Anime and manga is stuffed to the brim with ridiculous reoccurring tropes, so there’s no surprise fans of the medium unleash a fountain of memes every day. Let’s look at the best, the most biting and the most enduring memes anime fandom has to offer.
Spot The Main Character
Main characters of anime tend to have unusual and colorful hair while unimportant characters have normal hair. This trope has become so prevalent that many people have taken to playing a “spot the main character” game when it comes to anime hair.
This has also led to amusing posts about anime characters born with pink hair desperately trying to live normal lives while every magical being known to man tries to drag them into being a protagonist. In fact, a professional webcomic artist has decided to make an entire comic about this!
Bad Fansubs
Thanks to the fact a lot of anime tends not to be licensed early on in the West, most anime fans rely on other fans to add English subtitles to new anime. The practice is called fansubbing.
A parody of the above Death Note fansub.
But a lot of fans can get, shall we say, overzealous, when it comes to keeping the Japanese dialogue intact…to the point where they inexplicably refuse to translate some words, to hilarious effect.
A fansub of Yuri Bear Storm
A version with Shaggy from Scooby Doo.
(The most hilarious thing about this one is “daijoubu” translates to “it’s/I’m okay”. So…”everything’s going to be it’s okay”).
A Fate Stay Night fansub
Of course sometimes fansubs just translate things to sound really redundant as well. But we’d like to thank the crappy fansubs for making such good meme fodder!
Dying Anime Mom
This meme really took off after Attack on Titan. Fans noticed that main character Eren Jaeger’s deceased mother had brown hair in a side ponytail, just like the Elric brothers' dead mom, Trisha, in Fullmetal Alchemist. I honestly think Carla Jaeger’s design was probably an homage to FMA, considering it came later and Jaeger family bears other similarities to the Elrics. But fandom soon noticed a couple other dying anime moms ALSO had side ponytails, and a meme was born.
There’s even been cosplay!
Cosplay from here.
I-It's not like I like you or anything!
A tsundere refers to an anime character (often female) who covers up their romantic affection for another character by feigning dislike. A common refrain is “I-it’s not like I like you or anything!” often punctuated with “baka” (Japenese for idiot). Tsunderes are everywhere in anime, so they make great parody fodder. It’s common to photoshop real life figures and animals with anime blushing and tsundere dialogue.
Graphic by chibidraws4ever-d7jts5a
The tsundere trope had become so prevalent that it’s being parodied in anime itself as well. Maria Holic’s famous “is there a tsundere on board” scene is an example.
Yaoi Hands
If you’ve been living under a rock and don’t what yaoi is, it refers a subgenre of manga that focuses on romance (and often sex) between guys (generally intended for straight women, though there are plenty actually intended for gay men).
Like any subgenre, you can find some good stories, but a lot of them are…not so much. One of the most disturbing reoccurring tropes yaoi has to offer is giving the guys involved monstrously meaty paws.
…Yeah. Reproducing and parodying these terrifying digits became popular, to the point there’s entiretumblrs devoted to it.
Fun with Dubs
In the 90’s, a lot of anime like Pokemon and Sailor Moon were dubbed for American and Canadian kids. However, these dubs tried desperately to hide that the cartoons originated from Japan because I guess they thought kids hated other countries or something. This led to some truly hilarious moments, like the Pokemon dub insisting rice balls were jelly donuts:
In addition to not wanting to expose children to the horror of rice balls, dubs didn’t want kids to know that lesbians existed, which was why the lesbian characters in Sailor Moon were turned into cousins…though they still tended to flirt with each other a lot, making it seem like we had incestuous lesbians on our hands instead of no lesbians at all. As you could expect, it was goldmine for memes.
Valentine featuring the "cousins" from here.
T shirt from here.
Attack on Titan Theme Song Parody
The popular 2013 anime Attack on Titan had a really killer theme song titled “Guren no Yumiya”. SO killer that pretty much everyone and their mother decided to mash the audio up with their favorite shows, video games and….Christopher Walken?
Here’s a video that gives definitive proof this theme song can go with literally anything:
It's over 9000!
Another popular anime dub meme that has endured for so long you might even be sick of hearing about it is the “Over 9000” one. This originates from Dragonball Z, where while watching the main character power up, the antagonist Vegeta shouted that his power levels were “OVER 9000!” in a ridiculously dramatic way, smashing his scouter for emphasis. You can hear it here.
The meme really took off to the point it’s been going strong for nearly a decade. To give an idea of how persistent the meme is, it was referenced in the new Sailor Moon dub that was made this year. Trolls even successfully got Oprah to say the phrase.
“ Foolish” and other Naruto memes
This out of context screencap is funny whether you’ve watched Naruto or not:
So much that it’s inspired several redraws:
Link redraw from here.
Another common Naruto meme you see is a redraw of the scene where Sasuke begs his brother Itachi to tell them why he slaughtered their family, My personal favorite is this one:
Rugrats redraw from here.
The Frozen one is pretty good too.
Yet another popular Naruto meme is “the Naruto run”, describing the ninja’s weird tendency to run with his hands at his back. There’s tons of videos of people attempting the run, not to mention animation cycles.
There’s even a wikihow entry on how to do it.
