Serious Business / Anime & Manga

Things that are Serious Business in various Anime and Manga series.

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• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You:
  • The aptly named Serious Group is the series' manufacturer of Acme Products who go well above and beyond with the products and services they sell, often causing problems for people unaware of their practices. Chapter 77 features the Serious Onsen, whose various baths include body soap that foams so much the lather floods the room, showers with the power of fire hoses, equally powerful jet baths and waterfall showers, a bath that increases the bust size of any women who enter, and a cold bath that's freezing enough to cause hypothermia. The whole experience ends on the "Serious Paradise Bath", which very nearly sent the entire cast to Paradise.
  • Matsuri Dei feels very strongly about festivals in general and yakisoba in particular. Her love of festivals is such that she initially dislikes romantic couples because she feels they spend more time focused on each other than on the festival itself, and Rentarou has to show he takes them just as seriously to win her over. Her family has long run a yakisoba stand and Matsuri loves and is very good at cooking it. Her pride in her yakisoba is damaged when Chiyo proves herself Matsuri's match and causes some initial friction in Matsuri's joining the Rentaro Family.
• In Addicted to Curry this happens for curry: friendships grow and die by the curry pot and high-stakes cooking competitions decide the future of the main character more than once.
• Hachimaki are Serious Business in the world of Afro Samurai, with the Number One headband apparently conferring the powers and responsibilities of a God, and only the Number Two headband has the right to challenge the holder of the Number One headband.
• In Aggretsuko: A Very Metal Christmas, Fenneko and Tsunoda get really intense about Retsuko's Instagram feed. In opposite directions.
  Fenneko: Instagram is EATING HER SOUL!
  Tsunoda: Every time you post a cute picture to social media, you're helping to make the world a better place! (glares) You do want to make the world a better place, right? (takes a selfie) I'm such a giver.
• Lunch becomes serious business in one episode of Ah! My Goddess, with Skuld and Mara fighting over a boxed lunch with bombs and magic, culminating in Skuld throwing herself off a roof to catch it before it hits the ground.
• In Ai Kora, quite a number of characters seem to take their personal fetishes far too seriously (including Hachibei Maeda, the protagonist!) Chapter 42 involves Maeda butting heads with a band of militant meganekko fetishists, who are up in arms over a fake glasses fad and go around breaking the glasses of "false" meganekko. And according to chapter 45, pantyhose is serious business.
• Air Gear: roller skating is serious business, with a huge subculture, tournaments, gang wars, and a special police force dedicated to catching (read: often brutally injuring) unruly Air Treckers. The manga makes a point of addressing this trope. Both Simca and Ikki state that A.T.s should be for fun, and not used as tools for violence or control.
  • Further on in the Air Gear manga, a cameo appearance from BARACK OBAMA reveals that the roller-skates are pivotal to his plans of change. Seriously.
    • It's later revealed that in-universe the technology developed for Air Trecks was integrated into everything, from transportation to weapons technology, and the Sky Regalia is a universal remote that would allow the owner, for example, to control the world's nuclear weapons stockpiles. So yes, Serious Business. This of course makes the entire thing seem somehow even more ridiculous when one realizes that someone, somewhere decided to make the key to ruling the world being good at inline skates.
• Akagi breaks people's minds by playing Mahjong. The fact that there is an extreme amount of money riding on each game probably helps, as does the fact that he is effectively playing semi-legal gambling games with mobsters, who do in fact murder people in real life over not paying debts created by rigging or attempting to rig games of skill or chance.
• Alice in Borderland: One character's backstory involves her father who is a mountain climber. He made a vow to climb Mount Everest alone without an oxygen tank. When it came to light that he secretly took an oxygen tank with him, it was somehow news worthy, leading to him being publicly shamed, kicked out of the mountain climbing club he was in, even causing people to vandalize their house. All of it led to him killing himself. All because he lied about taking an oxygen tank on a mountain climbing trip.
• Subverted in Angelic Layer, CLAMP's version of a typical Shōnen battle-game series. At first, it seems to fit perfectly, as Angelic Layer matches are broadcast on the sides of buildings to large crowds, Angels are treated as Companion Cubes, and Shuuko has abandoned her daughter in favor of playing professionally. However, as we progress through the series, we realize that it was just a busy public place where people wanted to watch a sport (much like football), people that take the game too seriously frequently learn from being defeated that they should just have fun, and Shuuko's debilitating self-loathing, which propelled her to leave her child, is cured by her coworkers' support and her daughter's forgiveness. Most people see the competition as just a game — albeit a tad odd.
• The gondolier business in ARIA consumes all of the protagonists' lives. Sure, it's their profession, but they're just transporting tourists through the canals of New Venice and it is indicated that they'll stop once they get married.
• In Asteroid in Love, when Mikage asked Moe, the local Sweet Baker, to teach her chocolate making in the ninth episode, the latter gets very excited as she eagerly gives Mikage a rapid-fire lecture about how to make chocolate, going as far as a discussion on the crystallization of cocoa butter. Mikage initially sees it as this trope, and then realizes that's how she herself comes across to others when talking about rocks — she's a big geology nut.
• We all know that Tests in Real Life are Serious Business. In Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts? Waaaaaaaaaay too serious.
  • Similarly, in one episode of Magical Witch Punie-chan, Punie threatens to blow up the solar system if she fails a test.
• Bakugan suffers from this, to the point where it almost seems to be a parody of the Mon genre. Sadly, it is not. It's just an anime that apparently has children who are overly attached to their Bakugan, and don't get started about how the Bakugan Universe gets into this matter.
• In Bakuman。, working on manga is treated as a true calling that could very well threaten your life, like firefighting or something.
  • In fact, the main character's uncle dies from exhaustion from working on his manga before the start of the series. However, this can be justified by the Truth in Television of the staggering amount of people in Japan who die of overwork. His uncle had been focusing only on his manga and setting aside sleeping and eating properly.
  • Mashiro himself is hospitalized because of overworking, which nearly ruins his career.
  • Since being mangaka is business in real life, everything involving manga is justified. Mangaka is a job, and only successful mangaka can live by making manga alone. The chance of being a successful mangaka is little, that is why Mutou Ashirogi tries everything to improve their manga.
• Bakusou Kyoudai! Let's & Go!! is a series about racing miniature cars, which is serious business.
