Brain rot anime – series of no significant moments of substance, plot, or character development, but infinite amounts of chaos and enjoyment. While the term defining such anime is rather new, the concept of brain rot in anime is long-standing.
Anime is a vast medium these day, and for every experimental art series and thought-provoking narrative that is made, there is a series with chaotic jump cut animation editing and meme-worthy explosive diarrhea jokes.
If you no longer like anime that triggers the unpleasant itchy feeling of your neurons making new connections, then these delightful brain rot anime recommendations are for you.
Brain Rot Anime
Asobi Asobase
What better way to decay that gray matter than watching an anime about three girls who suffer from significant brain rot being degenerates to each other?
Asobi Asobase, with its cute middle school girls and soft pastel art style, hides itself perfectly as “just another school slice of life” series. However, it isn’t long before it whips out those exaggerated facial expressions and slapstick comedy that really emphasizes the “slap” end of the stick. It quick swerve to comedy thoroughly shows that this is a pure comedy anime about dumb girls doing dumb things for your entertainment.
Pop Team Epic
Pop Team Epic is best described as the “TikTok of anime.”
While each episode is 11 minutes long, there is certainly no sort of plot happening in those eleven minutes. Instead, it rapid-fires various sketches and parodies at the audience at a pace that makes each episode feel like dozens of episodes.
If you are a consumer of many anime, games, and other media – Pop Team Epic chocked full of references and has a lovably rotten crude humor alongside them.
Excel Saga
As you get older – and remain an anime fan, anyway – you find your peers start to praise the anime from your youth as “art” and the “pinnacle of the medium,” saying things like new series just aren’t as good any more.
Then you point out all the other brain rot anime from that age, which shows that anime is just as basic and degenerate as it is now, but with different comedy sensibilities.
Excel Saga is old brain rot where the punctuation to the joke was screeching stupidity, ultra violence, or something still stupid, but also trying to be sexy.
Like any good dose of brain rot, it is initially difficult to ascertain what the plot of Excel Saga is, but it can be easily summed up as a series that follows a minion of a evil organization trying to take over the world, but who is comically awful at her job.
My Deer Friend Nokotan
While My Deer Friend Nokotan cleverly brought in audiences with an earworm of the opening song, it then drove off the pretentious portion of those audiences by being nonsensical and unhinged. My Deer Friend Nokotan poorly explains what it is even about to the point where even the characters wall-break to joke about it. However, people aren’t staying for the plot, they are staying for the insanity and meme-worthy, deer-dense moments.
My Deer Friend Nokotan follows an ex-delinquent who is starting her life anew as a perfect student. Her aspirations are swiftly dashed when she attracts the laser-targeted attention of a girl with deer antlers that she left hanging from power lines for never explained or acknowledged reasons.
Aho Girl
It’s not okay for a boy to hit a girl, which seems like it should make Aho Girl, a series about a boy frequently punching a girl in the face, a target for some controversy. However, all it took to quiet that down was listening to the stupid things that come out of her mouth.
Aho Girl, or the literal translation “Idiot Girl,” is about a very, very stupid girl who is forcing her friendship upon her neighbor and unwilling childhood friend.
She says the most brain rot things and often gets a smack for it. That’s the show!
Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan
Ultra violence is often the punchline of many jokes in older anime, but no series took that more to heart than the now-legendary Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan.
Even the mere premise of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan is incredibly suspect as it follows an angel sent to kill a boy who, in the future, will create technology that turns all women into immortal 12-year-olds, creating a lolicon paradise on Earth.
However, instead of just murdering him the once, she decides to distract him so he can’t focus long enough to create the technology that destroys the future. Of course, the primary joke of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan is that she frequently murders him – brutally – for any annoyance or offense, then revives him.
Azumanga Daioh
Plotless slice of life anime where all the characters look normal, but act quite the contrary is popular and well-represented on this list. However, Azumanga Daioh is the progenitor of that very super-specific genre.
This older series with character designs that looked incredibly dull even in its heyday hides supremely good comedy. The basic premise of Azumanga Diaoh is a bunch odd high school girls in an odd class and odd neighborhood.
With dull art and a dull synopsis, it is hard to sell this series, but one episode of over exaggerated actions, “ree” screams, and jumping from joke to joke with all the vigor of untreated ADHD tells you all you need to know.
Lucky Star
While definitely not the oldest anime on this list, Lucky Star was peak brain rot during the age of giant-eyed moe girls that helped shaped the modern “moe, but at least more normal-looking” anime art style we enjoy today.
