Why Do Super Old Characters Physically Resemble Children?
[ranking: 1]
There are a surprising number of anime characters who don't look their age. While it's not always as drastic as a 40-year-old woman who looks like a young girl (sorry, Kinue), more mild examples can still be jarring. While this trope appears frequently in anime, there's no established explanation for it.
In some cases, the choice may be somewhat insidious. If a super young looking character is really an old person, it's less morally reprehensible sexualize them. Even if your eyes signal that something is predatory, official canon can step in and say "no, really, this character is an adult." Otherwise, it might just help to differentiate one character from another, and sometimes the discontinuity is explained in the plot.
Why Do Characters Have Such Huge Breasts?
[ranking: 7]
Anime characters often have unrealistically huge breasts, and for some reason, non-anime fans feel the need to question this. The reasoning is pretty simple: sex sells, and anime studios want to keep viewers interested.
However, breasts weren't always considered attractive in Japan. Prior to the 1940s, the focus was on their biological purpose, I.E. feeding babies. Things changed when World War II brought Japan into contact with the USA, a nation that was just starting to seriously sexualize breasts. The idea caught on, and now enormous boobs are a staple of fan service anime.
What's With All The Pink Flowers In Romance Anime?
[ranking: 14]
Cherry blossom trees, also known as sakura trees, appear so often in anime that it sometimes seems like other plants don't exist. In Japanese culture, these trees are a source of powerful symbolism, as their delicate blossoms ?? which appear in Japan at the start of spring ?? are associated with the fragility of both life and beauty.
Since their appearance coincides with the start of the Japanese school year, they're also associated with new beginnings. For these reasons, sakura trees are a common anime motif, especially in romantic dramas.
Why Do All The Characters Sound The Same?
[ranking: 12]
There are two reasons why it can sometimes be hard to distinguish between anime characters based on voice alone. The first is that, for English-speaking viewers who enjoy subbed anime, it's harder to pick up nuances in an unfamiliar language. Sure, it's possible to notice the differences between high and low voices, but it's much more difficult to pick up on the unique dialect of say, the Nagoya dialect and the Miyazaki dialect.
The second reason is that a lot characters actually do sound similar. Anime voice actors play numerous roles across all genres. Hiroshi Kamiya, for example, has lent his voice to close to 100 different characters. As for dubbed anime, it's rare to find a show that Vic Mignogna doesn't appear in. Of course, professional actors can vary how they sound depending on the project, but some similarity is inevitable.
What's With All The Absentee Parents?
[ranking: 6]
While orphaned kids are par for the course in Western media, anime handles the issue in a unique way that can seem baffling to those who aren't used to it. In anime, underage characters often live totally alone. One popular explanation is that their parents are dead. Even more common are characters whose parents are alive, but who live on their own anyway. This is usually explained by the parents getting a job far from home, or the kid attending a school in a neighboring town. While this does happen in Japan, it's not nearly as common as anime leads one to believe.
In real life, Japanese bureaucracy makes it pretty hard for new parents to actually adopt orphaned children, and kids with no parents typically live in orphanages or with relatives, not by themselves. However, this trope is fantastic for smoothing out plot holes, since normal parental limits can get in the way of fighting giant monsters or starting love nests with groups of alien cat girls.
Why Do Characters Always Scream Their Names And Moves?
[ranking: 5]
If you've seen Dragon Ball Z, Naruto, or basically any anime that involves fight scenes, then you've heard characters loudly announcing their moves. This happens so often that most anime fans don't even question it, but for non-fans, it can be a little strange. This oddity is actually a byproduct of adapting manga series into anime. When depicted in static, written form, it can be hard to tell who is attacking who, so shouted moves make it way easier to follow the action. This isn't as necessary in anime, but the tradition carried over anyway.
Characters also repeatedly announce their names, as well as the names of the people around them, to the point where it can seem absurd. This actually goes back to samurai culture, which emphasized individual, honorable battles. If one's opponent was renound, defeating them yielded more honor, so knowing exactly who you were fighting made a huge difference.
For this reason, duels often began with the duelists announcing themselves, and that tradition is lovingly recreated in many anime.
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