There is an increasing amount of Anime and manga available, and certainly some can be extremely inappropriate for certain ages. So we’re trying to start a database of quick and easy descriptions of them to help parents figure out what is appropriate for which ages.
“Fan Service” is the term often used to refer to superfluous sexual animation, such as nude shots, unnatural breast jiggling, exceedingly skimpy outfits, and strange point of view shots that just barely escape being pornographic.
Blue Exorcist
Rin and Yukio are twin sons of a fun, light-hearted holy man who are about to discover a dark secret–they are the sons of Satan ad their adoptive father is an exorcist who tries to protect humans from demons. Rin inherited all the powers, including a wicked temper. When Satan kills their foster dad Rin enrolls in exorcist school seeking vengeance. Surprisingly Yukio is already an adept exorcist, and a teacher at the school. Both seek to use their knowledge (and powers) to help the people they care for.
Warnings for this one are for language (yes, there is cursing), violence, and creepiness. These are demons after all, so expect some eyes bleeding and creepy faces on things/weird shadows. Fan service and general sexual content is very slim. There is one scantily clad character, but there’s very little fan service about it and the skimpy clothes are part of her character building. Female characters are just as strong and capable as the male characters and do the saving as often as everyone else. Blue Exorcist is one of my favorites so far. I definitely recommend it for an older teen audience.
Castlevania
Like vampires and demons and snark? Then this is an anime for you. Inspired by the Castlevania video game franchise, this series follows Vlad Dracula and his vampires as they try to exterminate the human race and Trevor Belmont, Alucard Dracula, and magician Sypha Belnades as they try to stop the genocide.
Castlevania contains violence and foul language, as well as mature themes such as The Inquisition, theocracies, and torture. This anime is excellent, but best for older teens and adults.
Death Note
Brilliant high schooler Light Yagami discovers the lost notebook of shinigami (death god) Ryuk, a book which has the power to kill anyone whose name is written inside. Light decides to use his new gift to “cleanse the world of evil” by killing off the world’s criminals. A secretive detective, L, appears from the shadows to stop Light, even if his cause appears good. Killing, L says, is wrong no matter who the target is. And so begins 36 episodes of hyper-intellectual back and forth.
Despite the dark and gory themes, most of the deaths are bloodless heart attacks, or off screen. There is very little gore, but they are tense situations which get creepier the more you think about them. The content warning comes more from Light, who seems like a nice, smart, hardworking teen, but who quickly becomes a sociopathic megalomaniac with a heavy dose of narcissism. Not a lot of fan service in this one, but there aren’t any real heroes either.
PG-13 rating
*Not to be confused with the live-action Death Note movie. It is based on this anime, but it absolutely included violent and gory death scenes.
The Devil is a Part Timer!
The title of this one captures a lot. The Devil flees his world during a siege by the good guys and ends up with his best general nearly powerless and in modern Japan. They have to acquire jobs, an apartment, and pay their bills like normal people. But they aren’t normal, and they aren’t the only refugees. So now the Devil, his general, and a half angel warrioress have to battle corrupt priests, demons, traffic, and other fast food joints while trying to make ends meet and find a way home.
This is an amazing anime with an interesting, but not unique premise and magic system. Contains violence, language, and lots of dating/relationship/romance talk.
Inyuasha
Inuyasha is one of the essential anime series. It certainly is the one that got me into the genre. Inuyasha is about a teenage girl, Kagome, who discovers she’s the reincarnation of a powerful priestess when a demon attacks her ad she falls through an old well at a shrine and ends up in the past. Instinct leads her to find the titular character, a half dog demon-half human, who loved Kagome’s past self (with tragic consequences) and is destined to protect her. When Kagome accidentally shatters a powerful magical gem, she and Inuyasha must hunt the pieces down, collecting an engaging, motley crew of cursed, charming, and tragedy-afflicted sidekicks. Except, far from secondary characters, Shippo, Miroku, and Sango’s stories are tightly entwined with Inuyasha and Kagome’s own.
While Inuyasha does face some tragedy (demonic control, murder, monsters in human form, etc) and romance, the graphicness remains mild, and the romance is ultimately on the sweet, crushy type. Inuyasha himself is quite bratty (and Miroku is a lech, but it is mostly implied, and the other characters call him on his behavior all the time), all the characters are undoubtedly heroic, good, supportive people. There’s even a range of demons, from relatively good demons, to beneficial nature spirits to monsters and plotting evil overlords.
I highly recommend this one for most audiences.
