Social anxiety is the intense fear and anxiety that comes with talking to or interacting with others, often defined by how negatively you think they will judge you. While this makes it difficult to lead a fulfilling life in the real world, social anxiety is one of the hot new trends in anime.
Perhaps it is the increase in social anxiety and depression that gave rise to the increase in anime about characters dealing with social anxiety. Sometimes they make it cute and comical. Sometimes they make it so relatable it physically hurts. Regardless, social anxiety anime in all its forms can be a bit of a balm to those suffering from it in real life. It just makes you feel like you aren’t the only one dealing with this in the world, you know?
If you are looking for anime recommendations where the character is dealing with social anxiety and social life-paralyzing shyness, head on down below.
Social Anxiety Anime
Bocchi the Rock
Without the social anxiety of the main character, Bocchi the Rock would be a pretty decent rock music anime. However, what really elevated this series above the other pretty decent rock music anime was – of all the things – the way the social anxiety of the main character is presented.
Bocchi the Rock will always be remembered less for its legitimately dope beats and more for the artistic way it presented the anguish and skin-crawling intensity of social anxiety in a character. Bocchi’s anxiety is presented in creative and artistic outbursts that really hit close to home for a lot of people that fell under her spell, but more than that, it also nails home how truly inconvenient social anxiety is when you just want to live a simple life.
Hitori Bocchi’s Lifestyle
When you have social anxiety, all you really can hope for its to have that one friend that is everything to you. However, Hitori Bocchi’s one friend withholds her friendship until Hitori can attempt to make friends at her new school.
An eternity of loneliness is a pretty compelling reason to try to reach out to people, and luckily, despite some fumbles, it works out pretty well. While not the most deep social anxiety anime, Hitori Bocchi’s Lifestyle provides a cute glimpse at new friendship and personal connection.
Komi-san Can’t Communicate
Komi-san Can’t Communicate takes the paralyzing fear and anxiety one feels when they speak to people and takes it to a comical extreme. Komi can’t talk to people, but she manages to make one new friend who helps her reach out to others. As everyone else in the school is also comically quirky, it makes for a fun adventure in helping Komi make 100 friends in high school.
While Komi-san Can’t Communicate is a quintessential comedy about social anxiety, don’t get too attached to it as a rom-com. It moves at a real snail’s pace.
Stardust Telepath
Sometimes social anxiety gets so bad, you just want to leave this world behind. In most anime about social anxiety, this manifests in becoming a shut-in, but Stardust Telepath goes a different route by having the main character want to leave this world behind by going to space to meet aliens that will hopefully better understand her.
Of course, the whole thing in this Cute Girls Doing Cute Things anime is the main character meeting others to help her build a space ship only for the real friendships to be the ones she makes along the way.
Shy
What are two genres that don’t seem like they would work well together? Super heroes and social anxiety. However, Shy explores just that.
Shy follows the titular super hero, a teenage girl superhero code named Shy, who has about as much confidence in her ability to save people as she does talking to others in class. Yet, the heart of a hero can beat in any chest, and Shy is an exploration of her overcoming her anxiety and building her confidence in a hero in what is actually one of the more inspiring social anxiety anime you can watch.
Watamote – No Matter How I Look At It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular
No matter how you look at it, social anxiety in real life isn’t anywhere as cute or fun as anime makes it look. It makes the cringe comedy of Watamote ever-so-slightly more painful to watch, but provides a less sugar-coated look at this increasingly popular condition that anime loves to feature.
Watamote follows an otaku girl with social anxiety shown in its worse form. She has trouble making friends and connections with others, but every time she continues to reach out, she fumbles in some comically painful way.
If you think your anxiety is bad, Watamote can help you see that it could be worse. Or it could hurt you very personally by being too relatable. It’s a real gamble.
Kotoura-san
When people push you away enough times, eventually you stop trying. That was the case in Kotoura-san when her ability to read minds makes it difficult to differentiate between what people have said and what they were just thinking, leading to a lot of destroyed relationships. When you accidentally implode friendships and marriages, sometimes the best option seems to just keep to yourself.
While Kotoura-san starts off as a wildly sad story about her withdrawal from meaningful connection, the anime is about meeting people who accept her for who she is, are fascinated by what she can do, and her building meaningful relationships with people for the first time.
Senryuu Girl
A socially anxious character that can’t communicate at all isn’t exactly compelling. You can only find shaking and shuddering interesting for so long before you want to know slightly more about the girl. Senryuu Girl provides a more unique approach on social anxiety by having the main character manifest her anxiety in a pretty unique way.
