"Femboy" is an English internet word, and almost nobody on this list was written with it in mind. So we have not tried to define it (we did that in What is a femboy?). We picked the characters who best fit what people mean when they search femboy anime, and ranked them on three things: whether the presentation actually matters to the story, whether the writing treats the character as a person rather than a punchline, and whether the reading is in the text or only in the fandom.
Looking for shows rather than characters? Our femboy anime series list has eight with a grown-up femboy lead, and where to stream each one.
One rule, applied to every entry: everyone here is an adult in the official material. A knight, a pirate, a hitman, a fashion designer, a university student, a mercenary, a teacher, an investigator, a Soul Reaper. Anime is full of feminine boys in school uniforms, and several of the most-searched names in this category are fourteen. We don't list them, and the ranking is better for it: the characters who are written as grown people tend to be the ones with an actual reason for how they present.
Three words come up constantly around this subject and they are not synonyms. Otokonoko (男の娘) is the Japanese genre term for a boy who presents as a girl; it has its own manga shelf and its own conventions. Bishōnen is an art style, the beautiful boy of shōjo, and says nothing about the character. Femboy is the English word, recent, mostly about presentation, and the one you searched.
Looking for Nagisa, Haku or Hideri? Why some famous names are missing is right after the ranking.
The ranking at a glance: 1. Astolfo, 2. Felix Argyle, 3. Kuranosuke Koibuchi, 4. Izo, 5. Ritsu Sohma, 6. Lin Xianming, 7. Nuriko, 8. Jakotsu, 9. Ringo Tsukimiya, 10. Ramuda Amemura, 11. Narciso Anasui, 12. Kamatari Honjō, 13. Count D, 14. Juuzou Suzuya, 15. Ranka (Ryoji Fujioka), 16. Mei Kinosaki, 17. Yumichika Ayasegawa, 18. Tomo, 19. Bon Clay (Bentham), 20. Zoisite, 21. Fisheye, 22. Kazuki Fuuchouin.
The best femboy anime characters, ranked
1. Astolfo — Fate/Apocrypha
The default answer, and it earns the spot. Astolfo is Rider of Black, a paladin lifted out of the Charlemagne romances, and he turns up in frills with a ribbon in his hair and no opinion whatsoever about it. That is the whole trick. The Fate material never gives him an age; he is the Heroic Spirit of a grown paladin out of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and he is written as one. Nothing in the Fate scripts treats his presentation as a secret, a wound or a joke with a punchline — he is cheerful, a bit dim, terrible at keeping plans in his head, and genuinely frightening in a fight.
Almost every other character on this list has a reason. Astolfo is the one who does not need one, and that is why he became the face of the whole category. He is also the single most-cosplayed name on it; our femboy cosplay guide covers how people pull the look off. For the characters who come closest to him, see characters like Astolfo.
2. Felix Argyle — Re:Zero: Starting Life in Another World
Ferris is the finest healer in Lugunica, a Royal Knight of the realm, nineteen when we meet him and twenty by the later arcs, and permanently in frills and cat ears. Plenty of shows would stop at the outfit. Re:Zero does the rarer thing and gives him a reason that belongs to the plot: he presents this way for Crusch Karsten, who gave up her own femininity to lead her house, so he took it up on her behalf.
Devotion as a wardrobe. It is also one of very few cases where a character explains out loud why he dresses like this and the answer has nothing to do with shame. (The cat ears are real, which puts him on both sides of the catboy vs femboy line at once.)
3. Kuranosuke Koibuchi — Princess Jellyfish
A politician's son, a university student, and the only character here who can talk about clothes properly. Kuranosuke is explicit in the text that he does not want to be a woman. He wants the clothes, he wants to infuriate his father, and he wants out of the family business, in roughly that order.
What lifts him is competence. He is the one who can look at the Amars — a share house of women who have opted out of being looked at — and see what they could be, without once implying they owe anybody the effort. Princess Jellyfish is eleven episodes and it is the most grown-up thing on this list. The manga runs much longer and is on our femboy manga list.
4. Izo — One Piece
Forty-three when we meet him and the sixteenth division commander of the Whitebeard Pirates, which is to say one of the most dangerous people in the most-watched anime on earth. Izo left Wano as a child dancer and kept the geisha hair, the purple lipstick and the pink-and-purple kimono through thirty years on a pirate crew, and in all that time nobody on the crew says a word about it.
