Self Harm / Anime & Manga

• In Attack on Titan, this is the primary method that Titan Shifters use to activate their transformation since injury (and a clear goal) are required. Eren has a tendency to bite his hand hard enough to draw blood, which others note is actually harder than it looks.
• Berserk:
  • At several points in the manga, Griffith claws at his arms deeply enough to bleed, usually due to going through some bad things mentally.
  • Guts does this in the earlier chapters too, to what's left of his arm with his fingers.
  • And then there's Farnese and her penchant for self-flagellation, which she does for religious, emotional, and sexual reasons.
• Black Lagoon:
  • Implied with Frederica Sawyer. In Chapter #41, scars can be seen on her wrist while she is climbing a ladder, and a few official artworks featuring her show a fairly large amount of scars on her wrists.
  • When Garcia overhears Roberta (who he has a big crush on) getting intimate with a soldier he responds by crying and biting into his finger hard enough that he bleeds.
• A Cruel God Reigns: Around a year after Sandra and Greg's deaths, Jeremy begins slamming his head and body into walls and door frames when he becomes too distressed or during moments of confusion.
• A contractor in Darker than Black has to cut himself in order to activate his powers.
• In Dragon Ball Z, Captain Ginyu wounds himself by stabbing his own hand into his chest, which greatly shocks Goku...but not as much as Ginyu's subsequent use of a body-change technique, leaving Goku in his badly injured body.
• After her wings begin splotching due to becoming sin-bound, Rakka from Haibane Renmei begins cutting off the ruined feathers. She stops when Reki finds out and teaches her how to dye her wings. Reki herself used to mutilate her wings as well due to being born with black wings.
• Miyamura from Horimiya got his numerous piercings by doing them himself, using it as a form of alleviating stress and frustration from his lonely childhood. When depicting his getting the piercings in the first OVA, special emphasis is put on how his skin bruised and bled right after a flashback of kid Miyamura feeling left out in school. This is repeated in the TV anime adaptation. There's mild implication he got his tattoos for the same reason. It's rather telling when some of his piercings start to close up due to him forgetting to maintain them, after his life has become occupied with a relatively wide circle of good relationships.
• In Inuyasha, there is a scene where Naraku, frustrated about the feelings of jealousy and unrequited love for Kikyo (which he blames on the vestiges of his humanity, but are later revealed to be very much his own), rips the skin of his back (where he has a scar that marks him as part-human) with a sword. With a Healing Factor like his, the resulting wound is like a shallow papercut to him, but the scene implies that he has been doing it over and over again and he has implied that he tried even more drastic methods... Since he already knew that it wouldn't work, one can assume that he does it entirely because of the aforementioned feelings.
• The main character of Life (2002) by Keiko Suenobu begins cutting after her best friend turns on her. In the Live-Action Adaptation, this is replaced by an Important Haircut and it focuses harder on the bullying.
• It's revealed in Lonely Wolf, Lonely Sheep that Little Imari has repeatedly broken her index finger on purpose. She started hurting herself because she was going through artist's block but noticed that when she accidentally broke her finger she no longer felt the pressure to draw. Big Imari offers Little Imari to join her as an interior designer so that she doesn't have to paint anymore.
• Chapter 23 of Love Me For Who I Am reveals that in the past, Mogumo, experiencing heavy dysphoria, horrified that their voice was changing, attempted to use a knife to cut out their Adam's Apple. Their mother tried to talk them out of it, but Mogumo called her out for not making any attempt to understand them and their issues. They don't go through with it, but the incident fractured their family enough that Mogumo left.
• Kosame from Magical Girl Site has powers that are activated by her cutting herself. As a result, her wrists are covered in bandages. It's also mentioned that Kosame started cutting herself before becoming a Magical Girl.
• In Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam, protagonist Tobia is being held captive by someone who thinks Newtypes have evolved beyond the concerns of Muggles and is trying to convince him to not care about the war going on right outside. Tobia's Shut Up, Hannibal! is to steal a knife from a nearby guard, cut his arm, and say (paraphrased) "Newtypes and Oldtypes bleed the same blood; we aren't superior, just different."
