Looking for a specific type of anime.

[EyeReaper]

Well, I don't think it checks off every box on your very specific list, but I'm gonna recommend a little anime known as "Kaiji." It hits most of your marks, except that it takes place in modern day Japan and is not very "fantasy" at all. It's basically about a giant loser literally gambling his life away to help pay away his debts to some less than scrupulous people. You want a real piece of work? This is perfect.

Although fair warning, the art style is a bit... unique.

 

[Black Reaper]

By "and as least badassery as it's humanly possible", do you mean something with a lot of badassery, or something that doesn't have much badassery?, that sentence is kinda confusing

 

[Fdzzaigl]

Not all of these might fit your exact wishes, but they're fairly out of the ordinary.

Narutaru (you're gonna think this is a children's series first, word of advice: it ain't)
Bokurano
Baccano!
Durarara!
Anything studio Ghibli
Infinite Ryvius
Shinsekai Yori (From the new world)
Sidonia no kishi (currently airing mecha anime, but by manga artist Tsutomu Nihei, who is known for his hard-to-approach material)
Infinite Ryvius
Another (school life, but the premise becomes gradually more interesting)
+
A large number of the older series

Films I've seen recently
Dear Momo
Patema Inverted (has a few clichés, but is pretty out of the ordinary, only film ever to make me dizzy after watching)

There's a lot more out there, definitely if you start looking into mangas. But I can't think of any.

Also, western animation series are 1000x more formulaic imo.

 

[Relish in Chaos]

Numerous of Studio Ghibli?s films probably fit the bill.

Trigun would almost make the cut if its protagonist wasn?t such a clean-cut Shounen (before you say it, the series started out as a Shounen before moving publication to a Seinen magazine) protagonist that refuses to kill at all costs. Still, it?s worth checking out.

There?s also Berserk, one of my favourite manga. It?s an ongoing epic with a multi-plot storyline on par with The Lord of the Rings. The second story arc especially is fucking gold.

 

[ninja666]

By "and as least badassery as it's humanly possible", do you mean something with a lot of badassery, or something that doesn't have much badassery?, that sentence is kinda confusing

I don't notice how it's confusing at all, but to clear things up: I want little to no badassery in my anime.

 

[Black Reaper]

By "and as least badassery as it's humanly possible", do you mean something with a lot of badassery, or something that doesn't have much badassery?, that sentence is kinda confusing

I don't notice how it's confusing at all, but to clear things up: I want little to no badassery in my anime.

It's confusing because people have suggested things like Fate/Zero and Baccano, which i consider pretty badass, and a guy talked about Legend of the Galactic Heroes' badassery as a plus for your request, so it made me think badassery was requested

I think it's really hard to recommend something that doesn't have badassery, but i really suggest watching Seirei No Moribito
It's about a female bodyguard called Balsa who is hired by the queen to hide and protect her son, Prince Chagum
Prince Chagum is being chased by the Mikado/King/whatever because he got possessed by a water demon that will bring about a great drought if the prince stays alive

I think it misses 2 of your points, the badassery and the humour, since it is full of badasses(particularly Balsa and her late mentor, Jiguro), there's pretty much no fanservice, it has a really likeable and memorable cast, and its pretty grey, i really enjoyed it and really recommend it

Some other series i've seen on this thread that i suggest watching:Fate/Zero, Baccano, Madoka

 

[WindKnight]

Depending on how you want to define multiple plots, I'd say (of the shows not mentioned so far) Haibane Renmei.

The first half of the show is establishing the setting and how the 'world' as such works (people with vestigial angel-like wings awaken from cocoons and find themselves making a life for themselves in a walled city, and must follow certain guiding principals). Generaly light in tone, but with a vague touch of melancholy, with the 2nd half building on whats been established for a generally darker and more personal story revolving around a couple of characters dealing with personal demons.