While she can’t really talk to people, she does communicate in any given situation through a series of short senryuu poems. It’s cute, it’s quirky, and the series manages to make her a lovable character in this rom-com without needing her to speak a word. Luckily, like in many cases, she is complimented by a similarly likable guy at her side helping her.
Welcome to the NHK
Any and every gender can be brought low by the troubles of social anxiety. Unfortunately for men, cute anime girls are a little more entertaining to watch suffer cutely than anime boys. However, while more rare, male characters with social anxiety do exist and Welcome to the NHK is perhaps the most famous exploration of the way social anxiety can affect men.
While not all NEETs are shut-ins due to social anxiety, Welcome to the NHK follows a guy who withdrew from the world due to his anxiety and explores the struggles he faces as burden who is unable to change himself.
Although framed as a series of comical shenanigans, Welcome to the NHK has a lot of dark undertones and is the best exploration of how anxiety and withdrawal from society can affect a person’s mind.
Hinako Note
Like any social anxiety anime, Hinako Note is about the admirable efforts that a young girl with social anxiety is making to overcome it.
Hinako Note follows a socially anxious girl from the country that wants to go to high school and join a theater club. In an effort to move towards that dream, she decides to go to high school in Tokyo where she can both improve her social skills and find a high school with a theater club to join.
Of course the theater club at her high school is defunct, but she lives with a series of odd misfits that decide to help her form her own club in the boarding house she is staying at.
Princess Jellyfish
Occasionally, characters with social anxiety are presented as people with a series of weird quirks or hobbies, and in this case, Princess Jellyfish provides the most dense collection of them.
As a plot, Princess Jellyfish follows a socially anxious girl with a love of jellyfish who has an encounter with a cross-dressing man when he helps her stands up for an abused jellyfish in a pet shop.
After the encounter, he helps her as well as her apartment full of various socially anxious, man-fearing women deal with their various anxieties and connect with the world.
My Roommate is a Cat
The thing about social anxiety – and actually a lot of things you probably avoid because they’re unpleasant – is that the more you avoid talking to people, the worse at it you become. That is the line that My Roommate is a Cat follows.
After his parents’ death, the main character withdrew from the world. While he certainly didn’t have trouble connecting before the incident, he sure does afterwards.
Although he is good at his work as an author, he is terrible at taking care of himself and making connections with others. That starts to change when he ends up adopting a stray cat who has a positive effect on his ability to care for himself and interact with the world.
Recovery of an MMO Junkie
The Recovery of an MMO follows a once-successful business woman who dropped out of the rat race to become a shut-in who took up playing MMOs to pass the time.
As a working adult, I resonate hard with the urge to just drop off the face of the Earth. However, you can’t really say that social anxiety forced her to withdraw. More burn out than anxiety, and yet, like presented in My Roommate is a Cat, Recovery of an MMO Junkie explores social anxiety that manifested after cutting off social connections. Once you are out of practice talking to people, sometimes it can be hard learn to do it again.
As such, social anxiety definitely becomes the barrier in this otherwise otaku-focused rom-com.
The Great Passage
While it is always worthwhile to work on social skills, sometimes dealing with social anxiety is more about finding your place in the world – place that is perfect for you.
The Great Passage is about a man with poor social skills and anxiety who manages to do the only job he could get – working as a salesman. Now, as you expect, a muttering guy who speaks poorly is not the most effective of salespeople. Instead of firing him, he is thankfully transferred by his company to the dictionary department where he finds fulfillment in the solitary and detail-oriented work of making a new dictionary.
Big Windup
While all sports anime is about the sport, there will always be character issues that will shape the character stories outside of the sport. In Big Windup, the topic may be baseball, but the main character is a social anxious boy whose self-confidence was crippled by bullying and accusations of nepotism by his previous team.
Heading to a new school, he doesn’t intend to even play baseball, but is pulled onto the team by a guy so determined to play baseball that he would build a baseball team out of scarecrows if he had to. When passion meets anxiety, you will find that it can have an rehabilitating effect that makes this sports anime even more inspiring to watch.
March Comes in Like a Lion
Not all social anxiety is weird communication quirks or stuttering and blushing until you black out. Social anxiety comes in many forms, and the most common form is purely just an inability to effectively connect to other people.
While March Comes in Like a Lion is marketed as an anime about shogi, it is really an anime about deep depression and learning to connect to others. The main character is deeply depressed and disconnected from everyone, spiraling into the depths due to extreme loneliness. However, after a family of three sisters does manage to force a connection with him, he starts to grow and make positive connections with others where he realizes that everyone is enduring some kind of struggle, just as he was.
Do you have more anime recommendations exploring the fun, frustrating, and comical intricacies of social anxiety? Let fans know in the comments section below.
