Embarrassment is relative. Some secrets are dangerous and potentially harmful while others are more about maintaining a facade. For one anime hero, a heavy metal persona is something you keep from the neighbors. For others, it’s a past history of violence that interferes with godly ambitions.
In some stories, one secret spawns another - a clandestine deal to keep the secret, secret. That’s often where the real story begins. Here’s a look at heroes and the secrets they keep.
10 Soichi Negishi Is Embarrassed By His Death Metal Persona (Detroit Metal City)
Soichi Negishi is a young musician who dreams of being a pop singer. But his not-so-great original songs don’t pay the bills. He adopts a second, secret persona of Johannes Krauser II, lead singer and guitarist of a death metal band called Detroit Metal City.
As the outrageous frontman, rumors swirl that he's killed his parents, and worse. A lot of the laughs in this black comedy come from his attempts to switch back and forth between his two contrasting personas and the humiliating fact that Krauser is so successful while the pop songs he loves to perform go nowhere.
9 Haruka Nogizaka Is Embarrassed By Her Love Of Anime And Manga (Haruka Nogizaka's Secret)
Beautiful and talented, Haruka Nogizaka is the most popular student in the Hakujo Academy. Her embarrassing secret is that she’s an otaku - something that can put a dent in her reputation as a social star in her prestigious school.
An otaku is seen as someone anti-social and unpopular. Yuuto Ayase discovers her secret by accident in the library one day, and when he agrees to keep it for her, it marks the beginning of an unlikely friendship that draws Yuuto out of his shell.
8 Kuroe Akaishi Has To Avoid Touching People As An Involuntary Shapeshifter (Kaiju Girl Caramelise)
Kuroe Akaishi looks like an ordinary girl on the outside, but she has a very rare condition called Involuntary Shapeshifting. Her classmates only know she has a mysterious illness, and call her Psycho-tan at school, where she's a loner.
When Arata, a popular boy at school, asks her out, she has to avoid touching him all night so that she doesn't trigger an involuntary transformation. It gets worse - in the end, he finds out she is a kaiju with both a human and monster form.
7 Takao Kasuga Impulsive Act Causes Big Problems (The Flowers of Evil)
Takao Kasuga goes back to school one day to retrieve his favorite book - Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (or The Flowers of Evil). He stumbles across gym clothes left by Nanako Saeki, the girl he's been nursing a huge crush on.
In a stupid impulse, he steals the gym clothes and brings them home. The next day, school is buzzing with gossip - who's the weirdo stealing clothes? Unluckily, Sawa Nakamura knows all about his humiliating secret and forces him into a contract to keep her silent.
6 In Kenji Harima’s World, His Manga Art Is A Secret (School Rumble)
Kenji Harima is an ex-delinquent, but his reputation is still pretty rough around the edges. He gets into a lot of fights, and it's usually about his crush, Tenma. He starts drawing manga, and while the art itself becomes more and more public as he gains success, he keeps his work secret from everyone in his private life except Tenma’s sister Yakumo. It's a combination of a little embarrassment and vulnerability, and a lack of trust in anyone other than her that leads him to keep it undercover.
5 Koro-Sensei Didn't Actually Blow Up Anything (Assassination Classroom)
Koro-sensei is a monster with tentacles and a smiley face in Assassination Classroom. He tells everyone that he’s blown up the moon, and he’ll destroy Earth in a year unless the plucky middle schoolers he teaches can stop him.
His secret is that he didn’t blow anything up and the moon was an unrelated accident. If they knew the truth, that he only wanted to help the students of class 3-E at Kunugigaoka Junior High in the memory of the woman he loved, it would not only be embarrassing, he’d lose the teaching gig.
4 Yato Would Like Everyone To Forget His Past As A God Of War (Noragami)
Yato hopes that one day, he’ll have his own following of worshippers on Noragami. He tells everyone he’s a Delivery God and does odd jobs on the cheap. His big secret is that his former life was spent as a god of war and calamity.
He lived up to his role with relish and wreaked havoc and destruction on humanity as much as he was able. Nowadays, he’s walking a different path, and he’d prefer that his violent and destructive past stayed just that - hidden in the past.
3 All Might Can't Maintain His Own Strength (My Hero Academia)
All Might is a superhero, also called the Symbol of Peace, on My Hero Academia. Like all true superheroes, he spends his time saving people and vanquishing villains. But, as a result of a previous injury, All Might can only maintain his beefed-up superhero form for about an hour.
It’s not only embarrassing for the superhero to be seen in his actual thin and unathletic body, it could be dangerous as villains wouldn't be afraid of him any longer. To keep it from his students, he’s sometimes forced to duck his teaching duties and hide in the principal’s office.
2 Arata Kaizaki Is No Student - He’s An Adult Getting A Second Chance (ReLIFE)
Arata Kaizaki’s life is dismal, especially after a work accident. He’s 27 and barely scraping by working part-time at a convenience store. When he’s offered the chance to go back and relive one year of high school by the ReLIFE Research Institute, he grabs it.
Back at Aoba High School, the one stipulation is that he can’t tell anyone about the experiment, or it’s over. The thing is, reliving high school is as embarrassing as it gets.
1 Misaki Ayuzawa Can’t Tell Her Family She Works At A Maid Cafe (Kaichou Wa Maid-sama!)
Misaki Ayuzawa is Class President in Kaichou Wa Maid-sama!, and she takes her duties very seriously, especially when it comes to school safety. She wants to improve the atmosphere for herself and other female students, and she’s not afraid to get physical when confronting lewd classmates.
Misaki comes from a poor family, and she works at a maid café dressed like a sexy French maid to help pay the bills. Naturally, those classmates would make her life miserable if they found out her secret... until one day, someone does.