  • Strangely, it starts out rather normal since mini 4wd is somewhat a serious hobby (car modification and care) in the first place. It's Big Bad who's trying to turn racing into war and the heroes' responses that makes things ridiculous.
• In Bartender, making cocktails is most definitely serious business, with businesses and futures hanging in the balance.
• Battle B-Daman. Apparently, in the "B-Da World", a person's social position, level of respect and moral actions are defined by playing marbles. Not playing B-Daman is something so bad that people don't even recognize you as a person (that's the message that the first episode gives to us). Playing with marbles is also a good way to take over the world and be a world-threatening criminal.
• Beauty Pop treats styling this way, to the point where heroine Kiri inherits her super-stylist father's special techniques: The Corkscrew, the Whirlwind, the Wizard, and their signature faster-than-the-eye-can-follow precision hair-cutting.
• Ben-To: Half-priced bentos are VERY serious to the point there is all out war, and rules regarding combat.
• In Beyblade, the sport of beyblading itself. It seems like if anyone wants to Take Over the World, they have to do it with dueling tops.
  • It is not so much the tops as the artificial or spiritual entities of animals inside that allow the tops to pack as much yield as a nuclear bomb without the nasty side effects. As powerful as that and they are exclusively put in spinning tops used by children to win a game. Even in the story's own history, they're always said to have been used for actual combat and wars prior to the days of modern beyblading.
  • Even without the "take over the world" angle, the sport of beyblading is able to fill stadiums specifically built for it, so there is some serious money there.
  • The first season provides the ultimate example with the PPB, the institution training the US national team... that is literally Backed by the Pentagon and NASA. Seriously. It was so bad that the BBA team (including the member who would later put down his life to try and win a particularly important match) called them out on it...
  • One scene in Beyblade Metal Fusion episode 13 implies that in the Beyblade universe, Moses parted Red Sea using a Beyblade.
• Played for Laughs in an omake in Black Lagoon. Yukio tries to perform a Boke and Tsukkomi Routine with her clubmate for a Culture Festival. Yukio takes this extremely seriously and, not really understanding how to perform manzai, seeks coaching from the Washimine Group, who similarly take Yukio's desire to learn extremely seriously.
• Bleach: While he's recuperating at the 11th Division barracks, Ichigo decides to spar with Ikkaku, who comments that he just got off the sickbed. When Ichigo replies that he wasn't "sick", just "injured", the two begin bickering about the idiom until the argument escalates into a swordfight. Which then gets interrupted by Kenpachi, who also wants to fight Ichigo.
• Blue Exorcist has an overly dramatic cooking fight in Episode 6.
• A Certain Magical Index: The Delta Force class (especially Touma, Aogami, and Tsuchimikado) take Serious Business to ridiculous lengths. Seeing Komoe-sensei shed a tear? Go pull off an all-out war in a school festival! No more food in the cafeteria because the class was dismissed late? Organize a small scale break out so some members can go get some food from a local store. Someone mention Nabe? Let's all go out to eat~!
• A Certain Scientific Railgun: In an omake chapter, the male researchers from the Level 6 Shift project need the 20,000 clones of Mikoto Misaka as close to the original as possible, so they try to figure out what kind of panties Mikoto wears under her shorts. A request for Tree Diagram to calculate a simulation is immediately denied ("Don't use me for stupid things"), so they send in the Hound Dogs, a black-ops mercenary squad. They break into the Tokiwadai dorm in the middle of the day in full gear... and are immediately slaughtered by the dorm supervisor. Just as the researchers are declaring that they'll have to take to the field themselves, the female researchers reveal that they just ordered 20,000 pairs of cheap panties.
• Carried by the Wind: Tsukikage Ran: Ran almost started a fight over watered-down sake. She says it's as precious as blood.
• In Chūka Ichiban!, also called Cooking Master Boy, cooking badly in an established restaurant and insulting certain chefs are federal crimes. Impersonating a renowned chef is like treason. Being the emperor's chef and/or taste tester makes you one of the highest ranked persons in China, even when retired. There is an exam that takes place every four years to become a "Super Chef", which officially makes you as high ranked as a military general or even higher. Then there's the Underground Cooking Society that aims to control China through the cooking industry and magic cooking utensils.
• Some of the villains-of-the-week in City Hunter are willing to rob, maim, kidnap, and murder to get to the top of the bloodthirsty, cutthroat professional worlds of... bikini design, children's book illustration, and wine tasting. Justified for the bikini design, as the designer had unwittingly got her hands on the formula of a chemical weapon... And failed to notice because she was that obsessed with fashion and just too honest to try and murder her competitors.
• In Code Geass there are luxurious underground gambling clubs for chess, frequented by millionaires, Mafia bosses and the like. Bring your own extremely expensive chess board and bet a fortune.
  • Averted. The gambling club was not for chess specifically. There were lots of different games available. Chess just happened to be Lelouch's game of choice, so it received the most attention.
  • Also: using a giant robot to make pizza. And everything else related to the Absurdly Powerful Student Council, for that matter.
• Aito of The Comic Artist and his Assistants and his Panty Shots, the latter of which is the sole reason why he became a Sequential Artist. A more specific example exists in the Panty Wars skit, when he, upon reading arguments comparing the two main types of panty shots, panchira^note showing just a small portion of the panties and panmoro^note a full view of the panties, he realized by mainly drawing panmoro, he was basically portraying his female characters as sluts.
• In Cosmo Warrior Zero, alcoholic drinks: the people of Gun Frontier are ready to hang Tochiro for (accidentally) destroying their whole reserve of booze and being unable to replace it, and Tochiro's best friend Captain Harlock, after kicking everyone's ass for nearly killing Tochiro, agrees they're right when the locals manage to explain their reasons. He then proceeded to give them his reserve of booze so that Tochiro could be spared.
• Cooking and food in general in Delicious in Dungeon, to Senshi at least. To the extent that anything not revolving around dungeon cuisine and proper nutrition don't interest him much. Do not waste food in front of him, whatever you do.
• Parodied and inverted in Detroit Metal City, where music fans assume that the titular band has demonic power over the universe, commit terrorist crimes and that the lead singer is a god. None of that is true whatsoever, but the band's fans act as if it was. On a smaller scale, the police assume that DMC is the root of all crime in the area.
  • The band Helvete actually does what DMC claims to do, their fans even blew up buildings for them.
