Categories:Elements:Action

Action anime usually involve a fairly straightforward story of good guys versus bad guys, where most disputes are resolved by using physical force. It often contains alot of shooting, explosions and fighting.

Examples: Rurouni Kenshin: Meiji Kenkaku Romantan, Koukaku Kidoutai STAND ALONE COMPLEX

Subcategories

Adventure

Adventures are exciting stories, with new experiences or exotic locales. Adventures are designed to provide an action-filled, energetic experience for the viewer. Rather than the predominant emphasis on violence and fighting that is found in pure action anime, however, the viewer of adventures can live vicariously through the travels, conquests, explorations, creation of empires, struggles and situations that confront the main characters, actual historical figures or protagonists. Under the category of adventures, we can include traditional swashbucklers, serialized films, and historical spectacles, searches or expeditions for lost continents, "jungle" and "desert" epics, treasure hunts and quests, disaster films, and heroic journeys or searches for the unknown. Adventure films are often set in an historical period, and may include adapted stories of historical or literary adventure heroes, kings, battles, rebellion, or piracy.

Examples: .hack//SIGN, Hunter X Hunter

Guns

Entries with this keyword should contain the use of firearms (that are small enough to be handled by one or two persons).

Examples: Grenadier: Hohoemi no Senshi, Gungrave

Martial Arts

Characterized by extensive fighting scenes employing various types of martial arts, meaning systems of codified practices and traditions of training for combat.

Examples: Shen Diao Xia Lu, Mutsu Enmei Ryuu Gaiden: Shura no Toki

Military

The anime concerns an organised armed force, and its members. Said body should have both the equipment and hierarchy found in military groups, and should ideally be actively utilising their power against an opponent. Characters are either employed as professional soldiers or enlisted on a volunteer basis, for ideological reasons.

Note: Just because the anime contains a bunch of soldiers or a tank, unless that is actually what the anime is about, you might not want to add this genre.

Examples: Kenpuu Denki Berserk, Zipang

Airforce

Anime with this category, like anime with Military as category concerns an organised armed force, but with the difference that they should primarily conduct aerial warfare.

Note: Just because the anime contains a bunch of planes or similar, unless the anime is actually about a fighting airforce, you might not want to add this genre.

Examples: Sentou Yousei Yukikaze, Last Exile

Navy

As with Airforce and Military, this category is for anime that concerns an organised armed force, but it conduct naval or space warfare.

Note: Just because the anime contains warships, submarines or spaceships, unless it is actually about those armed forces, you might not want to add this genre.

Examples: Tactical Roar, Ao no 6-gou

Sports

Sports anime revolves around a recreational physical activity or skill. In addition they often adhere to certain genre conventions, the emphasis on training and practice in preparation for competition, characters desire for self improvement, and pursuit of a specific goal.

The different subcategories of sports should be used when the anime specifically is about one of those activities:

Baseball

Baseball is like a complicated version of Rounders. It involves hitting a ball with a stick, then running around a field. Big in the US, and like many things the Japanese took it up eagerly to avoid being nuked for a third time.

Examples: Touch, Major

Basketball

Basketball is Netball for men, the real game that encourages dribbling and other such uncouth behaviour that was sanitised out of the ladies' version. However, it is itself woosy compared to Ulama, as the losing side are seldom publicly sacrificed.

Examples: Slam Dunk, I'll/CKBC

Combat

Involves a violent conflict whose goal is to establish dominance over an opponent.

Examples: Ueki no Housoku, Ayane-chan High Kick

Boxing

Boxing involves puching someone until their brains fall out, then challenging them to a rematch. Many boxers survive successfully for years with no central nervous system at all, to the bafflement of medical science.

Examples: Ashita no Joe, Hajime no Ippo

Judo

Judo is a frightening sport, in that it's not always the biggest strongest person that wins. Being thrown flat on your back and forced to sumbit by girl who's shorter and younger that you is certainly a humbling experience.

Examples: Yawara!, Kurenai Sanshiro

Driving

Driving involves driving in a competitive manner. Note that just driving to get groceries does not suffice, unless one does it like Takumi Fujiwara in Initial D.

Examples: Initial D, ex-Driver

Football

Football involves kicking a ball in order to score a goal, while the other team tries to stop you by kicking the ball in the other direction to score a goal of their own. Note that this is not American Football.

Examples: Aoki Densetsu Shoot!, Hungry Heart - Wild Striker

Golf

Golf is the most pointless sport ever invented.

Examples: <none?>

Gymnastics

Gymnastics used to just be thought of as an excuse for ogling women in skimpy costumes. However, the march of progress has lead to a great reduction in the mammaries that made this an interesting prospect, leading to a disallutionment with the sport.

Examples: Kaleido Star, Shintaisou (Kari) The Animation: Yousei-tachi no Rondo (warning: Hentai)

Tennis

Tennis is yet another sport involving hitting a ball. Were it not for the copious amounts of grass involved in certain varieties, it seems hard to imagine that people would pay it any attention at all.

Examples: Tennis no Ouji-sama, Ace wo Nerae!

Volleyball

Volleyball is a game best played on sand and half naked. Though it can be played indoors, this loses the magic somehow.

Examples: Attacker You!, Attack No. 1

Super Power

Be it an ancient greek Hercules, a cybernetic muscle-man, or a fourteen year-old girl in a mini-skirted sailor suit. As long as they have super power, they're in the show.

Examples: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon, Mai-HiME

Swordplay

This is about the art or skill of wielding a sword, esp. in fencing.

Examples: Afro Samurai, Blood - The Last Vampire

Western

Westerns, by definition, are set in the American west, almost always in the 19th century, from the antebellum period to the turn of the century. Many incorporate the Civil War into the plot, or into the background, although the west was not touched by the war to the extent the east was.

Many westerns involve nomadic type characters who wander from town to town, their sole possessions being clothing, gun, and horse (the horse may be optional). The high technology of the era – such as the telegraph, printing press, and railroad – do sometimes appear, occasionally as a development just arriving, and symbolizing that the idealized frontier lifestyle is transitory, soon to give way to the march of civilization.

The art of the Western takes these simple elements and uses them to tell simple morality stories, setting them against the spectacular scenery of the American West. With the best Western directors, the scenery essentially became a star of the movie.

Examples: Trigun, Gun Frontier