Hair Trigger Temper / Anime & Manga

You've heard about fury and a Woman Scorned, haven't you? Well, that's nothing compared to the fury of a woman who has no reason to be angry.

"There's only one way to catch these guys. 'Leave no stone unturned and think outside the box,' they said. I get leaving no stone unturned. Any idiot would. I mean, who hasn't turned over rocks to find stuff? BUT WHAT THE HELL IS THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX EVEN SUPPOSED TO MEAN?! MAYBE I THINK BETTER IN THERE!!! Dammit... SO, MY BRAIN'S IN A BOX, NOW?! THAT'S THE DUMBEST THING I'VE EVER HEARD!!! YOU THINK I'M AN IDIOT, CAZZO?!"

— Ghiaccio, JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind

In a World… where action reigns supreme and comedy is snappy, characters with a few screws loose are a dime a dozen.

---

• Grineed from Beet the Vandel Buster goes berserk when he's addressed in a casual manner. "Dude, calm down" will make him blow a crater in the ground with the sheer force of his trembling with rage. He constantly soaks himself in sedative resin, because he knows that sort of thing is "Not OK", no matter who you are.
• Birdy the Mighty's title character has a short fuse and is real quick to anger; even Tsutomu agrees with Gomez that Birdy is a hothead.
• If you so much as blink around Revy in Black Lagoon, odds are she'll get pissed off enough to fill you with holes.
• Bleach:
  • Mayuri Kurotsuchi, the unhinged Mad Scientist, has something of a hair-trigger temper. This was extremely prevalent in his early appearances, where he flew off the handle at the most minute of provocations, which he often took out on his daughter. He has chilled out significantly since then, however, and while he is still callous and easily annoyed, he handles it a lot better. The running joke in the fandom is that Ichigo's group broke into Soul Society on one of Mayuri's bad days. This is made even funnier later on when Mayuri offers only a complaint when Ichigo dares refer to him without rank or honorifics: the other captains comment that Mayuri must be in an excellent mood to let Ichigo off so lightly. Mayuri's good mood does promptly vanish a short while later when Ichigo compares him to Urahara. Even a good day can't stop Mayuri's temper triggering to that accusation.
  • Kensei Muguruma's personality. When first meeting the Vizards, Orihime nervously asked where the bathroom was. Love and Lisa had to restrain him from hurting her out of pure irritation. His method for comforting a child almost killed by hollows was "Smile, dammit!". For extra humor, he is stuck with a lieutenant who happens to be The Ditz meets Manchild, who flits between Genki Girl and Hair-Trigger Temper herself, over the most minor things (such as sesame-topped rice balls).
  • Hiyori Sarugaki hates everyone and takes offense at nearly anything the other characters say to her. She even once jump-kicked Shinji for literally no reason before telling him that she wasn't going to apologize.
  • Byakuya Kuchiki is revealed to have had one in his youth. His grandfather commented that he needed to learn how to control the temper before he could develop his talent. As an adult, he acts like The Stoic but there are very strong hints that he's merely become extremely good at hiding the fact he's still got a short temper.
• Knight Templar Big Brother Souichi Tatsumi from the Boys' Love manga Challengers and The Tyrant Falls in Love had viewed every action of his Straight Gay lab assistant as a transparent attempt to get him into bed from his Anguished Declaration of Love onwards. His suspicions weren't entirely unfounded, but on the whole, Morinaga suffers the brunt of his anger unnecessarily. His overprotective and homophobic traits also cause his little brother's boyfriend, Kurokawa, to suffer greatly — on hearing the news that Tomoe's married him in Los Angeles, he threatens to fly over there to murder Kurokawa and single-handedly take down the USA for being so "perverted" as to allow gays to marry in the first place. And it's all Played for Laughs.
• Classi9 has Wagner, who's in a constant state of annoyance, especially when around Haydn or Tchaikovsky. He gets really angry for no reason and even makes himself mad when he comes to slightly unfortunate realizations. He also never explains what makes him so angry, which lead Beethoven to think he had done something terrible and that their bond was unsalvageable when Wagner was actually mad at himself for not being able to beat him.
• Yanagin in Daily Lives of High School Boys has a hair-trigger temper (and punches out Ikushima a lot in the process).
• Usahara from Damekko Doubutsu is very aggressive around others. Especially Urno the wolf, who he treats like crap by kicking up and sometimes attacking him.
• Digimon Fusion:
  • Shoutmon, the main Digimon protagonist of the series. His name gives it all away - while he’s actually really nice, he’s always loud, uproarious, and quick to fly off the handle. It’s outright mentioned in-series that Shoutmon’s powers are actually driven by his temper, his attacks being powered by the “shout of his soul”. The English Dub sums it up quite nicely when Monitamon points out the ridiculousness of it:
    Shoutmon: That's why they call me "Shoutmon", YOU ANNOYING HUNK OF JUNK!!
  • It’s averted later on the series’ 3rd season, where, after finally becoming the Digimon King, Shoutmon became a lot more mature and composed. By then, he’s been succeeded in this department by Tagiru and Gumdramon, the new human/Digimon partnership of that season.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z was always temperamental, but being bested or knowing Goku's better is usually what gets him the maddest.
  • Pictured above is Chi-Chi, Goku's housewife who gets enraged very easily when the latter does something stupid. Her temper has caused almost every character she confronted to fear her (well, except Super Buu).
  • Bulma's temper is not as bad as Vegeta's, but the littlest things set her off. In Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection 'F', Goku and Vegeta return to Earth as quickly as possible because they know Bulma's going to say something insulting to Frieza and make him blow up the whole planet.
    Bulma: Hey, creep! Were the first two losses not enough? How'd you come back to life, anyways? You're not just obsessed with revenge, you suck at it!
  • Nappa continuously loses his cool while fighting Gohan, Krillin, and Piccolo, and against Goku, he just explodes. Seriously, he makes Vegeta look rational in comparison.
  • Majin Buu, having about the intelligence and temperament of a child, would easily get set off and go on rampages until whatever annoyed him is dead and burned to a crisp. Even after he gains a certain amount of intelligence as Super Buu, he is still prone to temper tantrums when things don't go his way even slightly. He does calm down after his evil side is killed and he begins living among the heroes; while he still gets mad easily, it's shown that Mr. Satan is scolding him about his temper, so he's making an effort to keep it in check.
  • Pan from Dragon Ball GT gets angry very easily for trivial reasons.
  • In Dragon Ball Z: Battle of Gods, most of the threat Beerus provides is in the combination of his incomprehensible power and extremely short fuse. He authorized the destruction of planet Vegeta because King Vegeta only gave him the second-comfiest pillow, and nearly blew up the Earth because Majin Buu wouldn't share his pudding cup with him. When he first appears in Dragon Ball Super, he opts to only destroy half of a planet because its food was merely adequate.

