As a content creator, I know too well about the importance of creating an eye-catching title that people want to engage with. I also know too well that instead of creating a title that is on-the-nose and informative, the more effective way to bring in an audience is to create a title that is so divisive that it causes people to spew vitriol out their mouths as they angrily click it.
Luckily, this isn’t Fox News or The National Enquirer, so we don’t really go that route here, but there are definitely some anime series that made their titles a little more dubious than they needed to be.
While it has long been the habit of light novels to catch your eye with an overly descriptive title, some series go a similar route by being descriptive and dubious. Interestingly enough, some series hook you with a provocative title and deliver exactly what you’d expect, but others surprise you by offering an emotionally rich story instead.
While you will get a mixed bag of series that will either feed your soul or feed your libido, give these anime recommendations with titles that threaten to give anime an even more dubious reputation to the uniformed general public a try.
Anime With Sussy Titles
Higehiro: After Being Rejected, I Shaved and Took in a High School Runaway
Higehiro is subtle and sneaky. Anyone can bring home a high school girl – even high school boys! However, by adding in that he shaved,you immediately infer that this is an older man that needs to regularly shave, and thus, should definitely not be bringing home high school girls if he wants to avoid jail time.
However, instead of being about seducing a high school girl with the middling pay of a salaryman and being able to legally buy alcohol, Higehiro is about a middle-aged man who is shot down by his boss, gets drunk, and takes home a high school runaway that was sitting in the street at night.
While that still has the potential to go horribly awry, Higehiro makes it clear early and often that he has set appropriate boundaries, even though the girl frequently tries to break them down. Having lived on the streets, she is already well-versed in what women with nothing must do to survive.
While Higehiro doesn’t necessary prevent building romantic feelings between them completely, it at least focuses its energies on trying to help this girl find stability and safety in her life as well as possibly reconnect with her family. Higehiro is not so much a romance anime, but instead an emotional story about a topic you don’t really see explore much in anime – addressing and healing from child abuse.
OniAi: As Long as There’s Love, It Doesn’t Matter If He Is My Brother, Right?
While it goes by the shorter and more manageable portmanteau of its Japanese title, OniAi, its translated title is a little – well, you know, suspicious.
And OniAi delivers on every ounce of the taboo you were expecting.
OniAi is a rom-com about two siblings reunited six years after separating due to the death of their parents. Perhaps luckily, the series adds three non-blood relative girls that come to live with the both of them, forming a harem affair to dilute the incest jokes.
Of course, OniAi is also a very ecchi harem and that little sister is vying pretty hard to win her brother’s affections.
TsumaSho: If My Wife Becomes an Elementary School Student
Using its more ambiguous short-form title TsumaSho on platforms like Crunchyroll, likely to avoid immediate attention from clickbait content creators, If My Wife Becomes an Elementary School Student takes a similar approach to Higehiro. While the title may suggest inappropriate relationships with a minor, once you look past the surface, it’s actually a story about child abuse, with an extra dollop of tormenting grief added on top
If My Wife Becomes an Elementary School Student’s title is provocative, but not so great at conveying the finer details of the plot.
In the series, a middle-aged man lost his wife in a sudden accident ten years prior. Now, he and his young adult daughter live a quiet, joyless existence. This is broken when a 10-year-old girl shows up, says she regained her memories of her past life, and that she is the reincarnation of his wife.
On one hand, you have an adult man who is far too excited and interested in his wife being alive again, but at least not in a sexual way.
On the other hand, you have a child who is enduring heart-breaking parental abuse in her home, and finds fleeting happiness and a loving family in her family from a past life.
If My Wife Becomes an Elementary School Student creates an emotionally rich story about grief and moving forward, but at the same time, it makes you wish that anime wasn’t filled with such a large amount of questionable content so that people are now conditioned to read the title and immediately become outraged.
There is definitely a lot of lolicon service in anime to be outraged about, but I don’t think this series isn’t one of them.
My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex
I like to think that the author of this series sat down with his editor and they went back and forth between “My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex” and “My Ex is My Stepsister.” The question is, were they trying to pick the less provocative title, or the more provocative one?
My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex is indeed about a guy who finds out that his new stepmother’s daughter is a girl that he dated and broke up with in middle school.
Frequent rom-com fans know immediately where the story is going. However, instead of being an inseki version of Oreimo, My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex is actually less focused on the taboo of step-siblings for titillation, and more focused on building out the emotions swirling between its lead characters.
Much of My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex is spent exploring why the pair fell in love, and then why they broke up in middle school. Through the forced cohabitation of being step-siblings, they have little choice but to address the miscommunication that ultimately tore them apart.
My Stepmom’s Daughter is My Ex is both as suspicious as its title sounds, and actually kind of touching as a romance – particularly since it is a very rare post-break up romance.
Hensuki: Are You Willing to Fall In Love With A Pervert, As Long As She’s A Cutie?
