Misconceptions about anime in general or specific titles that continue to spread despite everything

Chainsaw Man is "dark and edgy" is a good example.

School rooftops are accessible to students, but they are usually locked and off limits.

@Phosphophyllita

Is it?
Cause it's both, you know xD

@Merve2Love there's nothing particularly 'dark' in chainsaw man

@mshfqtny

Well, I don't know what YOU are used to, when watching Anime...
But... here's a list of stuff that I'd consider "darker" than your usual Shonen:


- An adolescent boy selling his ballbag to the Yakuza.
- The Bat Devil eating "Childrin", "Virgins" and "pregnant Woman" as his favorite Meal.
- Powers backstory - decapitating animals and drinking their blood.
- More corpse eating.
- That scene where Makima gets Shot in the back of the head, on a train, as if this was a Tarantino Movie.
- Every time the Katana Man is slicing or shooting someone up.
- Makima at the Shrine, using her ability that turns human characters into exploding Blood-Bombs.
- Himenos Death. Aka a demon literally dismembering every part of her one by one, till she vanishes.
- Kishibe strangeling our Teenage MC's on a graveyard.
- Makima collecting and presenting the eyes of the Yakuzas "Wifes" "Girlfriends" and "Children" as a Threat.
- Episode 12 -> Killing, eating Zombies. involuntary suicide-scene.

These are scenes I just remember off the top of my head. Im probably missing some.
Let's just add that each and every Episode there are tons of blood, organs and limbs flying around, as a bonus.

You're wrong, my boy.
Regardless of how hardcore you are or how much more dark Anime can/should get, in your opinion.
-> Chainsaw Man is pretty damn dark and some would say edgy. Especially in comparison to your average Shonen-Show.

@Merve2Love 1. Being gory and being dark is not exactly the same thing

2. One thing being darker compared to other thing does not equal to that thing being dark. For example doraemon is more mature than dora the explorer. It does not mean doraemon is a mature series.

@mshfqtny

1. Yeah, I think you're right
And I think if offered scenes that aren't gory, but are dark.

2. Following that logic: Beeing mature and beeing dark also are not the same thing, am I right?
If Chainsa Man isn't dark, okay. Then no series really is. If comparisons don't matter ....then alright. Nothings dark, ever. These are cartoons.

@Phosphophyllita

Is it?
Cause it's both, you know xD

@Merve2Love the 'mature' thing was just an example to prove my point. I can edit that sentence and say "doraemon is darkar than dora the explorer. That does not mean doraemon is dark".

Also berserk is still dark if chainsaw man isn't categorised as dark. (I'm using berserk as example cause that's one of the most popular and the least refutable option)

@Merve2Love agreed, though i'd say its more on the edgy side

"You need to be fluent in Japanese to be able to enjoy it raw"

It's said that about 80% of communication is non-verbal, and this is also true in anime. Even with a rudimentary understanding of the language, you can infer what is being said by observing the facial expressions, gestures, the tone in their voice and also by observing cause and effect. Heck, you could probably replace all the words in the dialogue with "a" and still have a reasonable idea of what the characters are likely talking about. Of course, the more you know about the language, the more accurate you'd be in your inference.
On one hand, this is great if you just want to enjoy anime. On the other hand, if you want to gauge your knowledge, anime isn't a good way precisely because of this.

The conflation of target demographic and genre seem to be very common, especially among more casual fans and the general public. Many people think that Shonen and Shoujo are genres when in fact they just refer to the target demographic these series market themselves to. There also tends to be a conflation with these demographics pretty much usually being only one kind of genre. Most people assume that shoujo is only romance for example when that is clearly not the case. Banana Fish for example is an Action series that is also a shoujo. There's also plenty of romance that ISN'T shoujo such as Nisekoi and 100 Girlfriends. Sure, there generally tend to be genres that are popular in certain demographics with romance and drama being popular in shoujo and josei while action and adventure are popular in shounen and seinen, but there are plenty of series that still fall under these demographics but aren't the genres that people tend to associate most with them. Not every shonen is action, not every shoujo is romance, not every josei is erotica for moms, and not every seinen is super ultra dark violent action. There's way more under the surface than we tend to believe.