• D.Gray-Man's Kanda is willing to fight his way through the entire staff of the Black Order to fix his Slipknot Ponytail after Bookman steals his hair tie. There is epic posing and Battle Aura involved.
• Rika (Ruki) in the English dub of Digimon Tamers. While all the characters are perhaps a little overly into the Digimon card game even before having to use their cards to save the world, Rika is by far the most intense. She is even appalled at her mother for not taking the childrens' card game seriously enough.
  • This is the whole reason she got a Mon in the first place.
• The show Dog Days manages to invert this trope. War is serious business in Real Life, but in their world it's a perfectly safe sporting event.
  • Also an inversion, as extremely powerful demons/monsters pose a very real potential threat, making such 'wars' a necessity for the training of soldiers. Money is also involved, so it can be at least as important as other betting sports.
• Duel Masters is another card game anime. It's not quite as blatant about it as Yu-Gi-Oh!, but stadiums are still packed full of spectators watching our heroes play cards.
  • The dub made it into an explicit parody.
  • It helps that both Duel Masters and Yu-Gi-Oh!, started off as parodying Magic: The Gathering, which has its own fair share of serious business (but sadly, the latter is a real life phenomenon).
• Eyeshield 21 takes football to the extreme. While the players are a bit more justified, since, well, they spend nearly everyday training for the game and will break into tears at losing, the audience, on the other hand, has no excuse. It's a full crowd for all the later games and some schools focus almost entirely on the sport. This is American football. In Japan. And it's constantly being lampshaded that the audience (both in the series and real life) has no idea what is going on. To be fair, Japan won two American football World Cups and hosted the latest one, where they came in second. In real life.
  • Taken to the extreme with the Teikoku Alexanders, who have over 200 players from across Japan divided into 6 strings, while your average NFL team has a maximum of 53. And to advance in the ranking you have to memorize over 1,000 plays and run 40 yards in under 5 seconds.
  • While not Truth in Television, it's actually not all that unbelievable for a sports club in Japan. For example, high school baseball is so insanely popular that a team with a good chance of making it to the Koushien (the Christmas Bowl of baseball) will have 150+ members (and like Teikoku, most of those players are 2nd-6th stringers who act as lackeys).
  • So while there aren't actual football teams in Japan that are that big, if the sport were to get extremely popular (and presumably that's the sort of universe Eyeshield takes place in), a team like Teikoku would not be unrealistic, unlike in America.
• Erza from Fairy Tail takes everything seriously, from her jobs under the titular guild up to her favorite cake (seriously, people who mess with her treat are screwed). One job involved her acting as a prince in a stage play, so she started doing vocal practices immediately, only to fall into stage panic the day of the play.
• Sora from Family Compo takes manga making very serious. It's his job and all, but sometimes he seems a bit extreme.
• Surprisingly averted in Food Wars!:
  • While cooking is incredibly serious business within Tootsuki, it is recognized that gourmet food is a niche interest outside that limited sphere, and the people who take it seriously do so because they are within that niche, but most of the world couldn't care less.
  • Even the most obsessive cooks never consider cooking to be a goal in itself, but always have another goal in mind and consider food to be a stepping stone towards that goal.
  • The ones that actually do consider food to be the most important thing in existence (Eishi, Azami, young Joichirou, Akira during his tenure at Central) are seen as maladjusted at best, and teetering on the brink of insanity at worst. Soma, the most competitive of the lot, at one points stands to lose his culinary career, but rather sanguinely points out that as a driven, reasonably intelligent sixteen-year-old, he could do a lot of other things with his life than cook, and losing his chosen career would be a heavy blow but hardly a crippling one.
• Future GPX Cyber Formula: Auto racing is already serious business in real life, but when it's set in the future, you got AI-computer equipped race cars complete with booster engines and there's insane racing courses (in the TV series), you know it's really serious business.
  • Your car has an engine with three times the power of the M1 Abrams, Without the booster, what did you expect from that?
• In the manga Gamble Fish, gambling is SERIOUS BUSINESS. In a prestigious private school, once main character Shirasagi Tomu enters, it descends into the the insanity of gambling, where people not only bet millions of yen, but even body parts. In. A. School.
• As far as Gintoki from Gintama is concerned, Shonen Jump and sugar are both extremely serious business.
  • EVERYTHING is serious business in Gintama; eating hotpot, eating contests, gambling, collecting beetles, strawberry milk, pet pageants, being a fanboy, being an otaku, gaining weight, losing weight, separating your garbage, being hado boerudo, playing console games/MMORPGs, acquiring paper to wipe your butt. Even being a neet. And it's hilarious.
• Used a few times in Girls Beyond the Wasteland:
  • Atomu is initially rejected since he doesn't have any particular talents. He then starts ranting about how some girl turned him down after asking to meet him, and develops a dark Battle Aura. Sayuki then decides to let him manage the club.
  • Sayuki telling Buntarou that she's putting him on lockdown, complete with a helicopter flying behind her as she calls him over the phone to tell him.
• In Girls und Panzer, tankery, which, in this universe, is also a competitive sport played by schoolgirls in order to refine their womanly attributes, is considered this way. Hana and Miho have, respectively, been disowned for participating in tankery ^note Although in Hana's case, her mother comes around and it's indicated she overreacted to a very sudden mention of her daughter doing tankery, and been slated for disinheritance for not upholding the honor of the family's practice of tankery. The Nishizumi family is said to be the strictest of all the tankery schools, and Maho once points out that a single loss in 10,000 battles is enough to get expelled.
• In Gonna Be the Twin-Tail!!, the main character Mitsuka Souji treats girl's twintails as serious business, since he has a fetish for them. While his friend Aika is exasperated and wishes he were more normal, it turns out to be valid, as certain invaders from another world can steal various fetishes from people (especially twintails) and use them to gain enough strength to conquer.
• Grander Musashi takes sports fishing very seriously, to the point that anglers call out a technique whenever they throw fishing lines into the water, and treat their fishing rods and lures as Companion Cubes. There's even an academy that trains would-be anglers in the dark arts of fishing. In the sequel, seven divine lures (created by Poseidon) that everybody is after are the reason for the sinking of Atlantis.
• Smiles in Grenadier. If Rushuna's got a dirty look on her face, and informs you that you're not getting a smile, Run. Truth be told, you really have to push Rushuna extremely far for her to stop smiling.