There is a very small handful of anime that refreshingly acknowledges that girls get horny too. Hensuki is not that.
Rather, Hensuki is that, but it presents its female harem as overly horny animals with specific kinks for ecchi comedy rather than to provide any thoughtful discourse on our attitudes towards human sexuality.
Alongside being an ecchi comedy, Hensuki is also a Cinderella-style romance mystery. The main character has received a love letter – and a pair of panties alongside it – and is now looking for his mysterious secret admirer. On his quest around the school, he uncovers the fetishes of a series of girls, each more degenerate than the last.
While it does explore a lot of fetishes, Hensuki is actually rather tame on the actual nudity. It is very much trying to be a comedy that is built on dirty jokes rather than an actual teen-teasing ecchi.
My Girlfriend is a Shobitch
There is a very good life tip for those who actually want to keep their girlfriend – don’t call her a bitch. However, My Girlfriend is a Shobitch is actually just a weirdly translated title, though its actual translation isn’t much better. In fact, it might actually be worse.
My Girlfriend is a Virgin Bitch, as it is more literally translated, is about a boy who confesses his love to the diligent class representative, who is, for all intents and purposes, the perfect-seeming girl.
However, he discovers that she has never been in a relationship, and being the diligent hard worker that she is, she tries to do her best to research and be the perfect girlfriend… by doing everything the internet says guys like.
Without a provocative title, this could have very well just been a cute rom-com, and it is a rom-com. It’s just a very ecchi one. The main relationship does have its cute moments, but it is – not unlike Hensuki – just a series of dirty jokes.
I Want You To Make a Disgusted Face and Show Me Your Underwear
I Want You To Make a Disgusted Face and Show Me Your Underwear is about exactly what it says in the title, and is exactly as bad as it sounds.
The series is about a guy asking girls to show him their panties, and breaking down to progressively more pathetic forms of begging until they do.
As this anime only has 4-minute-long short-form episodes, you really only get begging and panties. No personality for the girls beyond an archetype boilerplate one, no story arc beyond “ask > beg > panties,” and no lessons to be learned.
But, really? Was anyone who was interested in watching it expecting anything more?
I’m Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness
Compared to some other series on here, the title “I’m Giving the Disgraced Noble Lady I Rescued a Crash Course in Naughtiness” is only slightly suspicious. It’s probably the lowest on the spectrum of the lot – and also probably the most wholesome.
As there is an above average level of ecchi anime with suspicious titles, you may think that the “naughtiness” that is being taught to a disgraced noble lady is going to be of the lewd variety.
In truth, it’s actually just normal, almost child-like naughtiness.
The noble lady, pinnacle of innocence that she is, lived a very Cinderella sort of life with her family before ultimately being blamed for a crime and having to flee. She is found by a so-called “Demon Lord” in the forest, and he starts to teach her how to both enjoy life and stick up for herself.
As he teaches her naughty things like staying up late, indulging in snacks, or lounging around and not doing chores, they grow closer in a very cute (non-ecchi) romantic way.
Cherry Magic! Thirty Years of Virginity Can Make You a Wizard?!
As a middle-aged person raised by wolves on the internet, I can appreciate that old jokes from my youth are now making their debut as anime titles. First, Netoge, which played off the ancient addage that there are no girls online, now Cherry Magic, a yaoi anime about getting magic powers if you are still a virgin at 30.
And Cherry Magic is about exactly that.
In Cherry Magic, an office worker was unlucky in love and has since kept his virginity intact until his 30th birthday. In doing so, he gained the ability to read the minds of people he touches or who accidentally touch him. This leads to him finding out that his handsome and popular male co-worker is actually gleefully in love with him.
If you enjoy boy’s love, Cherry Magic is actually a very tender tale about building love between two adult men who support each other professionally and emotionally.
Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon?
If you are innocent, you may think Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon is about lifting girls up, which is not so bad. However, when most people read the title, it sounds like the main character is going to be sleazily hitting on female adventurers in a dungeon.
That is, of course, not at all what it is is about. In fact, the main character is entirely uninterested in most of the women that even remotely show romantic interest in him. Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls In A Dungeon, instead, provides a pretty action-packed dungeon crawling experience with a main character who is sweet and helpful rather than sleazy and horny.
Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun
The suspiciousness of Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun’s title is entirely dependent on how familiar you are with Japanese urban legends.
If you know about Hanako, an urban legend about a female ghost that often haunts a specific bathroom stall in schools, being toilet-bound is not suspicious at all. Instead, the intriguing part of the title is the “-kun” honorific since it is reserved for boys, and Hanako is always traditionally a female ghost.
If you didn’t know about Hanako, you might have been surprised by how unrelated to bathrooms Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun is. It is not a series of poop and pee jokes, but rather about solving increasingly sinister supernatural mysteries in a school.
Do you have more anime recommendations that feature particularly suspicious titles, even if they may or may not be as bad as they sound? Let fans know in the comments section below.
