18 Dark Romance Anime That Shatter The Fairy Tale

There is nothing wrong with a good fluffy cute romance, but sometimes you just want to see the other side of love – the side that drives people crazy. You want to see a love that isn’t quite like the fairy tales where romance is sinister, taboo, or even just completely toxic.

If you are looking for a darker romance anime where romance is unfolding, but not always happily, then give these anime recommendations a try.

Best Dark Romance Anime

Flowers of Evil

The experimental rotoscoping animation in Flowers of Evil makes it difficult to watch. The subject matter makes it difficult to enjoy. The toxically flawed characters – Well, you get the point.

Flowers of Evil is a hard romance to watch, and that is completely by design.

Flowers of Evil is a romance and coming-of-age anime about, not the idyllic happy children, but the disillusioned outcasts. It follows a normal if pretentious boy who, on a impulse, steals the gym uniform of his crush. He gets caught by the quiet weird girl who starts blackmailing him into doing increasingly unhinged things.

That doesn’t sound like a healthy foundation for a romance, and its not. However, it is, if nothing else, an interesting experience to see the darker side of rampaging youth.

Scum’s Wish

Scum’s Wish is an exploration of romantic relationships when everyone is just the worst kind of person they could be.

Scum’s Wish follows a dating teenaged couple that appears to be the perfect match. However, they are only dating each other because neither can be with their adult crushes who have rejected them.

What starts as a just a melancholy romance erodes further as more romantic hopefuls gets mixed into the stewing love polygon – and they are all, to some degree, awful people fulfilling their own selfish desires by using others.

While Scum’s Wish is often an unhappy romance for many involved, the bleak situations do perfectly spawn a few bright spots of character growth for several of them by the end.

Future Diary

A glorious blend of horror and romance, Future Diary may not start off as a romance anime, but the romantic relationship between an innocent boy and the yandere girl obsessed to death with him becomes a major element.

Future Diary is a survival game anime that follows a boy who spends his time writing in his cellphone diary and talking to his imaginary deity friends at home. However, it turns out his deity friends are not so imaginary, and now he is playing playing a survival game where godhood is on the line.

He teams up with his popular classmate who fiercely protects him, but also terrifies him with her obsessive and increasingly threatening love.

Koi Kaze

Koi Kaze is a series that dares to embrace the most popular taboo relationship of anime romance – incest.

In Koi Kaze, an adult man meets his estranged sister and, upon getting to know her and spending more time together, starts to fall in love with her.

So no, Koi Kaze isn’t one of those imouto love-baiting teases like many other series like to play with. Instead, it provides a grounded, candid glimpse as a romantic relationship between siblings and explores why these feelings can sometimes form.

School Days

School Days is a legendary anime whose reputation was firmly cemented by its shocking and unexpectedly extreme ending.

However, in the beginning, School Days starts off as just another romantic comedy with a love triangle element. That soon transformed into a harem element. And finally, it transforms into a dramatic horror element.

In truth, School Days is a parody of romantic harems that lands firmly on the most extreme side of the spectrum. If nothing else, it explores the more likely consequences of being a manslut that harem anime often conveniently ignores.

From the New World

Similar to Future Diary, romance is not the primary plot of From The New World, but it does play a major role through the story.

From The New World takes place in the far future after humanity started awakening psychic powers. in this collapsed, isolated society, everyone has psychic powers and normal humans have seemingly gone extinct.

In From The New World, you experience this world as the characters do. They start as children and as they grow up throughout, you learn the darker truths of the world. As is common with any group of interconnected friends, you watch romance bloom and crumble between them as they enjoy peaceful moments and endure tragedies.

Myself;Yourself

At a glance, Myself;Yourself looks like a likely love polygon between a reunited friend group. However, it isn’t a series about love triangles – but it is a series drowning in every other kind of drama.

In Myself; Yourself, a teen is returning to his childhood hometown and reuniting with his friends. However, while many of them are the same as always, his childhood crush has transformed from a shy, cute girl into a cold and melancholy teen.

With his own past trauma tucked unaddressed under his belt, Myself;Yourself navigates all the melodramatic problems of the whole pack in this coming-of-age romantic drama.

Nana

If you want a romance anime where people are just as unhappy in life as people generally are in real life, Nana is for you.

Nana follows two girls named Nana who meet on the train to Tokyo and just so happen to be renting the same apartment together. You follows one as she struggles through her music career and unhealthy punk rock romance while the other does what naive girls new to the big city so do – has a string of complicated romantic connections.