• Similarly in Gundam Build Fighters, where Mr. Ral explains to Reiji that people do recognize that Gunpla Battle is a game based on fictional works, but it's because it's just a game that people can take it so seriously and have fun doing so.
  • In a specific (and more classically negative) example, the Renato Brothers treat Gunpla Battles as seriously as real wars and hate Meijin Kawaguchi because of his "Gunpla should be fun" attitude, to the point where they want to defeat him in order to discredit his ideology. The Battlogue OVA shows that the Renatos even engage in mid-battle Roleplay (via animated pilot figurines) and get mad at Meijin for breaking their immersion by throwing a 1/60-scale Gundam Exia into their battle.
• While the game itself isn't an incredible amount more popular (possibly unintentionally) than current MMO's are, The World in .hack//SIGN has players who take it a little too seriously sometimes. Especially groups like the Crimson Knights, who are becoming thuggish police types in a video game. The serious business was probably more obvious when the show was new and MMO's did not have nearly as high a number of player bases and twenty million seemed an absurd number. Though it's the only big MMO in the setting. There are other small ones, but they never took off. A past super virus wiped out every operating system except Altimat, and as The World came with Altimat, everyone with a computer had the game.
  • With the exception of the super virus, that still sounds like Truth in Television. WoW is so popular that all other MMOs could be called "other small ones" by comparison.
  • Assuming that the World from the anime doesn't play like the World from the videogame sequel, one might be able to understand the game's popularity. It seems to be a fully virtual world with rather realistic interactions, not to mention use of Occulus Rift esque headsets (long before the Occulus Rift was even a thing).
  • All that aside, it's partially justified in SIGN's case; for Tsukasa, it really is a matter of life or death - and given that some of his friends and allies have taken up his defense, it justifiable for them too.
• In HappinessCharge Pretty Cure!, shopping is serious business for Iona, dragging Hime to the cheapest grocery store possible and still using coupons. When an angry Hime calls her a "scrooge" over her penny pinching (which was kicked off because she was refused a snack food), she flips out and says it's "economical".
• Haruhi Suzumiya:
  • A baseball game decided the fate of the world given that Team SOS-dan were playing against a really good baseball team. Their loss would aggravate Haruhi as she's a Reality Warper, and a sore loser, and would mean The End of the World as We Know It.
  • The Deep-Immersion Gaming duel between the SOS Brigade and the Computer Society, with Haruhi promising severe punishments to the Brigade if they lose, and Kyon getting into it by the end.
  • Come to think of it, Haruhi takes everything this way, game or no. Which makes it Serious Business for the rest of the SOS Brigade: if losing a baseball game means Haruhi will throw a world-destroying sulk, that really does up the ante.
  • The Gag Series Haruhi-chan gives us serious dodgeball, complete with Battle Auras.
• As Hayate the Combat Butler advances its plot, it seems the butler career becomes more and more Serious Business. The bare minimum seems to be equivalent to applying for a shounen fighting manga's character job. Props if you also have a Finishing Move.
• To Tomoki in Heaven's Lost Property, everything perverted is extremely serious business. To the extent of spending half a year building a system that would allow him to monitor the best peeping spots in the city without leaving his room and using a Peeping Satellite for a similar purpose. He actually almost won a wrestling tournament through sheer pervertedness.
• One H-manga by Shiwasu no Okina applies this to fellatio. The competition between one high school's competing fellatio clubs is a matter of life or death.
  • "Oral sex is hard work. That's why it's called a blow-JOB!"
• Hetalia: Axis Powers: "Whether it be games or cleaning, it's Serious Business to me!"
  • A lot of characters have this, despite Germany being the worst: Italy, China and France are a little too obsessed with food, England's got Busby's Chair, and... well, anything America does, really.
  • Monaco bets dates on Poker while loudly proclaiming that she's "very strong" and laughing.
• Hikaru no Go: The main characters take the game of Go very seriously. In this sense it's Truth in Television, and you'll know it if you know any professional players. However, it is made clear that the world at large doesn't particularly care about the game, even when it knows it exists.
• Characters in Hunter × Hunter think deeply and strategically about everything they do, in hilariously excessive detail, from playing rock-paper-scissors to using Internet search engines to making sushi to buying antiques to guessing a secondary character's gender. At one point, a character haggles down the price of a cell phone, and a crowd bursts out into applause.
• Initial D: Street racing + Serious Business. That some people get like this in real life just makes it all the more hilarious.
• In the manga Iron Wok Jan, Chinese cooking competitions can fill stadiums and attract celebrity judges, and a particularly famous food critic is a popular celebrity. There's even a shadowy organization that secretly controls all food production and distribution throughout Asia and is trying to take over the Chinese cooking industry of Japan by defeating Japan's top young chefs in a cooking competition.
• In Jewelpet Sunshine, Jasper's Trademark Favorite Food is curry, but he enjoys it without anything else on it. Saying you enjoy curry with extra soy sauce or any other additional sauce or topping within earshot of Jasper will make him angry. An entire episode is dedicated to a fight between Jasper and one of the human students of Sunshine Academy based solely on their opinions regarding how to eat curry.
• One of the main charming quirks of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure is how it presents utterly ridiculous concepts, takes them very seriously and actually makes them genuinely feel serious. As an example there are serious, life-threatening battles involving things like betting the characters' souls on a baseball video game and playing a game of deadly RockPaperScissors while flying high above a town with high speed WITH NO EXPLANATION WHATSOEVER.
  • Gambling on video games actually makes perfect sense. Terrence D'Arby is a man in his 20's who's really, really good at video games. Since nearly all his opponents are not (especially since this was a time when it was largely considered a kiddie fad), if they have no choice but to fight on his terms (or else lose an ally's soul and possibly their own), that gives him a huge advantage. Any time life and death is involved, Serious Business is a given.
• Jujutsu Kaisen: Learning that Yuko Ozawa had a crush on Yuji when they were in middle school makes Nobara and Megumi drop everything in order to gossip about it.
  Megumi: (shocked) You mean it's like that?!
  Nobara: (dead-serious) Yes, like that.
• Jumbor Barutronica: Construction workers are heroes and knights, riding giant robots equipped with excavator equipment, and cloned children implanted with the memories of worker-heroes with shape-shifting, liquid metal hands that turn into giant shovels and drills. Justified, as it is set two-thousand years in the future, with the world in shambles because of pollution, so re-constructing the earth is vitally important. But... Construction Knights! On Giant Robots! Shape-Shifting Clones!
