One staple of anime culture is how bizarre it tends to be. Basically every anime that is widely known has a very out-of-this-world plot, and that's what catches the attention of fans all over the world. Whether it is a story of a boy being rocketed from a race of tyrants (Dragon Ball), or a world where everyone is a ninja or pirate (Naruto and One Piece), people like anime with stories that are out of the ordinary.
This list will be going over the most confusing origin stories that characters have in anime or manga, because sometimes the best stories are the ones that are hardest to understand.
10 Mochizuki Touya
Mochizuki Touya is the protagonist from I'm In Another World With My Smartphone (that's a mouthful). The beginning of the series shows him getting struck down by a holy lightning bolt. When he died, he appeared before an almighty deity, who told him that the lightning was released into the world by mistake.
After apologizing countless times, this deity told him that he would revive him and send him to a new world and that he could have anything he wants in the new world. Touya only wanted to bring his smartphone with him, so the god attuned it to the new world and then enhanced his physiology so that it would be harder for him to die.
9 Ichiro Inuyashiki
Another protagonist, this time from Inuyashiki: The Last Hero, is Ichiro Inuyashiki. Inuyashiki is a 57-year-old man who looks older than he is. He was neglected by his wife and children, who viewed him as incapable of supporting them and being no more than an embarrassment.
Inuyashiki found out that he had stomach cancer and that he only had months to live. His family wouldn't listen to him, so he took his dog for a walk in the park and was killed by aliens passing by Earth. They recreated his body and made him a powerful android replica of himself so that he wouldn't be missed. He then went around Japan saving people and curing the masses.
8 Master Daruma
Master Daruma is a side character in the upcoming manga series Samurai 8, being a mentor to Hachimaru, the protagonist. He is a master samurai in a world where samurai are warriors chosen by Acala, the God of Samurai. Upon becoming a samurai, their body dies, being remade as cyborgs. Sounds familiar.
What sets him apart from the last entry is his method of finding students. He created an online multiplayer video game about his experiences as a samurai to teach kids across the galaxy, until he eventually would meet the top players. He also somehow lost his human form and became a cat, despite liking dogs more than cats.
7 Son Goku
Everyone knows about Goku at this point. With how far along the Dragon Ball series has progressed, the entirety of the original Dragon Ball could be said to be most of his origin story. He was a young boy rocketed to Earth from Planet Vegeta, a planet with warriors more monkey-like than humans who transform into giant apes when looking at a full moon.
He was sent to Earth to kill the people and take over the planet, but he hit his head and lost his memories and became a good guy. He was then trained by am old man who had been the greatest martial arts master for hundreds of years, he took down armies, took a rabbit to the moon, killed a big fish, fought some zombies and a ghost, found some orbs that summon a wish-granting dragon, traveled with shape-shifting animals... and this is just for starters, really.
6 Saitama
Saitama was a seemingly regular man in a world of heroes and villains and monsters. One-Punch Man is a world where, when someone desires something long enough, they will become it. Crablante, for example, became a crab-like man after only eating crab for a really long time. Many monsters came to be this way.
Saitama became the strongest man in the world. He did one hundred push-ups, one hundred squats, one hundred sit-ups, and ran ten kilometers everyday, until he became bald. That's how he did it. After that, he's been able to defeat anyone he's come across with but a punch. In simulations, it shows he still trains so much that he can one-punch himself from yesterday everyday.
5 Sasori
Naruto is a series filled with weird characters. While Sasori may not be weirder than, for example, Orochimaru, his origin surely is more peculiar. Like most Akatsuki members, Sasori is a powerful rogue ninja who has attained some form of immortality. He did this by becoming a living work of art.
When Sasori was a child, his parents died, and to preserve them, he turned them into working puppets. He became a master puppeteer, capable of wielding ten puppets at the same time from chakra extending from each of his fingers. To him, ten wasn't enough. He somehow turned himself into a puppet so he could open his body upon will and use his chakra within to wield a hundred puppets at a time.
4 Haruhara Haruko
Harukara Haruko is one of the main characters of FLCL, and she is an investigator of the Galactic Space Police Brotherhood. She is actually an insane and corrupt investigator looking for a powerful galactic space pirate that she fell in love with in the past named Atomsk, who can steal entire solar systems.
She crashed into the world on her yellow vespa and met Naota, who she runs over and hits in the head with her guitar that she wields as a weapon. She then began using his head as a wormhole to summon and create things, and she eventually taught him to wield a guitar, too, and to merge with robots.
3 Kagami Kouji
Kagami Kouji is the protagonist of the manga series Lv999 Villager. He was born into a post-apocalyptic version of Earth infested by demons, who create monsters as a by-product of their existence. People are born with roles and level up when they kill monsters or demons or other people.
There are a handful of roles, and the weakest one is the Villager. They rarely are able to level up, and the highest level Villager was level 30 before Kagami, who became level 999. The system of leveling shows that people level up based on defeating higher-leveled monsters, but the highest-leveled monsters in the world are level 500. How Kagami got to level 999 is a bit too complex to explain here, but it's all in the prologue.
2 Yuta Iridatsu
Yuta Iridatsu is the protagonist of the anime series called Punch Line, which is based around the concept of fan service. Yuta was in a bus-hijacking conundrum and as a result, had his spirit separated from his body, which, for some reason, would threaten to destroy the Earth with a meteor.
The catastrophe of the world is only conditional, however. It would only happen if Yuta saw a woman's underwear twice in a row. The first time he does it, it gives him a sudden burst of powes called "Über-fy." The second time, he goes unconscious with power, which sends a meteor to the Earth, which he has been known to have to travel to the past to prevent.
1 Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo
This should be no surprise. Bo-bobo is a 27-year-old man with a 24-karat gold afro who fights with his nosehair. But what is his origin? The most confusing thing about Bo-bobo is perhaps his reactive and retroactive history and physiology.
Sometimes he is a robot, sometimes a vampire, but always a Hair Citizen. His father is a giant hair follicle who sometimes abandons him, sometimes doesn't, but is always there in the end. Bo-bobo's brother is sometimes a smoker and a biker, sometimes a cat, and sometimes Bo-bobo is a good guy, sometimes a Hair Hunter, sometimes a vegan, and sometimes he loves hamburgers 100%, but he is always trying to help people in the end.