• Daimos: Richter frequently does this.
  • Upon seeing his father die, he instantly tried to murder several innocent civilians to avenge him.
  • He slaps Margarete because she told him she was worried for his sister and implored him to find her. He abuses her again when Erika escapes Execution and he blames her for having a hand in it, even though she was innocent.
  • He is angered when Erika serves in the army even though Olban ordered her to. However, that was likely a case of Anger Born of Worry.
  • He hits Raiza because she asked him to consider her for an important position. He smacks her again because she called to the humans for help, though in this case, it proved to be a bad move as it attracted Miwa's goons.
• Shizuo Heiwajima of Durarara!! has a hair-trigger temper and monstrous strength to go along with it. However, he's aware and ashamed of his violent habits and wants to get "strong enough" to keep a lid on them. There's one scene where hearing that someone has been harassing his friend Celty, he starts muttering "Kill them kill them kill them kill them..." Celty tells him to try to calm down, and Shizuo responds that he is: he hopes that by muttering those words it will release enough of his anger that he won't actually go and kill them.
• In Endride, Ibelda is quick to take offense, even among comrades. He quickly evolves into an Axe-Crazy Blood Knight as time goes on, slaughtering his teammates and his employer, the King.
• Daigo Ikari from Eyeshield 21 will always get angry when someone mentions Ojou High School or its football team, the White Knights, in a bad light; the problem is that every time he hears anything, he's always quick to assume the worst.
  • This leads to a running gag that Ikari never actually gets to play in a game until the second time Ojou plays Daimon, at least a dozen games into their season. The reason is that he always attacks someone and gets himself ejected before the game even starts. His teammates try to prevent this by binding him with chains. It doesn't work.
  • A giveaway is the fact that his surname is a homophone for the Japanese word for anger.
• Fruits Basket:
  • Hiro Sohma is a particularly obnoxious version, made even more irritating by his monotone delivery. Gullible Tohru falls over herself trying to appease him, while most viewers quietly harbor a desire to hit the little brat with something heavy. Unless, of course, you find it refreshing that Somebody Doesn't Love Raymond.
  • "Black Haru", laid-back Hatsuharu Sohma's hostile split personality, has shown signs of this trope as well, deliberately misconstruing Tohru and the student council's president (though the latter probably deserved it).
  • Akito Sohma is the queen of this trope, going from calm to physically violent with minimal provocation, especially when she thinks the Zodiac members are entertaining the idea of leaving her. Hatori's request to marry Kana resulted in her injuring his eye in a fit of rage, Rin was bodily thrown out a window for dating Haru, and a few taunts from Ren were enough to provoke her into tackling her through the door and nearly choking her to death. It's not a product of Ren's abuse either; flashbacks to her childhood show that Akito was always short-tempered, with Yuki's respiratory problems and coughing fits being enough to set her off.

• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Edward Elric gets angry at loads of things, from people calling him short to being told to drink milk. He gets better as the series goes on, though.
  • His master Izumi Curtis, who will throw the Elric brothers into walls at the drop of a hat.
  • Envy has a pretty short fuse, too. While the quickest way to piss them off is to call them ugly, they perceive just about anything as an insult and have a huge Don't You Dare Pity Me! / Inferiority Superiority Complex.
• Sousuke from Full Metal Panic! can get this way towards people, mostly if it seems to him like the person is "threatening the wellbeing of" Kaname. Even the most mundane, normal things that people say or do can be misconstrued by him as being a dangerous "threat" that must be eliminated. Justified in that he was raised by the KGB, with a highly suspicious, Crazy Survivalist nature.
• Cross Marian of D.Gray-Man may fit somewhat. It seems he can be very cool and composed if need be. But there are times when he's prone to showing a bit of a violent temper. Such as him having to nurse Allen back to health. Allen is unresponsive, thus Cross has to cook for him, feed him, and do his laundry. Cross' response to Allen not eating is kicking in a table and creaming. He washes the laundry with his feet and stomps hard enough to crack the wash tub. Ba Ba tries to warn him, but Cross ignores him and continues stomping. He gets furious with Allen in a back-story novel, D.Gray-Man Reverse, and in response to his rage, he punches Allen in the face and pulls his gun on him. Tim hits him to stop him from shooting. He has an important meeting with Allen and drops some very distressing news on him. Allen is frozen in shock for a minute, and Cross, frustrated at Allen's unresponsiveness, responds by slapping him hard enough to knock him to the floor. Later in the meeting, Allen becomes angered by Cross' parting words. He tries to get Cross to wait, then resorts to throwing Tim and hitting him. Cross seethes in anger, then goes to attack Allen, with a Crow guard holding him back.
• Eiri Yuki from Gravitation has this sort of temper with boyfriend Shuichi whenever he's trying to mess with the guy's head. In a slight subversion, however, Shuichi catches on to this ploy pretty quickly. That's not to say that he's any good at defending against it though.
• Hell's Chef from Gregory Horror Show. You insult his culinary skills? He'll haunt you. You aren't appreciating his dishes (even if it's because you aren't hungry)? He'll haunt you. Smoking on his watch? RUN.
• In Guardian Fairy Michel, it doesn't take much to make Salome angry, whether it's her minions annoying her or a slight delay in her search for treasure. Her default mood when not smug is to angrily shout when something goes wrong.