Getting Ahead of Yourself
The character Mami from Puella Magi Madoka Magica famously had her head bitten off in the third episode of the series. Fandom reacted to such a disturbing event the best way they knew how- by making tons of jokes about it.
From here.
This meme got so huge that even the creators were in on it. When the 2011 Madoka movie came out, the creators released custom Mami tickets where she had a tearaway head.
Mami’s death was even made into a VERB by the Japanese fandom, “Mamiru” became a word that either described “getting decapitated like Mami” or “dying a horrible death.” This word became so popular that it was even included in a Japanese dictionary for modern terminology in 2012.
Running Titan
Attack on Titan is an extremely gory anime about giant titans devouring people, but some of those titans are unintentionally (I think) hilarious looking. Particularly the ones that run in a very funny way.
From here.
For extra fun, here’s a combination of the Naruto run meme with the running titan one!
From here.
Science Goes Too Far
Look no further than all the jokes made about Nina Tucker for proof that the Fullmetal Alchemist fandom needs to burn in hell. The tragedy of Nina Tucker is among the most affecting in anime. Here’s the basic story: Nina’s dad was working on creating chimeras (combining two creatures into one with alchemy). Eventually, he decided to use his adorable four year old daughter, Nina, and her dog as test subject. They ended up being turned in a sad, lurching creature in constant pain who said “da-ddy”. The protagonist was tipped off to the fact this creature was the little girl he knew when she called him “big brother”. There was no way to fix Nina, much to despair of the main characters, and she was later killed.
Almost everyone was horrified by this moment, and many cried. But fandom deals with its pain through laughter, which is why you’ll find jokes about Nina and her horrible father everywhere.
From here.
Another common trend in Fullmetal Alchemist fandom is making fun of how the protagonist lost two of his limbs in an (unsuccessful) effort to bring his mother back to life and (successful) effort to bind his brother’s soul to a suit of armor.
Get in the ding-dong robot, Shinji
Shinji Ikari, the protagonist of Neon Genesis Evangelion, was famously reluctant to pilot his giant robot. His dad, Gendo, is famously a huge asshole. These two concepts combined when fans decided to write Gendo as saying “get in the fucking robot, Shinji”. There have been t-shirts, and there was even a video with the episode title “Neon Genesis Episode 12: “She said, I know your dad’s a dick but get in the fucking robot”.
Ironically, in the most recent Evangelion movie, Shinji actually really desperately wanted to pilot his robot, but nobody would let him. Kid just can’t win.
Congratulations!
Since Neon Genesis Evangelion is such a grim show, its fandom takes it’s laughs wherever they can find them. That may be why there’s so many memes.
The animators ran out of budget in the last episodes of the famous show, so viewers got to enjoy watching the characters basically sit around and try to work out their numerous mental issues in a weird surrealist way. When Shinji finally came to the conclusion that he wanted to live, he suddenly found himself surrounded by the other characters, who clapped in unison and endlessly told him “congratulations” one by one.
The anime ended with CONGRATULATIONS being written in big text, presumably to show admiration that the viewer sat through such a weird thing. This sort of bizarre ending became known as a “Gainax ending”, after the studio that made Eva. You can see it here.
Of course, the moment was very easy to parody, and people began putting “congratulations” on everything. It has an entry in the urban dictionary and everything.
From here.
The meme has transcended fandom as well. Recently, Steven Universe seems to have parodied the famous scene. You can see it here.
Nice Boat
The final episode of anime School Days included a scene of axe murder. The day before the episode was supposed to air, a real axe murder happened in Kyoto. So the episode was pulled that day and replacing it instead was….20 minutes of peaceful, live action scenery while string music played in the background. Someone online happened to comment “nice boat” about a ferry shown in the footage, and a meme was born. Tribute videos were made to the boat and it became a pastime for anime fans to rickroll each other with the boat footage. You can see it here.
Screencap from Magical Heart Kokoro-chan.
The meme got so big that the creator of School Days ended up referencing it, naming their convention booth “Nice Boat”. An anime called Magical Heart Kokoro-chan referenced the meme in an episode by labeling a life raft floating in a river of blood "nice boat". A creator also posted footage of a sailboat on his twitter when his anime Haruhi-chan failed to air on time.
Screencap from School Days
The most ironic thing of all would be the fact the actual final episode ended up concluding with one of the characters on a nice boat, though she was holding the severed head of another character at the time.
I’ll take a potato chip…AND EAT IT!
Death Note is an anime that often took itself too seriously with hilarious results, and the potato chip scene is the ultimate example of this. While doing evil junk, the protagonist Light Yagami made an attempt to appear normal to the people surveiling him, maniacally inner monologuing the whole time about how those FOOLS have no IDEA what he’s really doing.
This culminated when he, backed by dramatic music, declared he’d take a potato chip and EAT IT before doing exactly that in sparkly slow motion. You can see it here.
As you can imagine, the overwrought moment was very popular, inspiring a lot of youtube poops. parodies and images.
From here.
Being Meguca is Suffering
This meme started from a 4-chan thread about the popular anime Madoka Magica. Users took badly animated frames of the series and retold it in a funny way, with names intentionally misspelled to match the bad drawings, calling it “Meduka Meguka”. In a parody of the relentless torment the magical girls in the series go through, “being meguca is suffering” became a catchphrase.
From here.