For more specific things, Dragon Ball is a bit of a misinformation nightmare. The old FUNimation dub has ingrained so many misconceptions into the fandom as the original dub was really bad and made a lot of changes. Stuff like the Arcosians, Goku's personality and motivations for his actions, Super Saiyan coming as a result of a "Need not a desire", and even how certain techniques work were just completely inaccurate to the Japanese version, sometimes just being made up for completely no reason. Things get a lot worse when you also have stuff like the Dragon Ball wiki on Fandom being full of inaccurate information, Anime filler and extended fight scenes creating issues with continuity, localization inaccuracies in the official Viz Translation of the manga adding confusion as to the original intent of the source material, and inconsistent terminology between the Dub, Subtitles, Video Games, Manga, and original Japanese versions. It can genuinely be difficult to find accurate information on the series due to all these factors but there are some good YouTubers who have an almost encyclopedic knowledge on all this and can point you in the right direction. Geekdom101 is pretty decently known in the DB fandom for his amount of research and his debunking of common misconceptions and myths in the fandom. MistareFusion is also pretty great as their Dragon Ball Dissection video series analyzes the original Japanese manga in great detail which can help break down some of the original intent for Western fans, while also learning some fun facts about the series.

I'd say another more specific thing would be how many people think that the Yu-Gi-Oh franchise is a kids show, more specifically a show for kids around the age of 7 and up. While this may be true of the 4Kids English dubs, as well as the RUSH era of the series, this is not true of the source material. The original Yu-Gi-Oh manga is aimed at a teenage audience, being published in Shonen Jump in Japan, and the Japanese version of the show is of similar tone to the manga, only being slightly censored to abide by Japanese TV regulations. The Shadow Realm doesn't really exist in the Japanese version of the show, characters just die instead. It is well known a lot of the monster designs are more sexual and have religious iconography, and real weapons on them in Japan all of which were removed or toned down in the West. It also wasn't uncommon for plot threads to be completely dumbed down to remove mentions of death, violence, or many serious subject matters in all the dubs before RUSH, which led to the shows being much more child friendly on the surface and masking the original darker tones. Another misconception about the series would be that the entire franchise was just made to sell cards. While all the series from GX onwards definitely were, the original series was not. The Manga started out as just a general gaming manga with the Duel Monsters card game intended to be a one off in-universe equivalent to Magic the Gathering before never appearing again like the other games of the week from previous chapters. The card game however proved popular enough to return in the manga's Death-T arc (which a truncated adaptation of is used as the anime's first episode) before shifting to become the main focus of the series in Duelist Kingdom. The manga had actually gone on for 60 chapters before the card game became the main focus. The manga had in fact been going on for an entire year up to that point, and the actual OCG base set "Vol.1" didn't release until February 1999 which was over a year later.

@DreamingBeats
I could not enjoy raw anime at all back before I understood it.

@OmegaMilo Do you mean the plot or the characters? cause none of the csm characters are edgy in my opinion

One thing that came up in another thread is how many people think the mecha genre is about big robots fighting, when in reality the genre is almost always about visualizing some other conflict the characters are facing as a battle of giant robots (subtle difference there).

Another one I would just like to suggest is many people think Jojo is just about flashy fights and nothing has to make sense, and yeah there's definitely a lot of that too, but I think one pervasive element casuals fans might overlook is the abundance of fate as a narrative device in JOJO. Some notable examples include Bucciarati's character arc and the intertwining of the Joestar and Brando families, but there are many more small and big. Almost every part has some sort of aspect of fate but I rarely if ever hear people talk about it.

Other than that while its a bit off topic I have to mention that many anime fans just missuse a whole bunch of words. Weeb is taken to mean anime fan (it's actually an insult that is only tangentially related to anime), doujin is synonymous with erodoujin (believe it or not doujin can be non-erotic, it just means self-published work, or literally "same person"), NTR is conflated with cuckoldry (I can see how you would make the connection but these are not the same) etc.

Anime that are labelled as a deconstruction such as Madoka Magica.