Mysterious Girlfriend X

As dark romances go, this series isn’t quite as dark as it could be. In fact, the darkness comes more from its realistic drama. Instead, Mysterious Girlfriend X is more of a weird romance.

Mysterious Girlfriend X follows the sloppy romance between a boy who felt compelled to taste the drool of the sleeping “weird girl” in class, and is now addicted to her drool.

It merits mentioning that he is “addicted to her drool” in a supernatural sort of way and not a degenerate sort of way. Regardless, while a very strange setup, Mysterious Girlfriend X offers an interestingly touching building relationship for those who can handle an above average amount of swapping spit.

Kemonozume

Taking a supernatural stab at Romeo and Juliet-style star-crossed lovers, Kemonozume follows a demon slayer who falls in love with a demon, a race that needs to feed on humanity to survive.

However, with trademark Maasaki Yuasa experimental animation and his passion for dark, occasionally strange storytelling, Kemonozume is no happy tale for the pair.

Blood+

Blood+ follows a seemingly normal high school girl who discovers that she is actually a vampire who is capable of killing grotesque wild vampiric creatures with her blood.

Throughout the series, you follow her as she uncovers her origins hidden under her layer of amnesia with her loyal chevalier and protector that she begins to have romantic feelings for.

While Blood+ is definitely for those that like a little more action in their romance, it does have that melancholy and tortured soul vibes that draws people into vampire romance.

Sankarea

As Sankarea follows the romance between a guy who loves zombies and a popular girl who killed herself and came back as a zombie, Sankarea is built on a pretty dark foundation.

What makes Sankarea a particular joy as a dark romance is that it increasingly embraces the sinister, flesh-eating nature of the female lead. The series doesn’t neuter the danger of dating a creature that hungers for human flesh, and it makes the romance occasionally menacing.

Welcome to the NHK

While romance isn’t the sole focus of Welcome to the NHK, it does play a pretty important part in it as you watch a shut-in NEET whittle away his days trying and failing to improve his life.

Welcome to the NHK follows the (semi-autobiographical) days of a shut-in who embraces everything from MMOs to conspiracies. However, in between his shut-in activities, he is helped by a girl who is trying to pull him out into the world.

While that in and of itself isn’t so dark, Welcome to the NHK is a series that appreciates dark comedy, but also has some innately dark motivations to its romantic connection well.

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia

Dusk Maiden of Amnesia is a playful school club-focused series about a female ghost haunting a school and the Paranormal Club helping her solve the mystery of her murder. However, that plot actually gets wrapped up pretty quickly.

What Dusk Maiden of Amnesia becomes afterwards is a romance between an increasingly possessive ghost and the teenaged male main character.

The setup is a dark one, but also often conveniently ignores the realities of their relationship.

Devils’ Line

It can be said that vampire romance is innately dark romance, but Devils’ Line does it a little better and a little less melodramatic than most.

Devils; Line follows a college girl who is saved by a police officer and self-hating half-vampire that is part of a secret unit that takes out rampaging vampires to protect the public.

What is particularly unique about Devils’ Line is that vampires don’t need to drink human blood to live. Instead, it presents drinking blood as akin to taking the best drugs and having the best sex, meaning that when a vampire gets a taste they go on sprees of sexual assault and murder.

That said, the core romance in Devils’ Line is actually very sweet, though it leans heavily on rescue romance moments.

Elfen Lied

As a series that start with a nude woman dismembering her way through a research facility in what was, at the time, a shocking display of gore, no one expected much romance from Elfen Lied.

However, after that little mass murdering human experiment gets amnesia, she endears herself to a college boy and romantic feelings get increasingly complicated and tragic as things go on.

Domestic Girlfriend

If you are a fan of messy, taboo love triangles, Domestic Girlfriend offers you an enjoyable dumpster fire to keep warm at.

In Domestic Girlfriend, a boy has a crush on his teacher. Shooting him down as any good teacher should, he drowns his sorrows in a one-night stands with high school girl. Later, he learns that his father has decided to remarry and he is getting two new stepsisters.

Guess who those two new stepsisters are?

After that, you get to enjoy two girls play tug-of-war over a boy who deserves neither.

Vampire Knight

If you are a fan of Anne Rice or Western-style vampire romance media, Vampire Knight is really everything you would expect it to be.

Vampire Knight follows the headmaster’s daughter who mediates things between the human day students at her academy and the vampire night students.

Of course, it isn’t long before she finds herself locked in a drama-filled love triangle between a handsome pureblood vampire with mysterious ties to her and her vampire-hating childhood friend who was also turned into a vampire.

Do you know more twist anime romance tales that people might enjoy? Let fans know your dark romance anime recommendations in the comments section below.