Clannad is an anime about one thing and one thing only. How many times can God take a baseball bat to the undercarriage of a young man, before he learns his lesson and stays down! Life is not easy for Tomoya as those who have seen the show can attest to. A life filled with death, depression, addiction, and sorrow, with only intermittent bursts of happiness oases, scattered through the show’s timeline. On that depressing note, let’s talk about one of those moments of happiness.

On Nagisa’s twentieth birthday, she decides to have her first taste of alcohol. Unbeknownst to her - she is probably the biggest lightweight ever seen in anime. After a single sip, Nagisa becomes drunker than your middle-aged aunt at every wedding she attends. After some light fawning over her boyfriend, she proceeds to dip into “angry drunk” - berating him for falling in love with her mother. While Nagisa’s family appear to be enjoying themselves, Tomoya is not the least bit impressed by his spouse’s display. Yet, you can tell that, despite her ill-tempered accusations, he can’t help but coddle her. A very sweet moment for a very sweet couple. Let’s not get into Nagisa’s pregnancy announcement, oh boy…

Where there is tsundere, there will be awkwardness. Lucky for us, Edward Elric is one of the biggest tsundere to ever hit our screen. Having gone through an entire sixty-plus episode adventure - fighting baddies, making memories, chasing his brother’s skeletal body to the ends of the Earth, it’s only fitting that he earns the right to settle down. The only issue is, just who will he settle down with?
Confessions are always par for the awkward course. While there are certainly some great confessions in anime, rife with blushed cheeks and knockout punches of embarrassment, Ed’s confession to Winry at the end of FMAB just melts our hearts.

Set in his ways to the very end, he attempts to apply his alchemist logic to the human heart and fails miserably. It is not until Winry surmounts the courage to accept his confession, that the two realize exactly what they have entered into. As Ed asks for half her life in exchange for half of his - Winry proposes that she will give herself entirely to him (before reneging and dropping her investment down to eighty or seventy percent). The first confession is always the hardest and these two prove that no matter how many evil organizations or mutated monsters you may fight, declaring your love will always be a tough challenge.

Uzaki has a long and sordid history of unintentional awkwardness. Be it falling into a bush or falling in place of a watermelon, that girl seems to have two very erotically charged left feet. While you could pick almost any episode at random in order to fill your quota for romantic awkwardness, our choice is going to go to a drunken Sakurai confessing his love for Uzaki...kind of.

As can be expected of an ecchi anime, Uzaki-chan more than delivers with its catalog of risqué situations. However, this moment, although incredibly awkward due to the miscommunication, is very heartwarming and doesn’t play up to the ecchi tag as much as other scenes. As an intoxicated Uzaki goads an equally drunk Sakurai into spilling his subconscious, he unwittingly confesses his love for her with a single utterance. “Love.” As you can imagine, Uzaki proceeds to freak out and miss a key piece of information - “your cooking.” Watching Uzaki drink her embarrassed self into a coma is very entertaining and only adds to the existing chemistry between these two. We at Honey’s are excited for more awkward romance in season two!

Season two of Kaguya-sama brought with more hilarity than we could possibly imagine. While the premise remains the same - both Shirogane and Kaguya attempting to bait the other into confessing their love first, the characters have grown and the dynamic has evolved past simple trickery. For our pick of one of the cutest yet most awkward moments, let’s take a look at the moon episode.

As Shirogane and Kaguya stargaze, Shirogane becomes entranced by the moon to such an extent, he forgets his pride completely. This results in a passionate exchanging of space facts and some over the shoulder action which proves too much for Kaguya to bear. Watching Kaguya become flustered while an oblivious Shirogane spews his vast knowledge of constellations (including but not limited to, a profession that he would have loved the famous Princess Kaguya forever), is only enhanced by the following day where Shirogane realizes exactly the kinds of things he was saying. He’ll never be able to look at the moon the same way again.

While Horimiya is a recent release, it still provides a great deal of awkward romance as the main heroine Hori, tries to understand her tatted and pierced classmate. While perhaps not as awkward as the previous entries in regard to their abrasive slapping of the viewer’s face with cringe moments, Miyamura’s confession to Hori was one we didn’t see coming (aside from looking at the title of the show of course).

After Hori comes down with a fever, she seems to fall asleep. As Miyamura tends to her by her bedside, the confession just comes piled in with a lot of random tasks he asks her to perform to aid in her recovery. Naturally, Hori is shocked by this proposition and wonders if whether ignoring it is the best option - in order to maintain their current friendship. This moment is probably the most similar to a real-life romantically awkward situation, where you are unsure of how to act around someone after they profess their love for you. Not teaming with comedy or passion, just true painful cluelessness as to what to do next. For this reason, it tops the list - acting as the key to unlocking all of our painful childhood repressions.