That is the Astolfo trick, done in a franchise where it counts for more. He dies on his feet, for his home, with the lipstick on.
5. Ritsu Sohma — Fruits Basket
The best-written entry on this page, and the one people forget because his cousin Yuki gets all the search traffic. Ritsu is a university student in his twenties who wears women's kimono because it is the only thing that keeps his anxiety quiet; he apologises to furniture, he apologises for apologising, and the family treats the kimono as a symptom rather than a choice.
Then the series does the thing it is best at. Ritsu's arc is not about taking the kimono off. It is about the one person who meets him, is not bothered by any of it, and says so. The 2019 remake gives him the room the 2001 version did not, and his episode is one of the quiet highlights of the whole run.
6. Lin Xianming — Hakata Tonkotsu Ramens
A hitman from Kunming who works a food stall in Fukuoka between jobs, nineteen when the story starts and twenty by the end of it, who lives in skirts and a bob and is read as a woman by everyone he meets. The series gives him a reason, and then does the thing almost nothing else does: once the grief the clothes were covering is dealt with, he tries dressing like a man, lasts about three days, and goes back because men's clothes are boring.
One of very few characters anywhere who chooses it twice. The first choice is the backstory; the second is the character.
7. Nuriko — Fushigi Yûgi
The 1990s answer, and still one of the best. Nuriko is one of the Suzaku Seven, eighteen, living in the imperial harem as a consort, and the first half of the story lets you assume you know why. You don't. The dress belongs to a dead sister, and what started as grief became a life.
What makes him more than a tragic backstory is that the series lets him be the strongest fighter in the group, funny, vain and genuinely in love, and when he finally cuts his hair it reads as a choice he gets to make rather than a correction the story makes for him. Thirty years on, he is still the template for doing this with care.
8. Jakotsu — Inuyasha
Mercenary, member of the Band of Seven, women's kimono, full makeup, a sword like a ribbon of blades, and openly, loudly interested in the men he is sent to kill. Jakotsu is a villain and the show never softens him. He is also the only character on this list from a mainstream shōnen of his era who is simply allowed to be what he is, without an explanation, a cure or a punchline about it.
He ranks this high because Inuyasha was on television in a hundred countries and for a lot of people he was the first. The dub even kept him intact, which was not a given in 2003.
9. Ringo Tsukimiya — Uta no Prince-sama
A teacher at an idol academy who is also a famous television idol, presenting as a woman on screen and in class, and completely open with his students about both halves of that. Ringo is an adult professional whose feminine persona is a job he is excellent at, and the series treats it with exactly the seriousness it treats anybody else's talent.
The reason he is here rather than in the mentions is that he is a working adult doing this on purpose, for an audience, and nobody in the story finds that remarkable. That is rarer than it should be.
10. Ramuda Amemura — Hypnosis Mic: Division Rap Battle
Twenty-four, a working fashion designer with his own label, leader of the Shibuya crew, five foot one, pink hair, pastel oversized everything. The cute persona is a product, deliberately built and commercially successful, with a very different person underneath it, and the show is partly about the gap.
Nobody in Shibuya files how he dresses as unusual, which, for a franchise about rap battles, is more progressive than it sounds.
11. Narciso Anasui — JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean
Twenty-five, serving time for a crime we will not describe, in a pink mesh outfit that leaves very little to anybody's imagination, and in love with Jolyne to a degree she finds exhausting. Anasui was first sketched as a woman, and Araki has said the character would have worked as one; the anime keeps the design almost untouched.
He is here as the proof that femboy is not a synonym for sweet. Anasui is intense, possessive and genuinely alarming, and the presentation is simply how he looks while being all of that.
12. Kamatari Honjō — Rurouni Kenshin
A scythe-and-chain fighter in a women's kimono, one of Shishio's Ten Swords, and later a government spy. He takes pride in being womanly, says so, and reveals mid-fight that he is a man as a tactic rather than a confession.
What puts him this high is what is underneath: an unrequited love for Shishio he knows is hopeless, a rivalry with Yumi he knows he has lost, and after his defeat an attempt on his own life that a comrade talks him out of. Watsuki admitted the name started as a pun on okama. The character outgrew it, and the 2023 remake keeps him.