Lucky Star bills itself as a show about nothing – and it delivers! The series follows the daily life of an otaku girl and her friends. Often, instead of doing anything, they are simply having conversations about what snacks are best or the preferred way to engage in various weebery.
Konosuba
While isekai is the go-to genre for same-y brain rot, the escapism offered in another world is not always enjoyable. After awhile, glutting yourself on another serving of “OP personality-free self-insert goes to magic school and gets a harem” just starts to feel sad.
So instead, why not try an isekai about four thoroughly brain-rotted individuals that make up the isekai’s most ineffectual and entertaining adventuring party?
Adventures are had and nothing really every gets accomplished thanks to the variety of personality flaws on display that makes the main characters incapable of being normal people.
Nichijou
With its softer pastel art and very moe girl trio, Nichijou looks like a pretty standard slice of life anime, but Nichijou is a slice of life anime where everything goes unexpectedly.
Essentially, Nichijou is the daily life at school and beyond of three girls. However, every normal situation is punctuated by a joke and often an absurd situation just to further detach it from normality.
While the comedy is a lovely dose of brain rot, Nichijou is so beloved by a wide audience because it injects its jokes cleverly using a wide variety of animation styles to accent and elevate average jokes into deranged-feeling fever dream moments.
Kill Me Baby
If you are tired of brain rot anime like Nichijou or Konosuba where there is actually some semblance of quality to both the jokes and the animation, Kill Me Baby is the salve to your stimulated frontal lobe.
Kill Me Baby follows a pair of friends, one is a normal idiot and the other is a trained assassin. The sole joke repeated ad infinitum in this barely animated gem is that her normal friend tries to be normal friends with the assassin, who instead often responds only with assassin instincts and ends up hurting her comically.
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo
Tired of all this brain rot trying so hard to be comedy anime in the comedy genre where it is perfectly expected? Then why not Bobobo, a shounen action anime about fighting hair-stealing evildoers with nose hair kung-fu.
Now, to be fair, while weird, Bobobo is as effectively rotting as any shounen plot. The charming thing about it is that it embraces the fact that you can put in literally any weird power system and weird characters into shounen brain rot/money-printing formula and plop out a series that still fits in the shounen action genre perfectly.
Himouto! Umaru-chan
Before Nokotan was bombarding us with deer-based comedy and well after Lucky Star was dulling minds with cute pointlessness, Himouto! Umaru-chan snuck into hearts by being about the worst little otaku gremlin in the cutest little hamster blanket.
Himouto! Umaru-chan follows a high school girl that pretend to be normal at school, then transforms into a degenerate layabout when she goes home to financially mooch off her normal older brother in his home.
While that is the sole joke of Umaru-chan, unfortunately, some of its rotting potential diminishes over time as it manifest wholesome aspects like friendship.
Dropkick on My Devil
There are plenty of Cute (Supernatural) Girls Doing Cute Things anime out there, and plenty of it is the plotless, pleasant sort of brain rot that sustains the CGDCT anime fandom, but Dropkick on My Devil is all that, but with an extra side of extreme violence for comedy.
Dropkick on My Devil follows an occult dabbler who summons a demon. She doesn’t actually know how to send her back, so they end up as roommates. However, the demon knows that the easiest way to get back to the underworld is to kill the girl that summoned her. Unfortunately for her guts, her master frequently catches her attempts and disembowels her with a chainsaw for fun punishment.
Essentially, Dropkick on My Devil is a CGDCT comedy made by a probably long-time CGDCT genre fan that came unhinged.
Inferno Cop
Many, if not all of the above series are responsible for spawning some of anime’s most enduring, deranged memes. However, there is no more meme-worthy series than Inferno Cop.
Inferno Cop is the product of anime industry burnout where each short 3-minute anime episode is just a string nonsense, memes, and enjoyable chaos.
Ostensibly, Inferno Cop is about a cop from hell that dispenses brutal justice to criminals, but the plot isn’t important or even particularly acknowledged. Instead, you get three-minute episodes of ultra-violence and dumb humor that people either hoist up as the pinnacle of immature comedy or hoist up for underrated social commentary to justify watching a barely animated anime full of crude, low-effort jokes.
While everyone has their own definition of what exactly brain rot is, there is a lot of it to be found in anime. Let fans know your favorite brain rot anime recommendations in the comments section below.
