his large body and scary face falls in love with a cute girl he saved on the train who, surprises even him, by liking him back.
While that alone is a pretty odd couple in My Love Story, the actual oddest relationship is between passionate, gorilla-faced Takeo and his subdued, extremely handsome best friend Sunakawa.
They seem like two people that not only look so different from each other, but also have two distinctly different personalities. However, their friendship is one formed over years due to their close proximity as neighbors and Takeo’s continued determined invasion of his personal space.
Kaoru and Sentaro from Kids on the Slope
Kaoru is the uptight son pushed to perfection and academic excellence by his strict father. Sentaro is a rowdy delinquent that the world wrote off when he was born a half-Japanese bastard after World War II.
When Kaoru was shopping for new classical music to practice, he meets Sentaro in a local record shop where he introduces his rigid peer to the free-form chaos of Jazz music, a shared love that would be their foundation for a strong friendship.
Kids on the Slope plays odd couple trope in a big way specifically because it shows that no matter how different people are or even how different their struggles, a shared passion can bring them together. It is that passion that helps them get through this emotional coming-of-age story.
The Main Characters in Soul Eater
Like Bleach has a Gotei 13 made up of almost all odd couples, Soul Eater is another shounen action anime that is even more obvious with its love of the odd couple dynamic.
While Soul Eater mostly follows the exploits of Maki and Soul, there are actually three main partner dynamics that spend different amounts of time in the story’s spotlight.
Alongside Maki and Soul, a tsundere girl and a stoic boy, you also have hot-blooded, loud, and none too bright Black Star with his beautiful and collected weapons partner Tsubaki.
You also have the ‘odd trio’ of the obsessive symmetry perfectionist Death the Kid and his twin weapon partners, the Thompson Sisters. Unlike their master – or their sister – Patty is a ditz immune to fear while Liz is level-headed and afraid of her own shadow.
Ronaldo and Draluc from The Vampire Dies in No Time
What could possibly be a better partner for a famed vampire hunter than an actual vampire?
While that in and of itself is an odd match-up, this odd couple does have one thing in common – they are both big idiots.
As a gag comedy series, the odd couple in The Vampire Dies in No Time is the fuel for the jokes. Ronaldo is fairly competent, if narcissistic vampire hunter and Draluc is a vampire who dies if the wind blows on him too hard.
They met when Ronaldo was hired to kill Draluc, took pity on him, accidentally destroyed his home, and took the pathetically weak vampire in.
Loid and Yor from Spy X Family
They look like the perfect couple that makes the perfect family with their young daughter and dog. However, Loid is master spy who built a family as a cover to get close to a mark, and Yor is an assassin who used a guy who needed a speedy marriage to enhance her cover as a simple office lady.
It is the odd couple dynamic – and the just plain odd characters and situations – in Spy X Family that fuels the wholesome found family and spy action chaos that takes place in it.
Shizuku and Haru in My Little Monster
While My Little Monster suffers from terminal “Promotional Anime Syndrome,” where it gives you a taste of the shoujo romance that leaves you unsatisfied, craving what comes next, and forced to flee to the manga, it does set itself up one of the more unique odd couples in shoujo romance.
My Little Monster follows the studious and frigid Shizuku who just wanted to study and keep her eyes on her future as she is forced to take homework to Haru, a wild, chaotic delinquent boy who hasn’t been to school since he got into a fight on the first day.
Haru, deeply craving friendship and happy someone from school took an interest, declares his immediate love for Shizuku, who swiftly shuts that down.
While Haru eventually learns he came on too strong, feelings had already started bloom in Shizuku’s shut-off heart.
Legoshi and Haru from Beastars
Joining the increasingly stacked ranks of incredibly unsubtle metaphorical (and actual) odd couples is Legoshi the wolf and Haru the rabbit.
In Beastars, a world of anthropomorphic animals living their mostly peaceful lives where the predatory animals occasionally murder and eat their herbivorous peers in outbursts of pure instinct, you follow two high school kids that get caught up in a star-crossed romance.
Legoshi may be a wolf, but he is as meek and mild-mannered as any prey. Haru is rabbit that doesn’t deny her more promiscuous rabbit instincts, but also wants to be seen as something more than just a fragile bunny to be protected.
Chisato and Takina in Lycoris Recoil
Whenever you see blonde and black hair together in anime, there is a decent chance that you are going to find a very specific odd couple dynamic that Chisato and Takina personify.
Chisato is a cheerful girl that loves every second of life. Takina is a strict and serious girl that is all business. While both are highly-skilled professionals part of a secret anti-terrorism task force disguised as normal school girls, they go about their jobs in distinctly different ways.
It is the charming dynamic of their characters that really elevates Lycoris Recoil, which has an interesting if underdeveloped plot, into something well worth watching.
Yumiko and Chika from The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio
Hey, look at that. The blonde hair and black hair dynamic back at it again.
Yes, like Chisato and Takina from Lycoris Recoil, in The Many Sides of Voice Actor Radio, you follow the confident and cheerful gyaru Yumiko who is struggling as a voice actor and ends up on a voice actor radio show with dark-haired Chika, a gloomy girl from her class who was also secretly a emerging voice actor whose work Yumiko admires.
They get along in a lovably contentious dynamic at first that warms greatly over time as they support each other with their struggles in the entertainment industry.
Did we miss any more good odd couples in anime? Lay them on us in the comments section below.