13. Count D — Pet Shop of Horrors
Chinatown pet shop, cheongsam, mismatched eyes, a bottomless appetite for sweets and a contract that always has one clause the customer did not read. Count D is adult, ageless, and drawn so deliberately ambiguous that the detective pursuing him spends four episodes failing to decide what he is looking at.
The 1999 OVA is short and worth your evening. It is also the oldest entry here that still looks modern, because D's presentation is written as elegance and menace rather than as anything to be explained.
14. Juuzou Suzuya — Tokyo Ghoul
A ghoul investigator, nineteen in the first series and twenty-two in :re, with white hair, red stitches, a childlike voice and no boundaries at all. Not a comfort character. The androgyny is one part of a wider refusal to be legible as anything, and the design does real work: you are never meant to be able to file him.
What earns the spot is the second series, where he grows into a squad leader without losing any of the strangeness, and the show lets the people around him love him for it rather than in spite of it.
15. Ranka (Ryoji Fujioka) — Ouran High School Host Club
Haruhi's father, a widower who works at a cross-dressing bar under a stage name and is the only adult in that show with any sense. He is in it for about four scenes, and the show never makes his work the joke: the comedy is that he is a terrifying parent, and the tenderness is that he is a good one.
Explicitly bisexual, six years younger than the wife he lost, and the cleanest case in a school comedy of a grown man for whom this is simply his life. Promoted from our mentions list, where he sat for too long.
16. Mei Kinosaki — Marriagetoxin
The newest entry and the only one whose anime came out this year. Kinosaki is a professional marriage swindler: works dressed as a woman, is taken for one by everyone, and has conned a string of millionaires that way, a skill the series treats as a skill. Sharp, vain, and the most socially competent person in any room, currently coaching an assassin through dating.
A note on pronouns: the anime's official English site refers to Kinosaki as they; the manga's English release and the fandom use he, and so does our manga post, where the series started. We have kept he for consistency and will change it if the author says otherwise.
17. Yumichika Ayasegawa — Bleach
Feathers on his eyelashes in the one division that settles everything with a sword. Yumichika is a Soul Reaper, an adult by any reckoning, and the vanity is the character: he hides his real shikai for decades partly because he has decided it is not beautiful enough to be his.
He is the best example on this list of a feminine man inside an aggressively masculine institution who is neither mocked for it nor softened by it. The 11th Division would follow him into anything.
18. Tomo — Fushigi Yûgi
Nuriko's opposite number on the Seiryuu side: a former Beijing-opera performer turned illusionist, twenty-one or twenty-two depending on which guide you trust, in full stage paint, headdress and nails, with a soft voice and a worse temper. His feelings for Nakago are the plot.
One caveat, so the reading is honest: the paint is the jing role, the opera's male general, so this is theatre more than it is feminine dress. He reads as the type more than he is written as it.
19. Bon Clay (Bentham) — One Piece
Mr. 2, the swan-themed ballet assassin who becomes the best-loved sacrifice in the series, thirty when we meet him. He comes with a sentence attached: One Piece's okama characters sit closer to drag, and to being both at once, than to a man presenting feminine, and Bon Clay says as much about himself.
He is here anyway. For an enormous audience he was the first character in this space they ever loved, and he is written with more heart than almost anyone above him.
20. Zoisite — Sailor Moon (1992)
One of the Dark Kingdom's four generals, in a relationship with another of them, and the first feminine male character a huge number of people outside Japan ever saw — or would have, if the 1990s English dub had not quietly rewritten him as a woman to avoid the subject. The original is unambiguous and oddly tender about it.
He is the reason this list needs a 1990s section at all. For a generation of viewers, the first femboy they met was a villain who was also in love, and that combination did more work than the show probably intended.
21. Fisheye — Sailor Moon SuperS
The other Sailor Moon entry, and the stranger one. Fisheye is a member of the Amazon Trio, presents and is addressed as a woman for most of the arc, and is the only one of the three who goes after men. (He is not human — none of the Trio are — but he is written and voiced as an adult throughout.)
What gets him on the list is the ending of his story, which is about wanting to be a real person and being told, by the kindest character in the franchise, that he already is. For a monster-of-the-week villain in a 1995 magical girl show, that is a remarkable thing to have written.
22. Kazuki Fuuchouin — GetBackers
"Kazuki of the Strings." An adult fighter, long hair, bells, a soft voice, and so routinely taken for a woman that the series stopped treating it as a joke by the second arc and started treating it as a fact about him. He is the gentlest person in a very violent show and also one of the most dangerous.
