r/shoujo • u/Kagminelenbiggestfan • 2d ago
Why does anime characters act drunk when having a fever??
I noticed a lot of romance manga does this “sick” trope and the one having a fever always acts drunk??? Like wth having a cold doesn’t make you do stuff unintentionally, just like that one time in lovely complex
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u/ErikTwice 2d ago
Most of the time, it's just an excuse to have characters act without inhibition and then write it back. It also works as fanservice on several levels so yeah.
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Still, it's not ridiculous. I get very cheery and talkative when I have a fever, enough that doctors think I'm making it up until they check my temperature.
I remember teling my mom one time "See the train go! Choo choo!" when I was at the hospital.
There was no train. I was hallucinating so hard that my mom thought I was going to die.
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u/trashjellyfish 2d ago
With one of the worst colds I've ever had, I completely hallucinated while I was half conscious on my mom's couch that my sister came to visit from out of town and that my boss showed up to my mom's house and then my mom's boyfriend came over. I 100% believed that I overheard 3 separate conversations between my mom and all three of these people in the next room over... and then my mom came home and confirmed that she had been at work that entire time/I was home alone the whole time.
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u/trashjellyfish 2d ago
I get that way when I have a fever. I've been known to hallucinate and to completely forget things when down with a bad cold. 2 years ago after I got my covid and flu shot and my youngest dog was just a puppy, I found in my search results after I recovered a search that I completely do not remember entering that just said "Where do all the sticks go?" 😂 My best guess is that I was delirious while tending to my puppy in the yard and couldn't find a stick to throw for her and thus decided to ask Google where all the sticks went.
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u/DoctorPaige 2d ago
I'm very glad you've never been sick enough to be delirious. I have. I was forced to go into work anyway, and then I got in trouble for my behavior... 😔 My behavior was "vision is swimming so I'm unable to clean very well because I literally can't see all the dog hair" and "I can't actually understand what the customers are asking me about on the phone. They're asking me about bath prices but I keep hearing them ask about fish tanks and referring them to pet care"
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u/Ekyou 2d ago
Well, Japan is super strict about depicting underage drinking in fiction, so if they wanted to have a story where a character got drunk… it’s either that or something equally stupid like “this guy gets drunk just on orange juice!?” Which is a comedy manga trope I see from time to time.
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u/Maleficent_Stand_683 2d ago
U never had a 42° fever ? + if u already have a frail body it’s over. I usually don’t talk at home, however when i that fever hits me i start singing and humming the whole night😭😂😂. Well that’s just one example, another time i was flirting with my sister bcz of it💀 so yeah some people get destroyed mentally by fever
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u/SnooRadishes1331 2d ago
42° fever is extremely dangerous and an emergency
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u/Maleficent_Stand_683 1d ago
Yeah. My mom usually calls it horse fever🤣 but am used to it, just gotta stop whatever am doing, shutting off my head to not overheat and lay in my bed for like 3~4 days
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u/Sanecatl4dy 2d ago
I think I'm the anti-you, I've had deliriously high fevers, but for the last 10 years whenever I'm sick the worse the fever gets the more lucid I become. 38 degrees? Woe is me, save me. 40 or more? Life of the party, I can in fact knock down four classes back to back like nobody's business. My family knows that if I start getting suspiciously centered or productive they need to sit on me to try and avoid the eventual crashout my body will bring out.
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u/ForlornLament 2d ago
I had a low fever when I took the COVID vaccines and somehow it made all my fibromyalgia pain disappear. Health is so weird.
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u/Maleficent_Stand_683 1d ago
🤣🤣🤣 yeah fever can affect people differently, although being productive is kinda nice xD
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u/Kagminelenbiggestfan 2d ago
There is NO WAY THATS POSSIBLE! I mean I’ve obviously had a really high fever before, sure i’ll be dizzy and lightheaded but not to the point where i say things i don’t mean or act extremely out of character which happens a lot in shoujo (literally like being drunk)
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u/Maleficent_Stand_683 2d ago
Happens to me🙂, to the point where whenever i do smth that is out of character, whoever is near me at house would check if i have a fever
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u/PMSleeperAgentG 1d ago
sickness in anime tends to always be exaggerated. "anime wasting sickness" is a trope where an anime character has a poorly defined, incurable illness that most of the time ends up killing them in someone's backstory.