 

[Cowabungaa]

I think it's really hard to recommend something that doesn't have badassery, but i really suggest watching Seirei No Moribito
It's about a female bodyguard called Balsa who is hired by the queen to hide and protect her son, Prince Chagum
Prince Chagum is being chased by the Mikado/King/whatever because he got possessed by a water demon that will bring about a great drought if the prince stays alive

I think it misses 2 of your points, the badassery and the humour, since it is full of badasses(particularly Balsa and her late mentor, Jiguro), there's pretty much no fanservice, it has a really likeable and memorable cast, and its pretty grey, i really enjoyed it and really recommend it

I'd argue that it at least has believable badassery; there's no over-the-top shonen action here, the fight choreography is one of the best I've ever seen next to Cowboy Bebop and there's no insane power attacks with all kinds of silly special effects going on.

No badassery, just good, down-to-earth fighting, nothing idiotic. Fits perfectly within OP's specifications.

By "and as least badassery as it's humanly possible", do you mean something with a lot of badassery, or something that doesn't have much badassery?, that sentence is kinda confusing

I don't notice how it's confusing at all, but to clear things up: I want little to no badassery in my anime.

It's easy to find this confusing as your definition of "badassery" doesn't have to be that of someone else. Just look at the example above, I wouldn't call Seirei no Morobito an anime filled with "badassery". A classical example of that would be, say, Bleach or something, or Naruto, with all kinds of crazy shit going on. But things like Morobito or Cowboy Bebop? Given, there's action, but it's not idiotic Shonen action.

But that's my definition of badassery.

 

[Coruptin]

someone else who hates japanese cartoons even more than me!
if he is anything like me you guys going so the wrong direction by suggesting most of the things you guys are.
shonen and seinen, edgier shonen, are mostly just full of crap: fate/(x), madoka, spice and wolf, godam muther fukin death note!?

monster and maybe sometimes cowboy bebop are the only ones i think that might be what he's looking for

tell me ninja how do you feel about comedy/campy western shows and cartoons?

 

[Majinash]

By "and as least badassery as it's humanly possible", do you mean something with a lot of badassery, or something that doesn't have much badassery?, that sentence is kinda confusing

I don't notice how it's confusing at all, but to clear things up: I want little to no badassery in my anime.

Its because "as least" isn't want you mean. Someone noticed the mistake and has to guess if you meant "as little" which would mean not very much, or "at least", which (if you changed some more of the words a bit) would mean more than a certain threshold.

Also Bebop, because it is its own genre and is incredible. Good dub too.

 

[MeChaNiZ3D]

Was going to recommend Baccano! but the jokes aren't great, morality isn't much of a factor and some of the characters can be annoying. Was going to recommend Code Geass but jokes aren't great, some characters are annoying and there's some badassery. Was going to recommend Psycho Pass but not really that multi-threaded and there is some badassery. Good luck, I have no idea.

 

[gagagaga]

someone else who hates japanese cartoons even more than me!
if he is anything like me you guys going so the wrong direction by suggesting most of the things you guys are.
shonen and seinen, edgier shonen, are mostly just full of crap: fate/(x), madoka, spice and wolf, godam muther fukin death note!?

monster and maybe sometimes cowboy bebop are the only ones i think that might be what he's looking for

tell me ninja how do you feel about comedy/campy western shows and cartoons?

While I would agree that several things suggested are not what ninja is looking for, I'd also point out that describing something as "full of crap" is not actually meaningful criticism.

I think he'd probably like anything by Satoshi Kon.

Alternatively, there's an anime that's airing right now called Ping Pong that's pretty good.

Captcha: health food. No, most anime is certainly not that.

 

[V4Viewtiful]

Maybe Wolfs Rain.

It's pretty serious and very much like a grimm Fairy Tail, it has a very clever plot for how simple the actual plot is. I won't spoil anything other than the Intro is the ending. I think it has a good balance between western storytelling and Japanese.
There are no real "Badass" moments ass the characters limitations and struggles are realistic (enough).