• Inuyasha: Inuyasha and Sesshoumaru are far more similar than either of them will admit. This includes the short fuse that lights their tempers. Inuyasha is openly grumpy, with a base state of "mildly irritated". This flares up into angry on a regular basis even over trivial things. Sesshoumaru, on the other hand, will flit between The Stoic and Tranquil Fury, although it would be a mistake to think his temper is more muted than Inuyasha since Sesshoumaru's anger tends to be more lethal than Inuyasha's. Toutousai once lampshades this by observing that their identical short tempers makes it very easy to see that they're brothers.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Joseph Joestar was very cranky and quick to rile up during Battle Tendency, though by the events of Stardust Crusaders, he's shown to have mellowed out.
  • Speaking of Part 3, Vanilla Ice is usually The Stoic... unless DIO is disrespected in some way, something Iggy learns the hard way.
  • Diamond is Unbreakable:
    • A literal example with Josuke Higashikata. He's usually a laid back Nice Guy, unless someone insults his hair, then they're in for a relentlessly savage and brutal beating at best, and an unspeakably horrific fate at worst.
    • Tomoko Higashikata, Josuke's mother, is this, as shown when she slams a guy's face into a car for flirting with her.
    • Toshikazu Hazamada always reacts to the most minor of transgressions with violence.
  • Golden Wind:
    • Narancia Ghirga is by far the most volatile of Team Bucciarati, and if someone hurts or insults him, no matter what, he will always retaliate by brandishing his knife, or with a flurry of kicks, or by summoning his Stand. Or by summoning his Stand while brandishing his knife while attacking with a flurry of kicks.
    • Pannacotta Fugo is usually calm and mature, but his short fuse often leads to him randomly exploding with rage. Shown best in his Establishing Character Moment, where he goes from encouraging Narancia in his studies to stabbing him with a fork for getting a simple math question wrong.
    • Prosciutto beats Pesci, his own teammate, for having such a weak Stand. Though he's also shown to calm down just as fast, and it's shown that he only acts this way to help Pesci improve his confidence.
    • Ghiaccio has a tendency to go from reasonably calm to full blown rage over things he feels make no sense, such as when he smashes up his own car while ranting about a confusing idiom (take a leaf out of someone's book), to when he goes out of his way to rant over the pronunciation of Venezia/Venice, while in the middle of a battle. Ironically, his Stand is ice based.
    • Diavolo, the Big Bad of the Part, has this, coinciding with his paranoia, both of which tend to cause him to go overboard with punishing his enemies. This can also be seen in his Stand, King Crimson, which expressions tend to range from calm to over the top rage.
• Shinobu of Junjou Romantica often misinterprets even the slightest of things and becomes irrationally angry over them. The fact that he knows he's smarter than everyone else only makes this more apparent.
• Tomoe from Kamisama Kiss is in many ways an Expy of InuYasha and like him Tomoe is openly grumpy all the time, has a face that always seems to be set to a "mildly irritated" expression and he tends to go ballistic over minor things.
• Kill la Kill: Ryoku Matoi has a colossal temper and zero patience for anyone besides Mako, thus she is not to be messed with. She eventually mellows out, though.
• Komi Can't Communicate: Onigashima Akako's whole shtick is that she will get ticked off by the most minor of inconveniences (such as having to wait out a red light or walking behind slow people), building up her rage until she explodes. She's apparently so scary when that happens that even Yamai, one of her closest friends and a yandere who is not above committing murder, is downright terrified of her. The angrier she gets, the more her hair grows to resemble an oni's horns (there's a reason her name translates to "Red Girl from Oni Island"). After Komi untangles her earphone's cable, Onigashima breaks down in tears at the gesture and becomes friends with her.
  Narrator: Onigashima-san turns into a demon when angry.
  Onigashima: Tch!
  Narrator: ...No...Never mind...

