Aside from age-inappropriate or socially-controversial tags, I wouldn’t recommend otaku culture and others that require prior knowledge to get the jokes or the story.
Mushoku Tensei, definitely gonna traumatize them one way or another
boku no pico
Steins Gate
- it’s a long-burn, might give the wrong impression of it being boring
- it will break their heart
That’s a tricky one. I think most anime stands on it’s own and doesn’t need you to watch the other ones.
Thinking back though; I didn’t like Cowboy Bebop or Evangelion the first time I watched them ages ago, but I think that might just be because I’m older now and appreciate the more complicated and subtle stories.
Actually, I just thought of one. If you watch “Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid” before you’ve developed a strong “anime weirdness” filter and tolerance, you will definitely not enjoy it or find it funny.
edit.: Strike all that. It’s too early, and my reading comprehension wasn’t turned on yet. Explains at least why all the recommendations were especially shit.
I consider Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day the perfect beginner anime for a couple of reasons:short - with only 11 episodes it’s not a huge time investment (compared to multi-cour shows or mammoths with hundreds or thousands of episodes)universal - the concepts of the show are universal to every gender and culture. And you don’t need to know or learn any Japan-specific terminology to immediately understand the plot (ie. chuunibyou, shinigami, yokai, etc.).everyday people - the show has normal people who are thrown into an uncommon situation, which makes it easy to empathize with the characters.likeable characters - self-explanatory.believable - the show is juuust outside the norm. Enough to be interesting but not so far-fetched that every little thing is a new concept watchers have to wrap their heads around.instant hook - the show’s hook is near-instant. No “it gets good after 10 episodes” or “once the X arc starts in episode 180 it’s really great”.
Eminence in Shadow. If you are not aware of chuunibyou, you’ll think it’s meant to be taken seriously.
That parody Fate series. Hell, I’ve seen a bunch of Fate, and it still didn’t make sense to me.
Inuyashiki. That isn’t a typo — I’m not talking about the canine ninja dude, I’m talking about the old man and the young man who get replaced with killer androids. That second episode…
Awww I loved that show. What happened in the second episode, was that when the killing spree starts?
FLCL.
And if movies also count “Grave Of the Fireflies”.
Making one of my friends sit through FLCL when I’d already seen it and they hadn’t was one of the more entertaining experiences I’ve had watching anime, though.
It’s quite something when “alien on a Vespa scooter smacks a kid upside the head with an electric guitar so hard that giant robots start growing out of his forehead” is just the setup, the teaser for a series.
Serial experiment lain maybe? Seems like a bit “much” to hand someone new
That, I feel, is entirely subjective. Like, Lain might experiment with the medium and not be good for a kid, I imagine an adult with a love of sci-fi or niche films might find it much more tasty than a typical battle shounen.
Certainly Gintama. Several of the main characters are parodies of actual Japanese historical figures few westerners would recognize, and there are a ton of points where it plays off of everything from other influential anime that non-anime fans might at least be tangentially familiar with (Gundam for example) to classic rakugo stories that they definitely will have never heard of (Jugemu).
On the other hand, while a lot will go over your head you will also learn a lot. Watching Gintama was what set off my evolution from “boy who watches popular shounen” to “otaku who is in the know”. Well aging past being a teenager helped as well of course.
Horizon in the Middle of Nowhere.
Good luck having anyone you show it to to understand what the hell is happening. I don’t know what’s happening, but it constantly dumps more lore and literary references to Japanese and western history & folklore. It’s also very dialogue heavy. And the women are all drawn in a very specific way.
I watched two seasons hoping at some point I’d understand what the hell was going on, but I just got more confused. It apparently makes sense as a light novel? But the anime squeezed way too much into each episode.
Cuck porn
Team sport, then
Konosuba, Monogatari Series and Lucky Star.
Anything that relies heavily on familiarity of weeb culture or Japanese history.
Lucky star is a great intro imo
I’ve really liked the weeb-ass-shit scale for cases like this ever since I learned about it.
Three 1-10 scores:
- Weeb: the amount of familiarity one needs of Japanese culture or anime tropes
- Ass: the amount of T&A/panty shots/comedic groping/etc.
- Shit: an inverse quality scale
Can you rank some anime for me so I understand the scale better? I’m assuming the higher the score the less it should be considered?
Copy/pasting someone else’s scores both because I have trouble doing this exact thing and because the Venn diagram of my tastes to the average anime fan has nearly no overlap‡, hopefully it helps.
Ancient Magus Bride: 1/1/1. Can be enjoyed by people that don’t even know what anime is, barely any sexual content to speak of, extremely high production values.
Konosuba: 6/7/2. Requires a moderate amount of knowledge of anime tropes, specifically the isekai genre and JRPG tropes it’s lampooning. Contains an above average amount of sexual content, though it is not the focus and is generally reserved for comedy rather than genuine fanservice. Generally high production values and is very enjoyable.
Non Non Biyori: 3/0/2. Requires a surface-level knowledge of Japanese culture, but nothing too deep. Contains absolutely no sexual content whatsoever and could be shown to your grandma. High production values for a “girls doing things” show.
‡as a for instance, I practically loathe Konosuba and yet here it’s rated at a 2 on the shit scale
This is perfect thank you, so SAO would be something like 5/8/8 (an argument could be made for 9s in both the last categories) and Horimiya would be something like 3/1/1 as far as I’m concerned. Gotta incorporate that scale into a review site in a way that it averages out everyone’s rankings across all three categories. I also only watched one episode of Konosuba.
I love it, that’s hilarious.
Funnily enough, my first two animes were Lucky Star and KonoSuba!
I didn’t realize at the time that KonoSuba is supposed to be a deconstruction/parody of the isekai genre. Didn’t make it any less enjoyable, but now that I’m aware of all the isekai tropes, it becomes a whole lot funnier.
I would definitely put Evangelion on that list, especially if you have no familiarity with mecha.
I agree. I watched it when I was a newbie and didn’t understand what the point was at all. But I’m happy that I was able to understand Eva memes after a while.
Eva was legit one of the first anime I watched.
eva can absolutely power through on vibes alone if you’re depressed enough
Komi-san. The characters are all exaggerated parodies that will go over their head if they don’t know the tropes being lampooned. And also the fact that the show is only good when one particular character is not onscreen, and you have to build up a heavy tolerance to Anime Bullshit to be willing to put up with this stain on an otherwise great show.