 

[Little Woodsman]

I'm amazed this got the the 48th post before someone mentioned Haibane Renmei, that's the first one I thought of. I'd add Revolutionary Girl Utena to the suggestions as well.

 

[Dalisclock]

Baccano

Baccano is a really interesting one, because depending on what character you're following at the moment, the tone ranges from "Light-hearted and funny" to "This is really, really disturbing and hard to watch", with some amount of "I didn't realize the human body could hold that much blood".

 

[ThreeName]

The thing with western television is that you don't necessarily have to watch sitcoms with "family" humor. If you don't like them, there are always shows filled with dark humor, offensive humor, british humor etc. as well as a plethora of serious ones ("Breaking Bad" being the prime example).

I like that you're giving the example the is literally always used as the exception to the rule. "Breaking Bad" is not indicative of Western TV at all; that's why it was so amazingly received. It broke the trend, now we're seeing stuff like Fargo, True Detective and House of Cards really come in to play, it's great, but they're not what's common to Western TV at all.

I'm not massively into anime, most of the stuff I like has already been mentioned, and it's pretty hard to think of examples that don't involve at least some fantasy/sci-fi/badassery.

Paranoia Agent is really the only thing I can think of. Canaan is meant to be alright, but I haven't seen it, myself.

 

[Chromatic Aberration]

The whole Seinen genre is essentially exactly what you want.

Not really. Seinen titles, despite being targeted towards mature audiences, still tend to be pretty over the top (not to say downright silly) and have a lot of naive plots and overall badassery. I'm speaking from experience, as I've watched a few seinen anime in my life (Elfen Lied, Hellsing, Noir, Black Lagoon). However, full-length movies tend to be more mature than TV shows (Perfect Blue, Akira, Hotaru no Haka and Kite being my favourites), which is kinda logical, but I don't see why it doesn't apply to many TV series.

Maybe a tad late but point taken. It's worth mentioning, though, that the shows you mentioned I'd actually designate as pretty much being about badassery. Hell, Black Lagoon pretty overtly takes its inspiration from 80s action-flicks so....yeah...go with the things mentioned in this thread and you won't go wrong too much. I can at least say that I found a lot of shows that fit the bill by specifically looking for Seinen...so make of that what you will.

Also, didn't catch the no-sci-fi part - still as mentioned both LoGH and Kaiba are fantastic shows who don't do silly Mecha action. This thread has also added some more things I'd recommend if you like their specific style: Heibane Renmei and Mushi-shi (both very quiet shows that are more about small character or world studies than overarching story), The Tatami Galaxy and Welcome To The NHK (both black comedies with a strong element of social criticism) and the Twelve Kingdoms (starts tropy but builds itself up to very politically charged high fantasy whose point is essentially about the dangers of escapism so yeah....but beware: it just stops after a while because the novels weren't finished). Also, sorry for whoever posted that, but Code Geass, as awesome as I think it is, you should definitely stay away from.

 

[TheRundownRabbit]

Jormungand and/or Black Lagoon

I can't make good on the "no badassery" part, but they generally have the rest of the bases covered.

My father has the same type of mentality (although he doesn't really much care for anime in general) however, i got him hooked on those shows

 

[blazearmoru]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wyk5tGYTjY

Fate Zero : Clash of ideologies. Gray morality.

Edit : the "grail" is said to be an all powerful wish granting object.

 

[Coruptin]

While I would agree that several things suggested are not what ninja is looking for, I'd also point out that describing something as "full of crap" is not actually meaningful criticism.

I think he'd probably like anything by Satoshi Kon.

Alternatively, there's an anime that's airing right now called Ping Pong that's pretty good.

Captcha: health food. No, most anime is certainly not that.

Good thing it's not my intention to get op to watch more japanese cartoons. Not having to convince anyone of anything affords me the luxury of not being critical.