• Maria no Danzai:
  • Kinugawa is incredibly easy to set off. And once he starts, he will attack whoever it was that made him angry, with no one able to calm him down (with the posible exception of Okaya).
  • The Volume 2 extra pages show that Shikimi had a similarly nasty temper back in kindergarten, throwing a ball at Kinugawa for insulting her exactly once despite having witnessed how violent he was.
• My Hero Academia has Katsuki Bakugo (pictured on the trope's main page image), who has a ridiculously fiery and explosive temper with a Quirk, a rather tacky yet incredibly fitting Hero Name ("Great Explosion Murder God Dynamight") and an Astonishingly Appropriate Appearance to match. He frequently yells at people to "DIE!!" — even when brushing his teeth, fights his foes with absolute ferocity, is a jerkass to most people around, shouts a lot and has a gruff-sounding roaring voice. Character Development has shown this young man a little calmer and more mature since the series beginning, but he's still an EXTREMELY angry, raging, foaming-at-the-mouth-feral maniac.
• Naruto:
  • Sakura can get like this at times due to her fiery Tsundere persona.
  • Tsunade will think nothing of pounding your face in if she gets pissed off.

• Mio from Nichijou has a tendency to get angry a lot quicker than usual whenever Yuuko or her sister, Yoshino, are around, due to the former's idiocy and the latter being The Gadfly. When she gets angry...
• One Piece
  • Buggy the Clown is an interesting variation, where there is only one thing that sets him off: Mentioning his red nose. However, he seems to be a bit hard of hearing and tends to interpret anything you say as an insult to his nose, meaning he effectively has a Hair-Trigger Temper.
  • Eustass Kid, to a degree than anything that so much as irritates him can set him off. His Ax-Crazy disposition is balanced out by his far more level-headed subordinate Killer.
  • Jack "the Drought" is essentially impossible to negotiate with because of his temper combined with a permanent desire for destruction; the moment anything stops going exactly as planned, such as someone even asking for a chance to talk things out, is the moment he starts getting very, very violent.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Misty, while usually nice, had no patience for Ash's stupidity, especially in the pre-Togepi episodes. According to the Fortune Telling book in the episode "The Fortune Hunters", she's listed as a Gyarados type, a Water-type Pokémon infamous for having a ferocious temperament.
  • Ash himself had such a temper in the Kanto episodes, such as throwing a tantrum and chasing Mankey up a tree when it stole his hat in "Primeape Goes Bananas" and would frequently bicker with Misty. He became calmer since then.
  • The episode "The Song of Jigglypuff" has an entire town full of bad-tempered individuals, to the point that one Officer Jenny (who herself seems a little on edge) has to go around town breaking up fights. This is because nobody there gets enough sleep (being the Pokémon equivalent of Las Vegas and all). Ash manages to avoid getting beaten up thanks to said Officer Jenny breaking up the almost-fight, but Team Rocket was out of luck.
• In Pop Team Epic: Popuko's only real consistent personality trait is her tendency to get inordinately angry at relatively innocuous things. She's been thrown into a swearing, violent rage by such things as thunder, being asked her name, seeing a cuckoo clock, and being asked whether she wants beef or chicken for her meal.