Note: There are bare, nippless breasts on a demon in the first few episodes, but there is no other noticeable fan service.
Kakegurui
In this exclusive school, the sons and daughters of Japan’s billionaires and politicians busy themselves, not with studying, but with gambling and manipulation. Everything here is some high stakes game, and, of course, everyone is cheating. When a new girl shows up, she, of course, disrupts the whole system with her erotic/neurotic addiction to the games, not just the money and power to be won by them.
Kakegurui is weirdly fascinating, but definitely not kid friendly. The addiction to gambling the characters portray is psychotic in level, and the repercussions are often sick, sometimes violent, and definitely abusive. For example in the second episode when our heroine loses all her fronted money, the winner offers to give her a second round, if she bets her fingernails in place of money. There is a lot of fan service in this one, implications of sexual slavery/bartering, abuse, and on screen (but not outright graphic) sexual content. Adults only.
Ouran High School Host Club
Ouran High School Host Club is a hilarious, tongue-in-cheek manga and anime about Haruhi Fujioka, a scholarship student at an exclusive (expensive) private school who runs into some trouble with the school host club (more or less, they guys are escorts, without actual sex, playing doting, perfect boyfriends to rich, teenaged girls.) The club forces Haruhi to join to repay a debt, only discovering after the fact that Haruhi is female.
This anime pokes fun at gender and genre stereotypes (going so far as to have a character actually call the characters and situations by their tropes–this is a flirty, reverse harem shojo, by the way) while also being charming on its own. There is spicy sexual talk and romance, but no real sexual content. Better for older kids (or at least those you don’t mind explaining “twincest” to) but definitely an enjoyable gem in the genre.
Side Note: Like a lot of anime there is a strange combination of acceptance and hurtful stereotypes. The biggest example of this is Haruhi’s father, who is trans. The characters, even the father himself, commonly misgenders himself (thus why I’ve done so here, because the character does use he/him pronouns, but presents as female) and refers to him as a “tranny”. However, he is intelligent, caring, protective, hard working and over all extremely supportive and the other characters also accept him and his presentation with respect and no judgement, and instead with sympathy for how others treat him. He is actually an excellent, if complicated, parental figure to all of the host club, and when there is ridiculing of him it is not about his gender presentation, or even behaviors linked to gender roles, and instead it is about him getting emotional or making mistakes. This is one of the most accepting portrayals of a trans woman I’ve seen, as the character isn’t cliche or a cardboard cutout, but instead is a fully realized character who also happens to be trans.
Contains: sexual teasing/talk including frank use of tropes like twincest/incest, sugar daddy/baby, and forbidden love, prominent transgenger character, heavily implied same sex relationships
The Seven Deadly Sins
Ten years ago a merry band of criminals slaughtered a group of Holy Knights, sworn to protect the realm, before vanishing. Now things aren’t adding up for Elizabeth, one of the kingdom’s princess’s who narrowly escapes when the Holy Knights imprisons her family and takes over the capital. So she sets off to find the Sins, because the enemy of her enemy might be her friend. The Sins are not as they seem, but neither are the Knights.
The Seven Deadly Sins is fairly standard anime fare. An increasingly powerful band of friends/family battle a progressively more impressive, and sinister, set of warrior-mages. The feudal European setting is fun. There is some troubling fan service. Captain Meliodas gropes and sexually assaults Elizabeth at every opportunity. Ban is immortal, so of course he suffer from a variety of bloody wounds. But other than that language and violence content is pretty cartoony and tame. PG rating, with the special nod to the creepy, gropey relationship between Elizabeth and Meliodas.
Soul Eater
The visuals are creepy in this anime about a group of kids in a school training people with special abilities to fight demons that prey on humanity. Some people are weapons (they become sentient weapons) and some are meisters (who wield the weapons). The school is founded by Lord Death, who got tired of losing humans to the demons. There is a lot of darker imagery (insanity, mental torture, depressing back stories since all these kids have been touch by darkness), the visuals are unsettling at times, and there is some sexy content (like Blair, a cat with so much magic she can become human shaped and hates clothes, and Maka’s dad is a blatant womanizer) but otherwise is appropriate for a PG-13 level audience.
See our episode reviews here.
Vampire Knight
Strongly reminiscent of the Blue Bloods series by Melissa de la Cruz, this series centers on a school (run by a vampire hunter) where humans and vampires are trying to forge a peaceful future together. There’s lots of dramatic reveals, threats, and some blood drinking, but the fan service and even violence is kept to a minimum. While there is blood and the rare fight scene, mostly this anime is a teen vampire romance drama.