What Anime Made Your Jaw Drop?

Anime is a wonderful medium, a place to tell stories that are totally different from what are common in mainstream media, where characters can find themselves transported to magical isekai universes, where touching stories of love between non-traditional characters can be expressed, where animation isn’t required to conform to “family values” as it was back in the 1980s.

There are also plenty of moments where anime shocks us so completely that our jaws drop to the floor. Recently we asked our Twitter followers “what anime made your jaw drop?” and here are some of the answers we got…

• That first anime bath scene when a female characters shows up nude. For many it was Ranma 1/2, though my first anime shower scene was the Macross 1984 Do You Remember Love scene.
• Gakkou Gurashi, aka School Live! When Nitroplus makes an anime about cute kids living in their school, there’s no chance it will turn out to be about a zombie apocalypse, right? Right?
• That famous line from Kokoro Connect.
• The exquisite ecchiness of Golden Boy. Pretty much every moment of it.
• That one episode of Madoka Magica. You know the one.
• As an experienced anime-watcher, I thought I could take a few dark twists, but Elfin Lied — an anime about engineered humans who have invisible appendages called vectors that can decapitate people at will — was so intense I had to take a break partway through.
• The episode of Code Geass where Lelouche accidentally uses his powers to program Euphy to kill all the Japanese in Britania-occupied Japan. My jaw stayed open for days.
• The School Days anime ending was a shocker, which traumatized fans and, I’m convinced, ushered in the current general distaste for the NTR genre. Of course, the game (which we publish) is much different, not nearly as dark.
• The first viewing of Evangelion, when you learn that the Evas contains the souls of the mothers of every major characters.
• Episode 1 of Goblin Slayer, especially if you didn’t know what to expect going in.
• And so many other examples…

So what anime made your jaw drop first? Tell us on Twitter!

We’re having tons of fun meeting our customers at Anime Expo, and hope everyone who’s at the show will stop by our booth and say hi! But we know that not everyone is lucky enough to be in attendance, and so we’re having a great sale this weekend, giving you $10 off all orders of $50 or more! You can get in-stock figures, naughty products, or browse the new J18 products and make a big order! No code to enter either…