• Kaguya-sama: Love Is War:
  • Kaguya and Shirogane turn pretty much everything into mind battles, from Old Maid, discussing where to go on vacation, to exchanging LINE IDs. All in the name of forcing each other to confess their love.
  • There's a running subplot involving the Four Ramen Emperors of Tokyo, who treat eating ramen as a matter of life and death.
• In Kakegurui gambling is very, very serious business. A person's standing in school is entirely dependent on how much they can win (and how much they can afford to pay to the Absurdly Powerful Student Council), with even the simplest of games of chance being determined by wagers of millions of yen.

• Keijo!!!!!!!! is a pro sport where the competing girls try to push each other off a platform and into the water using their butts and boobs. Despite the seemingly silly premise, the heavy amount of betting involved has driven up the prize money, so the competitors tend to take it very seriously and people have been known to die in the ring.
• Kill la Kill is full of this, though unlike most examples, the over-the-top World of Ham is 100 percent intentional and part of the absurd charm. Literally everything related to school, including tennis matches and the freakin' sewing club, are part of some grander world domination scheme. Oh yeah, and clothes are Fascism. And aliens.
• 5* Sawako of Kimi ni Todoke takes everything seriously.
• Likewise, Kinnikuman features wrestling matches that can decide the fate of the earth, and are frequently to the death.
• Kitchen Princess, like the Beauty Pop example above, treats baking and pastry-making as though it could create world peace if heroine Najika could just make the perfect flan.
• In K-On!, cake is very serious business.
  • And light music, naturally.
• Kurogane (2011): A manga based around the INTENSE world of High School Kendo where success in matches, tournaments and major life decisions are usually determined due to Flaw Exploitation, Hyper-Awareness and the occasional advice from samurai ghosts.
• Lucky Star's Anime Tenchou brings gallons of hot blood, various superpowers and nuclear explosions to the humble business of running a comic and animation store. Why can't real managers be like this guy? And wait till you see his boss... Bonus points for being voiced by Tomokazu Seki.
  • The sheer level of seriousness Anime Tencho has for his job is further amplified by the pursuit of one goal: To sell any merchandize to the illustrious "Legendary Girl A" (Konata, one of the protagonists who is also a hardcore Otaku). To this end, Anime Tencho even has a set up exclusively for this one customer (the "Legendary Girl A shift") in order to maximize the visibility of his store's merch whenever Konata drops by.
• In Magician's Academy, a good portion of the school is made to run a magical Death Course, no holds barred, to decide the next school uniform. The students who aren't putting their butts on the line watch this in a large stadium with commentary, video cameras, the works. Serious Business indeed.
  • Sakuma takes dramatic deaths (going so far as to hand a person a gun), and Moe fetishes seriously (he wreaks explosive violence on someone for tricking him with fake moe glasses).
• In Martian Successor Nadesico, there's an entire civilization based around a single in-universe giant robot anime. This concept is also deconstructed; it's shown how this excessive fixation on and fetishization of fiction has distorted their society on several levels, from gender roles to politics.
• Metal Fighter Miku makes women's wrestling serious business.
• In the Nue arc of Mononoke, "The 'Hearing' of Incense" is such serious business that a game where the players try to determine minute differences between pieces of incense made from the same type of tree is used to to decide whose marriage proposal is accepted!
• In one episode of Monster Musume, an Ork radical group forcefully takes over a bookstore and starts a hostage situation... and the group demands that in order for them to let the hostages go Light Novels and Anime must start to be written with more Ork protagonists. That is literally their only demand. The police commissioner gets a conniption when he hears this.
• My Bride is a Mermaid has several examples:
  • Sun and Lunar's respective fan clubs turn the school into a literal war zone battling over whether Sun or Lunar is better. Which is especially absurd as Sun and Lunar's rivalry is completely one-sided and only Lunar actually cares.
  • Mawari tends to take this approach to enforcing her brand of justice. Which is fine, as she wants to be a police commissioner one day. Unfortunately, she generally goes overboard and enforces rules like "no walking more than two abreast on the sidewalk" with the same gusto that's generally reserved for laws like "no murdering".
  • Mermaid priorities are a bit... different from human priorities: Sun's father (a yakuza boss posing as a teacher calls in his elite (in name only) squad of fighters, pulls the fire alarm, and evacuates the school... because Nagasumi brought a cat to class.
• In My Hero Academia, the Sports Festival at Yuuei Academy is a huge event that draws more national attention than the Olympics! Somewhat justified, though, in that Yuuei is the top school in the country for training prospective superheroes, and the Sports Festival is used as a venue for heroes and corporations to scout promising new talent. Also, while over 80% of the population in this series has some form of Quirk granting them an unique ability, some aspects of society, such as the Olympics committee, have been slow to adjust their standards to allow for the incredible variety of abilities that now exist.
• My Monster Secret basically runs on this, from a hot-blooded training to "dodge the sun" to a desperate race to get limited-edition burgers, to Youko almost crossing the Despair Event Horizon when she learns there won't be any run-for-the-bun in the obstacle race this year.
• My Neighbor Seki is a gag manga about a boy who gets invested in his games to the point of crying and freaking out, and a girl with a lot of imagination, treating everything as incredible, even if we're talking about a cactus plushie or Othello. It was bound to happen.
• In Negima! Magister Negi Magi, Negi and Fate attempt to have a diplomatic meeting and nearly come to blows while arguing about whether tea or coffee is superior. The negotiations later fail for an unrelated reason.
• In No Game No Life all games are treated as very serious business, especially by the two protagonists, Sora and Shiro. In the world of Disboard, violence has been outlawed and games are used to decide all conflicts, from social disputes to wars between nations. Entire races can be sold into slavery based on the outcome of a game as simple as rock-paper-scissors. Justified, since it's a world where the God of Games Tet became the Top God, making games a sacred form of conflict resolution enforceable by divine decree and bound by Ten Pledges. At the same time, the tenth of these reads "Everyone must have fun playing together!", implying that, despite the seriousness it's treated with, fun was still Tet's primary reason for introducing the whole system in the first place.
• In Nononono, ski jumping is apparently a very important sport in Japan — important enough to have masses of people threaten the safety of an athlete and his family for not winning a medal.
