Lousy Anime Moms We Should NOT Celebrate This Mother’s Day

Mother’s Day is for celebrating the moms in our lives. You don’t just have to give birth to be a mother: you can adopt, use a surrogate, or even just be an especially influential mother figure. But no matter what makes a mom a mom, unfortunately, not all of them deserve to be celebrated. Here is a short list of moms from anime that are so bad at being mothers, this holiday is NOT for them.

1. Uchika Hanesaki from Hanebado!


One of the duties of a mother is to take care of her child when they’re sick. Making them some chicken soup, monitoring their temperature, putting a cold compress on their forehead… Yet when a young Ayano Hanesaki caught a cold, her mother, Uchika, still wanted her to compete in a badminton match. And when Ayano lost that match due to her weakened state, did Uchika take her to a doctor, or even home to rest? No. She was so disgusted by her daughter’s loss that she abandoned her and moved abroad, where she adopted a Danish girl who was apparently better at badminton than Ayano.

2. Cordelia from Diabolik Lovers


The Sakamaki triplets are… messed up, to say the least. Their personalities are very distinct from each other, yet all three of them are horrible people in their own right. The boys’ monstrous, sadistic ways mostly stem from their mother. Cordelia never felt any love for any of her children and abused them both physically and mentally. She also often neglected them, especially Kanato. You really can’t blame them for wanting to murder their own mother…

3. Nana Shimura from My Hero Academia


Okay, I know this is a controversial take, but hear me out. The superhero business didn’t abruptly become dangerous; Nana must have known when she decided to become a mom that her career would put her family at risk. If she was going to abandon her son in the end anyway, she should have done it when he was too young to remember her instead of waiting for him to be old enough to grow attached to her. I know this was a difficult decision that she regretted immensely, and that she didn’t want to abandon her son, but the decision traumatized him so much that he resented heroes and passed that resentment onto his own son, who would become one of the most dangerous villains in the world.

4. Kozuru Mori from Dance Dance Danseur


Even though I don’t have concrete proof that Kozuru was a terrible mother to her daughter Mazuru, she was certainly an awful grandmother to Mazuru’s son Luou. While it could be argued that Mazuru herself was a bad mom for disappearing from Luou’s life and leaving behind a scandalous legacy that his classmates would eventually use against him, her own mom, who raised Luou in her absence, treated him much, much worse than she probably would have. Not only did she treat Luou as if he were Mazuru, but she also trained him so rigorously in the art of ballet that it involved physical abuse. He lived under his grandmother’s thumb even after she fell victim to dementia and couldn’t recognize him anymore… Although she never really recognized him as his own person in the first place.

5. Mrs. Shinjo from Stars Align


It’s been said that parents should love their children equally and never pick favorites. I’m not a mom, so I don’t know if it’s inevitable to secretly have a favorite child; with Mrs. Shinjo, however, it’s no secret which of her sons is her favorite: she’s very vocal about it. She straight up told her younger son, Toma, that she never wanted him in the first place. She grows so sick of him that, as you can see in the screenshot above, she tells him (over the phone, no less) that she’s leaving him behind to move in with his older brother. It’s obviously never acceptable to tell your middle-school-age kid that you hate him so much you can’t even stand living with him, but what makes this even worse is that Toma isn’t even a bad kid. Most of the boys in the cast of Stars Align have abusive or neglectful parents, but Mrs. Shinjo’s blatant dislike of her one son and preference for the other especially stuck with me.

So, what do you think? Do these anime moms deserve a Mother’s Day gift?

About Gabby Bibus

Gabby has been obsessed with anime since she was just 9 years old, and is proud to say she has watched over 200 different series. But that’s not even her biggest claim to fame: she also lives on a farm with over 80 goats! Although anime and animals are her two favorite things in the world, she also loves music, books, and movies. Her day job is a middle school ESL teacher, but some of her other side gigs in addition to writing for Fandom Spotlite include a college writing tutor, a staff member at the New Jersey Renaissance Faire, and a pet sitter.

View all posts by Gabby Bibus

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