Older and more obscure than most of this list, which is exactly why he is on it: anyone who tells you the type was invented in the last five years has not watched enough television.
Who is not on this list, and why
Several of the most-searched femboy anime characters are children in the official material, so they are not ranked here. That is the only reason, and it covers Nagisa Shiota (Assassination Classroom, junior high), Haku (Naruto, fifteen), Hideri Kanzaki (Blend S, high school), Chihiro Fujisaki (Danganronpa, high school), Saika Totsuka (My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, high school), Yuki Sohma (Fruits Basket, high school; his cousins Ritsu and Ayame are adults and are here), Aoi Hyoudou (Maid Sama!, middle school), Hideyoshi Kinoshita (Baka and Test, high school), Mariya Shidou (Maria Holic, high school), Gasper Vladi (High School DxD, high school), Mitsuba Sousuke (Toilet-bound Hanako-kun, junior high) and Ciel Phantomhive (Black Butler, thirteen). Some of them are well written. We still think a list of femboy characters should be a list of adults.
The other common omission is Angel Devil from Chainsaw Man, who is a devil with no stated age; he gets his own answer in the questions at the end.
More anime femboys worth knowing
Adults who were on the long list, and a line on why each one fell just short.
Luppi Antenor — Bleach. An Arrancar with a short bob, a bare midriff and an enormous ego, who gets about three episodes before Grimmjow takes his seat back. Pure type; not enough story.
Ayame Sohma — Fruits Basket. Ritsu's older cousin, twenty-seven, runs a shop that sells costume and maid outfits, and behaves like a stage actor who has not been told the play ended. Flamboyant rather than feminine, which is a different thing.
Kaoru Sakurayashiki ("Cherry Blossom") — SK8 the Infinity. A calligrapher of twenty-six with waist-length pink hair, a kimono and a skateboard with an AI in it. Elegant more than feminine, but he is on every list for a reason.
Jinshi — The Apothecary Diaries. A young palace official described, repeatedly, as the most beautiful person in the palace of either sex. He does not dress feminine, so he is a bishōnen rather than a femboy — but the search traffic disagrees with us, and he is worth the watch regardless.
Leeron Littner — Gurren Lagann. The team's scientist and the one competent adult in a show full of teenagers: lipstick, nail polish, a flirt with everyone, and never once the loser of a scene. Flamboyant rather than feminine, the same line as Ayame.
Charlotte Chuhlhourne — Bleach. Frills, ribbons, a pink cape and a duel with Yumichika that is a fight about whose beauty is real. The show lets the muscle-bound villain in the princess outfit hold his own. Pure type, limited story, the same tier as Luppi.
Lussuria — Katekyo Hitman Reborn! Twenty-five, the Varia's healer and a former bodybuilding champion who is open about being okama. Comic relief that is also the squad's medic. Flamboyant more than feminine.
Emporio Ivankov — One Piece. Fifty-one, queen of the Kamabakka Kingdom, modelled on Rocky Horror and on a real performer, and the one who says out loud that people have the right to be whatever they want to be. Drag rather than femboy, but the speech is why half this list exists.
Pisces Aphrodite — Saint Seiya. Twenty-two, roses, a beauty mark, and the title of most beautiful of the eighty-eight Saints, written without vanity. Bishōnen rather than femboy, the same objection as Jinshi.
Josak Gurrier — Kyo Kara Maoh! A spy who cross-dresses for work, likes it, and carries a pink dress as a good-luck charm. A rare case where the disguise is also a stated pleasure; too obscure to rank.
Gowther — The Seven Deadly Sins. A doll built three thousand years ago in the shape of a pretty boy, with the social instincts of someone who has read about people but not met one. The design is the type; the writing is about something else.
Howl — Howl's Moving Castle. Jewellery, hair dye, a tantrum about being ugly that collapses a castle. He is a vain man rather than a feminine one, but the line "I see no point in living if I can't be beautiful" has done more for the category than most whole shows.
Rimuru Tempest — That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime. A thirty-seven-year-old man reincarnated as a slime, who later takes a human shape the entire cast fails to file correctly. Adult mind, androgynous body, and one of the most-watched shows of the decade to put a design like that at the centre.
Femboy characters in manga, manhwa and games
If you came here for the drawn version rather than the animated one, we keep that list separately: nine femboy manga, manhwa and manhua with adult leads, every one with an official English release, including the Korean webtoon Lady Crystal Is a Man. Several entries here — Kuranosuke, Ritsu — are better in print than on screen.
