Sometimes the best-laid plans go wrong. And in some cases, the plans were laid so poorly in the first place, they never had a chance of going right. Anime is full of wild schemes and intricate plots that range across all genres and character types, making the viewer roll on the floor laughing at the insane fallout of some crazy scheme in one show, while breaking fans’ hearts with the tragic results of a plan gone very wrong in a different anime.
The characters that lay those plans might be scatterbrained, making it up as they go along, or they might be near geniuses, planning an encounter from start to finish, attempting to predict every possible counter to their plot.
10 Attack on Titan: Whether The Plan Succeeds Or Not Is Irrelevant
Any fan of Attack on Titan knows that whenever characters start to make plans, the result will assuredly be painful. Whether the plan is to plug a giant hole in the wall or bring the fight to the land of their enemy, little goes as planned for the people of Paradis.
And it doesn’t matter even if the plan succeeds in the end, as is often the case. Daring counter-maneuvers, unforeseen developments, or tragic losses impact and disrupt these plans and bring further misery to both the participants and viewers alike.
9 Everybody Wins & Everybody Loses In Kaguya-Sama: Love Is War
Every episode of Kaguya-sama: Love is War contains two or three carefully planned plots by either Kaguya herself or her amorous target, the student council president Miyuki Shirogane. Each tries to influence or ensnare the other into confessing their love to the other, as both battle a lack of courage and an excess of pride that prevents them from openly declaring their mutual love.
The plans never work. They’re too ridiculous in the first place, or the other person sees through the plan and counters, or simply the initiator flubs the plan somewhere along the way. Or, more often than not, Chika Fujiwara appears and completely disrupts everything.
8 Akame Ga Kill!: What Did It Cost?
Night Raid’s goal in Akame ga Kill! is to bring an end to the current order through confrontation and assassination and replace it with a new order not based on oppression. And as fans of the series know, that plan is highly successful in the end. The former heads of state are suppressed or killed, and the outlook for the future looks bright. But the sacrifices it took to get there are drastic.
All but two members of Night Raid meet their deaths before the struggle ends, some early on along the path, others in the final decisive battle. Poor Najenda knew sacrifices would be necessary, but likely never envisioned the losses her party suffers to achieve their goal.
7 A Plan For Planning To Maybe Not Have A Plan In FLCL
There’s a plan in FLCL? Fans could point to several, actually. Among all the craziness, Medical Mechanica is trying to take over the world, and between times Haruko Haruhara is plotting any and everything from trying to find Atomsk to seducing random side characters connected with whichever main character she’s involved with at the moment.
Whether short-lived or overarching, nothing works out as planned. Haruko is too wild to see any of her little plans through, her plan to find Atomsk is continually thwarted, and Medical Mechanica ultimately fails to conquer the Earth.
6 Time Travel Fails To Prevent Disaster In Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song
In Vivy: Fluorite Eye’s Song, the plan is to send Vivy, an android whose purpose in life is to make people happy with her singing, back in time to alter key events in hopes of preventing a war between androids and humans in the future. Through adventures and misadventures, both pleasant and heartbreaking, Vivy learns what it means to be human and succeeds in altering events at critical points in the past.
But the overall plan is a failure: the war still occurs despite the changes in the past, and a resolution can only be reached by Vivy understanding her true purpose and sacrificing herself to save the world.
5 Happy Sugar Life Is Not Happy, Not Sugar, & Certainly Not Life
Of the many monstrous displays in Happy Sugar Life, chief among them is Satou Matsuzaka’s plan to live her own “happy sugar life” with her beloved Shio, a little girl she found abandoned on the streets. The unhappy life Matsuzaka has led to this point has driven her to the brink of madness.
She will do anything to maintain this idyllic but reprobate lifestyle she has finally found happiness in, even if that means killing anyone who gets in her way, be that coworkers, friends, or random people she encounters in her life. In the end, she cannot maintain this existence, as it ends unhappily in tragedy and flame.
4 Life & Shogi: March Comes in Like a Lion
Poor Rei Kiriyama in March Comes in Like a Lion doesn’t have a plan in life. His rather sad existence has left him with the game shogi and little else. Shogi itself takes him to many places both happy and sad during the course of events during this series. But Rei knows that, just like in life, the best-laid plans in shogi usually go awry. Rei’s apathy towards having goals in life might be related directly to this.
As a shogi player, he has learned to plan and then adapt, knowing from the outset the plan itself probably won’t make it all the way through to the end of the game. If his life is indeed just filled with shogi and nothing else, his entire perspective on life will be affected in this way, leaving him placing little value on planning.
3 Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-Kun Has A Stream Of Futile, Hopeless, & Hilarious Plans
There are two kinds of plans in Monthly Girls’ Nozaki-kun. The first is Chiyo Sakura’s continuous plan to confess her love to the hapless Umetarou Nozaki, and the second is the never-ending, spur-of-the-moment schemes Nozaki comes up with to help inspire creativity in his writing.
Through the end of this single season anime, poor Sakura still hasn’t managed to confess her love. Nozaki himself has put his friends through dozens of wild scenarios, including pushing his friend Yuu Kashima around on a cart as girls furiously chase them, and encouraging the baffled Hirotaka Wakamatsu to confront Yuzuki Seo about her harassment of the basketball team, all leading to hilarious misunderstandings and crazy fallouts.
2 Lelouch Is The Grandmaster In Code Geass — Or Is He?
In an anime known for astonishingly and impossibly intricate plans, Lelouch Lamperouge in Code Geass lays his traps and spreads his nets over the entire globe, hoping to snare his enemies both foreign and domestic. Rarely do the plans accomplish his goals, and almost always he injures his compatriots and his cause along the way.
The Black Knights make progress in their revolution only through Lelouch’s charisma bringing allies to their cause, the good and powerful people leading the movement, and sheer force of will, and almost never through the complex plans Lelouch lays.
1 Tomoko Fails Time & Again In WataMote
Tomoko Kuroki from WataMote tries to make herself into a popular high school girl with a near endless stream of otome game-inspired schemes. All of them are doomed to failure the moment they’re conceived. But not only do the plans fail miserably, but they also get Tomoko into terribly cringy situations that make the viewer feel terrible for poor Tomoko.
She embarrasses herself time and again, making it worse the more she tries to extract herself from these situations. From the beginning of this anime to the end, Tomoko doesn’t make the slightest progress in her quest to become popular.
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