• Naruto:
  • Gaara attempted to slash his own wrists as a child but was blocked by his own sand barrier. This is after a classic example of a Dark and Troubled Past since while he had never actually been injured due to said sand barrier and was only half-halfheartedly trying out of curiosity, the fact that a child would casually try something like that is still rather indicative of Gaara's state of mind.
  • Hidan impales himself with sharp objects in order to sacrifice people for his religious ceremonies. After linking his body to someone else by ingesting some of their blood, wounding his immortal body allows him to transfer said damage to his victim.
  • The summoning technique in general requires the summoner to offer some blood before they can proceed to summon their creatures. Usually the go-to method is to bite the thumb.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • While she may or may not have tried to speed the process by cutting her wrists and lying in a bathtub, Asuka was implied to have taken a more indirect route by starving herself. She's found naked with her clothes folded neatly (a hallmark of people committing suicide) and is too weak to avoid being taken into custody when Section 2 agents find her.
  • One early draft of episode 24 would've shown Kaworu with scars on his wrists and neck, with the implications that they were from suicide attempts. This was apparently cut in the final draft, but it does help explain why Kaworu was so willing to have Shinji kill him.
• One Piece:
  • Very early, during the Arlong arc, Arlong's ally, corrupt marine officer Nezumi, "confiscates" the ransom money that Nami spent the last 8 years collecting. Arlong tells her that he didn't break their deal and the villagers decide that she has fought enough, and goes to fight him, which would lead to their certain deaths. Distraught and hopeless, Nami grabs a knife and starts violently defacing the Arlong tattoo on her arm, not stopping until Luffy grabs her hand.
  • The scar under Luffy's left eye is self-inflicted, but it wasn't for much of an emotional reason. He just wanted to show how tough he was to the other pirates when he was a kid.
• PandoraHearts: In times of emotional distress Break will claw at his empty eye socket until it bleeds. (It was pulled out of his head by the Will of the Abyss).
• In Shadow Star, Akira Sakura cuts herself - hardly surprising considering how dark the series is. She's depressed and suicidal due to her father's Parental Incest and bullying at school.
• In Suicide Club, Saya is frequently shown cutting her forearms. Initially it seems to be a way for her to deal with her personal trauma, but it's revealed that part of a previous cycle of the Mitsuko club involved Mitsuko and her followers cutting their forearms as some kind of bonding-through-mutual-pain ritual.
• That's My Atypical Girl: Takamatsu and Shimizu have scars from cutting their risks due to past and present emotional problems. The titular character has cut her wrists as well, but those go beyond self harm and were failed suicide attempts.
• Tokyo Ghoul:
  • After being captured and imprisoned in Cochlea, the amnesiac Ghoul #240 is seen wearing bandages over his eyes. This is because he repeatedly clawed his own eyes out (he has a Healing Factor so they would regrow), to the extent the wounds kept getting infected.
  • Juuzou Suzuya is shown stitching his own skin for no discernible reason. Being raised and tortured by a psychopathic ghoul might have something to do with it since he shrugs off more major injuries as well.
• One of the many signs of mental instability shown by Dilandau in The Vision of Escaflowne is how he picks at the cut on his face that Van gave him early in the series and reopens it while brooding. One of his Mooks points out that this is preventing it from healing properly and gets promptly backhanded for it.
• Wolf Guy - Wolfen Crest: The Big Bad Haguro Dou becomes completely and crazily obsessed with protagonist (and werewolf) Inugami. He initially doesn't care about or even think twice about Inugami... until he pushes Inugami too far. This results in Inugami showing him his true form and scaring Haguro. Haguro goes insane from it, and obsesses and stalks Inugami after that, even cutting himself all over his arm and carving the word "Inu" onto his hand.
• In The World God Only Knows, Lune is stabbing herself to relieve the frustration of being unable to harm humans.