• In Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! human media is a strictly regulated commodity among the various races of the Cthulhu mythos, complete with smuggling rings to get around the limitations on how much can be taken at a given time. It's serious enough that some Moral Guardians want to destroy the Earth to protect their races from the media.
• One Piece:
  • Luffy loves meat, and he takes it very seriously. He practically goes mad with fury when he goes to a restaurant that doesn't serve meat; when offered shellfish, he replies with "Shellfish isn't meat! Meat is serious business!". He also considers piracy to be serious business, and gets really pissed with Wapol flaunting the jolly roger.
    Luffy: This flag is a promise of life. You don't fly it lightly!!! IT'S NOT SOMETHING TO BE LAUGHED AT OR SHOT AT!!!
  • Kaku's Devil Fruit power lets him turn into a weregiraffe. While everybody else finds it appropriately ridiculous, Kaku himself takes giraffes so seriously it borders on obsession, considering them majestic and powerful creatures. At one point he says "I love giraffes" in the same grim, determined tone you might expect from a man swearing vengeance on a murderer.
• Gil from PandoraHearts removes the Power Limiter on an Eldritch Abomination to get his hat back. The Eldritch Abomination in question was engaged in an arm-wrestling match at the time.
• Patlabor: The TV Series: The two Maintenance Division-centric episodes end up with most of Division 2 going mysteriously missing one by one, and a small civil war among the unit including beatings, nazi-esque "security squads," kidnappings and (non-lethal) hangings, respectively. The reason? Some spoiled food and the confiscation of a sizable Porn Stash.
• In the anime of Phantasy Star Online 2, the eponymous MMORPG has become so popular and widespread in Japanese society that the student council of Seiga Academy study it and submit reports on it in order to better understand and interact with the student body: as such, Itsuki Tachibana's primary duty as the student council's vice president is to play PSO2 and write about it. This stems from the council president Rina Izumi's belief that PSO2 sits on the cutting edge of communication technology, and with the school's administration looking into banning the game from campus, she is determined to convince them that the game is not detrimental to academic performance, since banning the game would constitute a severe breach of student privacy.
• This is true of the Pokemon universe, with its hospitals, schools, and criminal organizations centered around Pokémon.
  • Beat the bad guy threatening to take over the world in a Pokémon battle, and his plan is foiled.
  • In Sinnoh, Ash and co. met up with a villain who was willing to turn weapons and Pokemon on humans, as well as deal with the issue of Pokemon poaching and kidnapping. Hunter J was by far one of the more terrifying villains, and show that there are people in the Pokemon universe who are evil, practical and downright ruthless (which is a stark contrast to the hilarious Rocket trio, who half the time forget they're even villains, at least before they Took a Level in Badass in Best Wishes-but even then, they don't come close to her). Even more so was that she had the same reason as Rocket: To kidnap rare and powerful Pokemon to sell to the highest bidder. Unlike the Rocket Trio, she succeeded most of the time.
  • Zoey has a very low opinion on trainers who compete in both Pokemon contests and gym battles, saying that someone who does both is not taking it as seriously. She's since mellowed out about it.
  • The fourth episode of the anime has a Bug Catcher type Pokémon trainer who dresses and acts like a samurai, treating his bug Pokémon catching profession as seriously as a samurai would treat his duties.
  • A notable early episode has Ash act this way about his hat when it's stolen by a Mankey; citing that it's an official Pokémon League Hat that he won in a raffle by sending in large amounts of postcards. Suffice to say; he's determined to get it back and capture the Pokémon that took it as well.
  • Chloe Cerise is an unenthusiastic girl who doesn't see Pokémon as a huge deal, though of course the narrative ensures that whatever she does in her life it will absolutely involve Pokémon whether she likes it or not, which is why she gets an Eevee as a symbolic way to choose what she wants to be.
• The Japanese junior high school tennis circuit in The Prince of Tennis.
  • Stock up on tennis rackets in 2012
• A lot of humor and much of the plot of Prison School is derived from people taking things way too seriously instead of acting like normal people.
  • Gackt agrees to help Kiyoshi break out of prison temporarily so Kiyoshi will pick up a limited edition figurine for him while on the outside. Gackt wants the figurine so much that he soils himself in public just to get the sound of him soiling himself as part of the escape plan.
  • When the boys are pleading with the headmaster to give them time to come up with a defense so they won't be expelled, Kyoshi gives an impassioned speech about why asses are better than boobs, completely winning the headmaster over.
  • Gackt is able to convince the boys to help their hated enemies the shadow student council against the regular student council by revealing that the regular council's school fare will not have a wet t-shirt contest, unlike the shadow council's.
• In QQ Sweeper cleaning can save people's lives, so Kyuutaro and Fumi have to be really good at it and know exactly how to do so.
• Ranma ½. Martial arts is serious enough in real life, but when you have martial arts tea ceremonies, martial arts take out races, martial arts cooking, and many, many, many others, you know it must be Serious Business.
• In Read or Die, books are most definitely serious business.
  • Justified in the TV series, where the British Library is enacting a multi-generational plan to take over the world by rewriting history. Taking control of the world's books is just the first step.
• The Red Line race. Justified because the betting and advertising make a ton of money, and according to Lynchman 'there's enough money riding on this race to buy several planets!'
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: Episode 8 of the anime adaptation reproduces Oliver and Chela's argument from the book about the relative merits of the Lanoff and Rizett sword styles. The omake for the episode then self-parodies it by having Katie walk in on them seemingly having resumed the argument, only for it to turn out that this time they're arguing about breakfast breads.
• Saki does this with Mahjong, more or less. It's fairly toned down compared to most examples here, with nothing more riding on the games than would be in Real Life. On the other hand, high school tournaments get national broadcasts, there's trading cards of professional players, and generally very little to suggest that the average person in the Saki universe isn't fond of the game.
  • And in The Legend of Koizumi mahjong is even more Serious Business. World politics are decided by secret high-stakes Mahjong games.
    • Not just world politics, but whether or not the world will be taken over by NAZIS FROM THE MOON, led by Hitler, whose Mahjong powers are so awesome he has gone SUPER SAIYAN.
    • According to the Pope, God used Mahjong to create the world.
• Scan2Go, a car-racing toy, is taken way too seriously by the main characters considering that, even in-universe, they are just toy cars. The fact that Hot-Blooded main character Kaz Gordon takes it way too seriously and doesn't know how to relax is depicted as a character flaw.