• Rebuild World:
  • Ojou hunter Reina is introduced being a Royal Brat like this, which makes Akira criticize her in Brutal Honesty about how that could get her killed and makes her a liability, thus Reina spends a lot of her subsequent scenes struggling internally with it. Togami teases her for being a Mood-Swinger. Gradually having Took a Level in Kindness, Reina gets past it and becomes a Humble Hero, which lets her trounce her family rival and Shadow Archetype Chloe in Passive-Aggressive Kombat.
  • Lilina is a Jerkass squad member of Katsuya's who's constantly angry and prideful, trying to push everyone around, until this leads to a My God, What Have I Done? moment from her We ARE Struggling Together troublemaking and she dies in a Must Make Amends Stupid Sacrifice.
  • Chloe is an unrepentant example as a Drama Queen, which makes her really suck at negotiations and fall into Murder Is the Best Solution. This is Played for Laughs at one point, as when Chloe's negotiating with Akira after her email was thrown away as spam, she has to constantly have her servants stand-in for her mid-sentence as she recomposes herself.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Rei is usually Hot-Blooded and is easily provoked, especially from Usagi's antics.
  • To a lesser degree, Usagi herself. Despite usually being a happy-go-lucky Genki Girl, she goes from calm to extremely mad with minimal provocation. This may be contributed from her hyperactivity
• Slayers: Lina, Lina, Lina... insult her appearance (namely her small bustline), deny her food or money, spill her food, upstage her — any of these warrants either some sort of explosion, screaming, or physical harm. Two egregious examples are Lina nearly drowning Amelia in a hot spring after Amelia makes a lighthearted joke about growing her bustline, and Lina nuking an entire restaurant for the owner accidentally stepping on a sardine she was eating (which she didn't want in the first place) in the Cold Open of Slayers Premium. While she has always had a short temper, though, later anime productions flanderize it.
• Sonic X:
  • Knuckles The Echidna will constantly get extremely angry when someone insults him or makes a sarcastic remark. Mostly, Sonic and Rouge does the button pushing a whole lot.
  • Amy Rose also qualifies, as she'll easily blow up at anyone who slights her. But this is due to being a Tsundere with mood swings and whenever Sonic has better things to do than to be romantically involved with her. This was taken too far as the series progresses.
• Tamagotchi: Although she is friendly, Memetchi is very easily angered, especially in The Power of Gossip, this is apart of her The McCoy tendencies.

• Manabizaki, the main character of SWOT, always seems angry and annoyed. He gets pissed at anything he deems which interrupts his study time (which happens a lot) and has a tendency to fly into a rage at the slightest provocation. The fact that his school is filled with delinquents doesn't help.
• The Nitro from Toriko are one of the more dangerous species in the setting, which is a bonafide Death World, because of an unholy combination of vast strength, intelligence, voracity, and very short and violent tempers. They were called "Nitro" because they have temperaments akin to nitroglycerine. Even the Taste Hermit Chichi, a presumably friendly Nitro who is able and willing to speak to humans, has a pretty short temper.
• Kurogane from Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-'s is an interesting take on this. Normally he is portrayed as The Cynic and a Perpetual Frowner but around Fai, he flips out regularly, even if Fai doesn't even try to provoke him. Just one look is enough to make Kurogane try to murder him. Or at least in the beginning. Around Mokona, on the other hand...
• Shinobu from Urusei Yatsura used to be a nice and calm teenage girl. But because of all the wackiness after Lum showed up and stole her boyfriend Ataru, the littlest actions around her can suddenly send her into a blinding rage, which is made worse by the massive strength upgrade that goes with it.
  • Sakura, Ryuunosuke and Benten also have rather Short tempers, given how the former two are always pestered by Ataru you can't blame them.

• Maho from Wandering Son gets mad at everything. Saori is a more mild case, as she used to have a bit of a temper but has tried to change.
• Voltes V: Heinel gets angry easily, and discussing the Emperor's view on him is a sore spot in particular, as Jangal, Katherine and Zaki learn. However, this was a case of Early-Installment Weirdness and in future episodes Heinel would have a calmer disposition towards the matter. However, he was also offended at the mere suggestion that Kenichi could be Boazanian, and scolded Jangal for indulging that thought.

---