Term · Anime culture · 2000
Tsundere
Insults you for six episodes, saves your life in the seventh, and denies both.
In Otakana the clue reads: Harsh outside, soft inside, it's not like they like you
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Anime culture
- Debut
- 2000
- Letters
- 8 · Normal
A tsundere is hostile in public and fond in private, and the story is the slow leak between the two. She calls the lead an idiot, hits him for existing, and then quietly does the thing that only someone paying close attention would have known to do. The disclaimer attached to the type is quoted everywhere, in and out of Japanese: it's not like I like you or anything.
The name is two sound-words. Tsuntsun describes being prickly and turning away, deredere describes going soft and lovestruck, and the compound names a person who switches between them. Fans on Japanese message boards coined it around 2002 and it spread through fan sites fast enough that writers were designing to the label within a few years.
The characters came first. Asuka Langley Soryu in Neon Genesis Evangelion predates the word by years, as do plenty of romantic comedy leads from the 1980s. Taiga Aisaka in Toradora, adapted in 2008, is the version most often used to explain the type, largely because that series takes the joke seriously and asks what someone would have to be protecting to behave that way.
Spelling TSUNDERE
TSUNDERE opens with the letter cluster that catches English typists: TSU, one Japanese syllable spelled with three letters, because English has no other way to write つ. Eight letters, and the last four are the DERE block shared with yandere, kuudere and dandere. Get the ending free, then decide whether the front is TSUN, YAN, KUU or DAN.