Nosebleeds in Anime
When you start to watch anime, you naturally encounter some concepts that may seem strange at first. Like those giant, emotion-filled eyes, the way a character will get a huge sweat drop on their head to show they're frustrated, or the strange phenomenon of sneezes being caused by people gossiping about you. As you watch, you learn some of the more subtle nuances, like the concepts of senpai and kohai I talked about last time, or the way certain characters will become enamored of someone of the same sex in an extremely dramatic and/or entertaining way without warning. Another odd concept that took me a while to figure out were the nosebleeds that happened whenever a character (usually male) suddenly sees a female in a provocative situation. The joke, which has its origins in gag manga from the 1960s like Dokonjo Gaeru and Inakappe Taisho, is a euphemism for blood flow to another region of the body entirely, and it's a fun way to express the concept on-screen. Today, the anime nosebleed has come to be a meme all by itself -- there are even anime/manga in which nosebleeds are a central part of the story.
What weird anime thing confused you at first?
The anime nosebleed took me a while to get used to.
posted by Peter in Japan at 8:33 PM
17 Comments:
Stylized swollen veins on the forehead when a character is angry. It took me several years to understand that it was a vein and not an odd drawn "x" ^^;
9:55 PM
I first saw the nose bleed in the 1999 Hiroyuki Nakano film "Samurai Fiction". I thought it was peculiar but I got it right away. Funny movie by the way.
10:24 PM
Kenshin, yes, my daughter saw a model of a WWII German plane and said, "This plane looks angry" because it looked to her like those veins. It was so cute.
I remember watching Project A-Ko and being unable to accept that B-Ko could be sexually lusting after C-Ko. I was sure they could never be that open about sex, could they? I thought for sure it was a mis-translation.
11:33 PM
Well, I had been watching anime since the late 90's, and had become part of the anime internet culture in late 2001(yes, I was uebu-less up untill the 21st century.)following sites like Anime News Network, Anipike, abcb etc. Anyway, I had read articles galore on cliches' in anime/manga subculture and had read the phrase "SD"(super-deformed)countless times and seen it in anime hundreds of times over. But, it wasn't untill like two months ago I actually put them together and said "oh, so that's what SD is:when the characters get really chibi, usually when they're being dragged away".
Sorry for the length of that^_^
11:36 AM
For me one of the strangest things was the falling-washbasin-landing-on-someone's-head joke.
Oh, and the Paper Fan of Doom.
3:01 PM
Haha, forgot about the wash bin. One I hate is, when any anime character in an Adachi Mitsuri sleeps, they will have a runny nose bubble. Also I dislike Super Big Anime Lips.
6:53 PM
A couple of times in anime, I've seen a character's forehead suddenly turn blue for a moment. Usually it was in the context where they either felt embarrassed or mortified. Peter, is that what it means, and do you know the cultural origins of this?
11:30 PM
Not sure about that one, it just means "so embarrassed a shadow has fallen over me" or something ^_^
11:52 PM
Sweatdrops and tentacle rape.
8:04 AM
I never really got the whole sneezing when somebody's gossiping about you thing...
8:27 AM
I never really got the whole sneezing when somebody's gossiping about you thing...
8:27 AM
The sneezing thing isn't only anime, but a Japanese saying or something like that.
Female nosebleed is my favorite! (Although much more rare than male). Like in FLCL where the chicks in the space station see Naota swing the bat and all of them get nosebleeds. ROFLMAO xD
8:48 AM
Actually in Western folk tales, we have our ears burning when we're being talked about (as in they get red and warm, not burst into flame).
Sneezing when being talked about it hardly all that different.
8:58 AM
Super deformed. I still find it jarring when used in the middle of a scene.
9:19 AM
The thing that still gets to me if I think about it too much is the characters who *always* have their eyes closed; you know, in that smiling sort of way? Sometimes I foolishly wonder how they manage to see anything.
9:40 AM
Tsukikage, that is sometimes done to indicate that the person is Chinese, but maybe I'm misunderstanding that tone. See a ton of information on this here.
11:31 AM
Definitely either the oversized sweat drop on their head or the crow that flies a dotted line behind them.
6:53 PM
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