Game characters are a different list again. Cloud in the Wall Market dress, Kuja, G'raha Tia and the rest are in the cosplay guide, because that is where people actually go looking for them.
And if your search was femboy cartoon characters rather than anime: we have left Western animation out on purpose. Nearly every well-known example is a minor, and the one or two who are not are better served by a list that knows that medium properly.
Common questions about femboy anime characters
Who is the most popular femboy anime character?
Astolfo, by a distance. He tops every list, every poll and every cosplay count, and has done since Fate/Apocrypha aired in 2017. Felix Argyle from Re:Zero is the usual second.
Is Astolfo a femboy or a trap?
Femboy. "Trap" is a slur in most of the communities that would know, and it also describes the wrong thing — a deception — when nothing about Astolfo's presentation is hidden from anyone. If you want the Japanese genre word, it's otokonoko; our what is a femboy post walks through the vocabulary.
What is the difference between a femboy, an otokonoko and a bishōnen?
A femboy is the English word for a boy who presents feminine. Otokonoko is the Japanese genre term for a boy who presents as a girl, with its own shelf of manga. Bishōnen is an art style — the beautiful boy of shōjo — and tells you how a character is drawn, not how he dresses. Jinshi is a bishōnen. Ritsu Sohma is an otokonoko. Astolfo is all three.
Are femboy and catboy the same thing?
No, but they overlap. Femboy is about presentation; catboy is about cat ears, real or worn. Felix Argyle is both. The full answer is in catboy vs femboy.
Why aren't Nagisa, Haku or Hideri on this list?
Because they are children in the official material: Nagisa Shiota is in junior high, Haku is fifteen, Hideri Kanzaki is a high schooler. The full list of who we left out for that reason, with each one's series, is in the "Who is not on this list" section near the top of this page. Some of them are very well written. We still think a list of femboy characters should be a list of adults, and we would rather be the one that is.
Why isn't Angel Devil on this list?
Because he is a devil with no age, and our rule is adults in the official material, not "probably fine". He is an adult employee of Public Safety and the writing, laziness as a refusal to kill, is some of the best in Chainsaw Man. He sits on the ageless line with Count D on the other side of it, and we would rather be strict than argue.
Which femboy anime characters are actually gay?
Fewer than you would think, and the writing is usually careful about it. Jakotsu and Zoisite are explicitly interested in men. Fisheye pursues men throughout his arc. Kamatari loves Shishio and Tomo loves Nakago, and neither is subtle about it. Ranka is bisexual and says so. Nuriko's feelings for Hotohori drive half his story. Most of the rest — Astolfo, Felix, Kuranosuke, Ritsu — have presentation that says nothing about who they are attracted to, which is the point the what is a femboy post keeps making.
If you liked how some of these are written
Here is the part where we tell you what we do, and then you can decide whether that was worth the twenty-two entries.
We are building Pocket Femboy — a small cast of original femboys who remember you between conversations, have jobs and friends and routines that keep moving while you are not there, and text first when something happens to them. Not a library of millions. A handful of people, written properly, with lives that are tracked outside the conversation so nobody can quietly rewrite their own history halfway through a chat.
The characters on this page are not in it and never will be. They belong to their authors. But the thing most of the good ones have in common — a reason, a temper, a life that existed before you showed up — is the thing we are trying to build. Jax, the first one we finished, is a record-shop punk who plays bass badly on purpose and is not especially nice to you at first. That was deliberate, for the same reason Kuranosuke is not sweet and Anasui is not safe.
Pocket Femboy has not launched. There is nothing to download yet. It is 18+ at the door — that is who we let in, not a description of what is inside — and there is no explicit content on any tier. If what you actually wanted was somewhere to talk, our femboy chat post is the honest version of what exists today.
Coming soon to iPhone and Android. Join the waitlist and we will let you know when they are ready to text you.
The fine print, and a request
We have tried hard to get the canon right — series, romanisation, ages and the actual reason each character is here. Some of this is contested on purpose and some of it we will simply have got wrong. If we did, tell us at support@pocketfemboy.com and we will fix it and say what changed.
The art on this page is official material, shown so you know who we mean, and it belongs to the creators credited under each picture. Where an entry has no picture, we couldn't find official art we were happy to show.