  "Do not underestimate Scan2Go!"
• Sex is serious business in School Rumble. Guy students stampeding towards the museum to see Itoko's nude portrait or conducting clandestine meetings to determine who is the hottest girl in their school (again Itoko) is nothing new.
  • The GUN BATTLE OF DEATH. The stakes? Who gets to choose the event for the culture festival. Guns. Blood. Death. Culture Festival is Serious Business.
• Episode 23 of Sengoku Collection features four year old Tsunehisa Amago trying to take over her daycare's sandbox to make the biggest sand castle possible. The episode is presented in the style of a war documentary, with actions like turning a hose on a mudfight or one child telling on the teacher shown as moments of tremendous import.
• Sgt. Frog plays with this trope by having Keroro and Giroro treat everything from vacuuming, to going to the beach, to jumping rope, as though it were either a major military operation or a Cooking Duel to decide the fate of the galaxy.
• Shakugan no Shana: Ike planning a theme park trip. That is serious business. Overlaps with Mundane Made Awesome.
• In SHUFFLE!, the instant fanclubs in the anime have carried over into real life, with Ship-to-Ship Combat.
  • Never say Kaede is a Psycho Knife Nut Stalker with a Crush in front of members of Kitto Kitto Kaede-chan if you value your life.
• An example predating many of these: In Speed Racer, racing is serious business. Lots of drivers play rough and several people are rammed off the road to their deaths over the course of the show.
• Strawberry Cake is VERY serious especially the Strawberry on top, just ask Mio, Yui, another Mio, Chiri, Erza, Yotsuba and Mrs. Ayase.
• In Summer Wars, the Japanese card game Hanafuda is used to decide marriages and fight the Big Bad using Cyberspace accounts to set the stakes.
  • Justified, like with many examples, as said big bad used its influence to access the world's collective nuclear pile, making the situation rather serious.
• To Tiger & Bunny's Sky High, birthday parties are very serious business.
  Sky High: Thanks to you, our surprise party was ruined. I worked hard to remember my lines.
• In Toriko, food is serious business. Seriously. Gigantic superfauna that could level cities are hunted by warriors, not for the treasure they might guard, but because they're insanely delicious. Gourmet meals can cost billions, if not trillions, of yen, and they have special jails dedicated just for food related crimes, including dine and dash.
  • The reason for this? It's because with Gourmet Cells, people can gain super powers by consistently eating their favorite foods, and from eating certain ultra-rare foods, and a centuries-long war was once stopped by a legendary chef who created the ultimate food, called God.
• Variable Geo takes the trope to literal extremes.
  • The plot centers on an official tournament for combat waitresses, who are competing for the ultimate prize: 10 million yen, a choice piece of prime real estate, and a year's worth of free advertising for their establishment.
  • What's more, VG is such a big deal, that some of the participants even have corporate sponsors, and multi-national conglomerates have stock market shares in the tournament. And one scene shows that the Prime Minister, himself, takes time out of his schedule to watch VG matches!
• In Violet Evergarden, writing letters through the use of ghostwriters becomes very serious business. When two royals are arranged to be married, their correspondence is put on display for the public to admire and discuss, letter by letter. A soldier in a war zone sends for a ghostwriter to write a letter back home. Ghostwriters are used to write letters for a whole town, to be dropped from a plane so that everyone gets a random letter to read. Ghostwriters seem to be present for anything important.
• Makoto from Wandering Son takes female clothing very seriously.
• "Immortal" Tatsu, an ex-Yakuza turned House Husband in The Way of the Househusband, takes his domestic duties INCREDIBLY seriously, to the point where he will flat-out ignore armed gangsters trying to kill him in order to make it to a massive sale, cleaning house for guests is treated with the same seriousness and attention to detail as cleaning up the scene of a murder, and accidentally walking into the women's changing room results in him willingly offering himself up for ritual execution to make up for his "disgraceful conduct."
• Welcome to the NHK does this with hentai games, though that might just be an exaggeration to reflect Satou and Yamazaki's respective mental derangements. It becomes much more serious if you want to make money by making a hentai game.
• ×××HOLiC: Watanuki gives a Breaking Speech to a woman he is teaching cooking because she won't eat what she cooks, as she doesn't want to know herself and will not eat what people she is familiar with make either. Yea, that's right. If you don't eat your own cooking or others, it means you don't know yourself or them and are afraid of commitment. Or something.
  • Being a TV psychic who's accused of giving false readings is apparently heinous enough in xxxHolic to warrant physical assault (even if the psychic is a young girl) and vandalism of the psychic's house.
• Bread is treated as Serious Business in Yakitate!! Japan, although given the wondrous properties of the hero's own bread, (including the ability to rearrange the fabric of reality and send people back in time), perhaps this shouldn't be surprising.
  • Kuroyanagi has made it clear that he's willing to risk bodily harm and even death for the sake of a reaction. Most evident in the jam match between Kanmuri and Tsutsumi, where his reactions consist of shoving his face into a bowl of boiling hot, flaming jam and suffering serious burns, and then trying to climb into a large pot in order to smoke himself to death.
  • Another reaction has him run off and marry a random Gonk woman with the last name Shima just so he can change his surname (he ends up divorcing her just in time to taste the competition's bread.)
  • Saijou no Meii, by the same author, takes this trope in a completely different direction by applying an over the top Shonen Manga mindset to something that actually is serious, namely Pediatric Surgery.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • In the original manga, Yami Yugi oftentimes will find a game he's interested in, only for the bad guy of the chapter to cheat or taking it too far in whatever game's he's interested at the time. Then Yami Yugi will up the ante by turning said game into a Shadow Game by staking his and his opponents' lives on the line. Even the rules of the Shadow Games will penalize the cheater for breaking said rules with a Penalty Game.
  • Even by the series' standards, Seto Kaiba is by far the most extreme example, as he doesn't even care about the mystical stuff behind the games, and is even called out on it by the other characters. He just wants to prove he is the best. And he really enjoys crushing his opponents. Unlike the other characters, who actually just want to have fun while playing games but end up getting roped into life-or-death situations against their will, Kaiba was taught from a very young age that losing a game may as well be equal to death itself, hence the idea behind the Death-T amusement park and him willing to gamble his own life against Yugi in the Duelist Kingdom in order to win, he was ready to die had Yugi not thrown in the towel, and while he gets somewhat better, later on, he still takes Duel Monsters very seriously and is more than willing to accept life-or-death stakes when it comes to duels. As if that wasn't enough, the fact that human society in the Yu-Gi-Oh verse runs on card games (especially in the sequel series'), can largely be traced back to Kaiba's continuous efforts to make it so, including sending cards into space to teach alien life how to duel.
