You endure every anime? Don’t you know foreign shame? Then we have here for you 5 anime series that are really good – but also incredibly cringe.
Anime are pretty absurd at times. In most cases, they’re so weird that non-anime fans can only roll their eyes anyway. But even for die-hard fans of Japanese animation art, there are some series that send shivers down your spine. Some anime are just so “cringe” that you keep flinching in pain in front of the screen.
Still, you can’t just switch off. Here we show you 5 anime that you will find it difficult to watch – but you still want to bravely see them through to the end because you just can’t do anything else.
Watashi ga Motenai no wa Dou Kangaetemo Omaera ga Warui!
Alternative names: WataMote, No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular!
Genres: Comedy, slice of life
Episodes: 12
Stream available on: Currently no German provider known, only available with VPN.
Tomoko Kuroki is a true gamer. After completing 50+ virtual lives in college and picking up well over 100 guys in dating sims, she’s ready for real college life. At least that’s what she thinks. In fact, she is hopelessly overwhelmed by the social requirements and constraints and simply overwhelmed with coping with everyday life. Even the smallest mistake throws her off balance so that she staggers from one clumsiness to the next and has more and more thoughts that only produce more mistakes.
What to expect from Watamote: Watching Tomoko go about her everyday life is quite amusing. Her forged plans to finally become popular are always torpedoed by her own mistakes in the end. Watamote creates quite a balancing act. Because every now and then the mood shifts from “uncomfortably cringe” to “uncomfortably understandable”. Because in everyone there is sometimes a little Tomoko who is overwhelmed by the social rules of society and wishes to be able to escape from them.
Here we explain why anime have such absurdly long names.
Rent A Girlfriend
Alternative names: Kanojo, Okarishimasu
Genres: Comedy, Harem, Drama
Episodes: 24 (2 seasons, a third is currently running)
Stream available on: Crunchy roll
20-year-old Kazuya starts life in college with a big shock. His first girlfriend broke up after just a month. To comfort himself, he enlists a “rental girlfriend” service, meeting the adorable Chizuru and going on a date with her. When he finds out that Chizuru gives all the guys such a good time – which is what she gets paid for – he gets angry and gives her a bad review.
Just as the two are arguing about it, Kazuya gets a message from the hospital that his grandmother is not well. So they rush to the hospital, where Kazuya introduces Chizuru to his grandma as “his girlfriend” so that she doesn’t see him as a failure. Chizuru plays along since it’s a paid date. It’s just stupid that Chizuru’s grandmother is also present in the hospital, who doesn’t know anything about her granddaughter’s part-time job and thinks that Kazuya is Chizuru’s true friend.
The two now have to maintain this sham relationship, at least in front of their grandmothers, but otherwise want to avoid each other. How annoying that you still live next door to each other…
What to expect from Rent-A-Girlfriend: Kazuya is not only “cringe” but often hard to take. Not only does he misunderstand just about every sentence a woman says, maneuvering her and himself into complicated situations, but he also lets her take the blame for the problems. As is usual with the “harem” genre, this is compensated for by the female characters, of which Chizuru in particular stands out from the usual “harem cliché mush” and forces you to watch the next episode. Genre-typical “coincidences” are guaranteed to leave you squirming on your feet.
Especially as the story progresses, the protagonist becomes a bit more complex and improves. Even if he will probably never shed some negative qualities.
More cringe anime (which are still worth watching!) are on the next page.