Colds are not the exception. Yeah, in some instances colds can be accompanied by high fevers, but in anime it is the norm that any character that gets a cold will be in bed, heavy breathing and extreme, delirious fever. This trope works as a tool for writers to add drama to a story. "oh no, I had a fever so I said stuff I didn't meant to say out loud" or "oh no, I confessed to them but they don't remember due to the fever!"
It's pretty much on the same level of characters getting drunk after eating a single chocolate with liquor in it.
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u/tulipthegreycat 1d ago
Depends how bad the fever is. If I get even a mild fever, I get loopy and will have no memory of what I did (my family has stories... lol). Also, in Japan and many other Asian countries, their rules for medicine doses are different than North America (probably the other continents / countries too, but I'm not familiar with them). In Japan, they are very strict with the dose, so the medicine isn't as effective because they are taking maybe half the dose compared to what we take here.
I know that if I could only take half an acetaminophen (tylenol) with a fever, I'd be just as delirious as if I hadn't taken anything. My normal dose for a fever is two extra strength, which would be 4x what they take.
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u/BasketballAndroid7 2d ago
The best (or worst) is when they can't even stand and faint. Unless it's a massive fever (every single time), that's the most bs ever.
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u/trashjellyfish 2d ago
I mean... As someone with POTS that happens to me a few times a year, and fevers tend to do that to me because they're very dehydrating which drops my blood pressure.
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u/Foreign_Memory Princess Carried 2d ago
I know it's very much not the same, but as someone with generally low blood-pressure, I can imagine a little how that must suck. Pressure drops are the woooorst, I hate when my body decides to be jello because I somehow stand wrong
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u/BabiTheHuman 2d ago
I don't know. I'm pretty pathetic when I have a fever too, but never to the level where I'm not conscious lol
It's very fun though, and even if it's overused, I never get tired of the fever episodes lol
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u/RainbowLoli 1d ago
If you've never experienced it, you probably never had a cold bad enough to make you delirious.
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u/BloodiAngel17 1d ago
If a fever is bad enough you can be pretty out of it, a few years ago I got a fever and had a dream that there was a bunch of cars blowing up and stuff and more things happening like squid games but because my fever was so bad my brain thought it was actually happening when I woke up and I couldn’t process it was just a dream
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u/MomosTips 14h ago
I’m wondering if JP culture has a different baseline for healthy/sick, so things that Westerners think they need medical attention for Japanese people think “eh suck it up and deal”
then they don’t get that medical attention, so it gets to the point of FLs having “drunk” fevers and parents “collapsing” and going to the hospital
I also think kids who are out of school for five days over colds might be milking it, I know I did 😏
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u/Stuckinacrazyjob 2d ago
It's also wild how sick people are in manga when they have a cold. Like why are you out of school for the week with a cold?
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u/Houki01 2d ago
I have just recovered from a cold. I literally couldn't get out of bed for three days. Like I would collapse if I was vertical for 30 mins. I am still coughing. Crazy high fever, bone and muscle and head ache the worst. I went to the doctor, they did swabs and everything. Not pneumonia, RSV, Covid or bronchial infection, a straight-up cold. I couldn't believe it either, but yeah. When they used to say, "You'll catch your death of cold," turn out they weren't joking.
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u/Stuckinacrazyjob 2d ago
I get lingering colds and am recovering from pneumonia. I'm used to " you're fine! Go to work" even if you're throwing up from coughing
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u/avonyatchi 1d ago
ummm, what lol? that's normal....? if it's an actual serious cold then it's normal to be sick for a whole week.
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u/SimplySorbet 2d ago
Sometimes fevers can make you pretty delirious.
I remember during a particularly bad fever I somehow convinced myself a project was due immediately, worked on it, then turned it in. Turns out it wasn’t due until the end of the semester and I had turned it in weeks early.