  • In the world where the game takes place, especially the sequel Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, the card game of "Duel Monsters" is a global phenomenon. National tournaments, academies, politics, etc. all revolve around a fairly simple collectible card game. And this isn't even including the mystical occult properties, known only to a few: that Duel Monsters is actually based on magical games powerful ancient Egyptians used to play. From the latter part of the first series onward and in every subsequent series to date, Duel Monsters becomes a Cosmic Keystone or a method of manipulating one. Should children really be playing this card game?
  • The main villain of the Battle City arc is fond of making the game serious with human lives at stake. Furthermore, during the Battle City tournament, two people were struck by lightning and no less than four people fell into comas after they lost their duels, one of which was almost fatal. However, all Kaiba and his lackeys care about is continuing the tournament.
  • In Jonouchi's duel with Ryota Kajiki/Mako Tsunami, at first, Jonouchi does a bit of showmanship and clowning around to try to entertain the audience. Ryota gets extremely pissed and yells at him for making a mockery of the game. Jonouchi takes the hint and starts taking the duel seriously.
  • GX's protagonist Judai attempts time and again to convince his opponents that their reasons for getting into the game are wrong, and need to remember that the main point of the game is to have fun. Pretty amusing when you consider that these people go to a prestigious boarding school for the sole purpose of learning how to play it better. Judai eventually stops enjoying the game in Season 4 after spending most of Season 3 playing with his and/or other's lives at stake. The two-part finale, after all the villains have been defeated, consists of him regaining the sense of fun he'd lost... by going back in time to duel Yugi. After all the life and death battles in the previous two seasons fought using Duel Monsters, Judai plays with Yugi with nothing at stake — the victor of the duel wasn't shown, but it's clear that what mattered was that Judai had a good time, and had a burden lifted off his shoulders as a result.
  • The English dub for Yu-Gi-Oh! GX lampshades this at one point. Manjoume is upset because he's being upstaged by a new guy (Amon) who's absurdly wealthy.
    Manjoume: Who cares if he's better looking and so what if he's richer than I am. I'm really good at playing card games! And that's what life is really all about, anyway!
  • Manjoume's brothers in outright state that Duel Monsters is one of the three pillars of society alongside politics and business. In other words, a children's card game has replaced religion as one of the pillars of society.
  • In the manga version of GX, even Judai finds it odd that Misawa wants to duel him for Asuka's mobile number, something he's have been glad to simply give him. (Misawa has a crush on her and thinks they're an item; they aren't.)
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, Duel Monsters has justification for being so important: Duels create the energy that fuel the world. This essentially equates to perpetual energy for anything with Momentum built into it just so long as duels keep happening and is especially helpful when evading authorities.
  • When Lucciano and José confess to playing a part in the murder of Sherry's parents, Sherry and her butler Mizoguchi angrily try to attack them with hand-to-hand combat. The two villains, while easily warding off their attacks, at first get confused why they are attacking them, then get fed up and easily beat them down, then tell them they have to duel if they actually want to accomplish anything.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL has a card called "Numeron Code" that created all of reality. Card games are also used to decide the fate of three different universes, but in the end it was mainly on account of the villains being that crazy rather than card games being that important.
  • In one episode, Anna tries to get revenge on Yuma for supposedly standing her up (it turned out to be a case of Mistaken Identity). Despite being strong enough to punch through concrete and wielding a massive cannon, she agrees to settle the matter in a duel when Yuma suggests it. Kotori even says that doesn't make any sense.
  • "Stop Having Fun" Guys like Seto Kaiba and Siegfried often mock Jonouchi for using luck-based cards, claiming that he's not a real duelist. At one point in 5Ds, Kiryu uses a luck-based card, and Yusei starts flipping out and asking what he's doing. Kiryu tells him to "Relax, it's just a duel".
    • However, the context of that duel is that Kiryu is betting his life all the time on duels after he regained his memories and he actively tries to end his life by dueling, and the only reason he doesn't just commit suicide is because his life is all about dueling and his fate should be decided by duels.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, the protagonist Yuya Sakaki dedicated his life to his father's philosophy that dueling is all about having fun and entertaining the audience. When he learns of other worlds where people conduct warfare and hurt each other by beating them in duels (losers get sealed in cards, the monsters are solid and can hurt you), the concept is almost inconceivable to him. Then it gets more serious than ever. The ruler of the Fusion Dimension seems to have its sights on conquering the other dimensions, and has nearly succeeded doing so to the Xyz Dimension. Duel Monsters has become so serious that an interdimensional war is being waged over which Extra Deck Monster is superior. And the results are not pretty.
  • At one point, Yuya blames Reiji for Yuzu being missing and throws a punch at him. Reiji pulls a Punch Catch, then scolds him for not trying to settle things with a duel, saying he is dishonoring his father's philosophy. Yuya reluctantly duels him and loses, so he reluctantly accepts Reiji as the group's leader.
  • The Synchro Dimension's society is built on winners and losers. The rich are vastly more powerful and have more say, and Commons are poor and oppressed. People of all kinds will be tossed away by society if they lose duels and, in the case of the Friendship Cup, are even being forced into slavery. At one point, Yuya says they should stop dueling and look for Yuzu after she and her motorcycle crashed into a building and has not been seen since, bringing up that she would likely need serious and immediate medical attention. Shinji tells him that no one will listen to him unless he wins duels and proves his worth, because dueling and winning are just that important here.
  • On a more personal level, Yusaku, the main character of Yu-Gi-Oh! VRAINS, treats Dueling not as a form of competitive sport and entertainment, but as a means to eliminate (or even potentially kill) those who are getting in his way, especially the Knights of Hanoi (for ruining his childhood). Fans noted that Yusaku is the complete opposite of Yuya: driven by rage and hatred, prioritizes Revenge Before Reason and embraces brutality over entertainment.
• The school in 'Jishou F-Rank' settles everything through games. You can lose money, your place in the school, your rights...

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