Anime Fang

In manga and anime, some characters have a single triangular fang-like tooth normally visibly drawn sticking out of their mouths. This "anime fang" is part of the character's design, and is considered to be cute by some people.

Character: Sakura Hibiki 紗倉ひびき
Anime: Dumbbell Nan Kilo Moteru? ダンベル何キロ持てる？ (Episode 1)

Usage
In Japanese
Rendering
Examples
- Skin-Colored
- Mouth Closed
- Double
- Feral
- Demonic
- Monstrous
References

Usage

In general, the anime fang doesn't carry any deeper meanings or connotations. It's simply a feature added to make characters cuter.

Series focused on cute characters (moe 萌え) with simplified designs are more likely to have anime fangs, while more serious, realistic series won't have them.

In some cases the anime fang is based on actual fangs, which means the character is a demon, vampire, monster girl, or some other fanged creature, including cat girls, or that they're wild and feral for some reason.

Lastly, in some cases the anime fang means the characters teeth are physically protruding, which means the character's bite is misaligned.

Non-symbolic usage is rare: generally a series won't acknowledge in-universe the shape of a character's teeth—nobody ever comments on it, and it doesn't affect anything at all—so it really ends up not meaning anything at all.

In Japanese

The word for the "anime fang" in Japanese is yaeba 八重歯, which is when a person's tooth is misaligned to the point it ends up in front of another tooth, i.e. an "overlapped tooth."

A diagram of yaeba 八重歯, illustrating how canine teeth become misaligned

Source: japanesewithanime.com (CC BY-SA 4.0)

The word for "fang" in Japanese is kiba 牙, like the fangs of a wolf, snake, or ratel.

Some characters with anime fangs have perfectly human overlapped teeth, others have animalistic or demonic fangs. They're both rendered the same way, though, so it's impossible to tell one apart from the other, and everybody just calls them yaeba either way.

Character: Okumura Rin 奥村燐
Anime: Ao no Exorcist, 青の祓魔師 (Episode 5)

Not these, though, these are definitely fangs.

Also, in case you think something like: "why does this character have yaeba? Why haven't their parents sent them to the dentist already?" Let me say again that anime fangs are just there because they're cute and don't mean anything at all, in particular, they don't mean the character's parents are bad, or that their financial situation is so dire they can't afford dental care.

Matsuoka Rin 松岡凛, example of anime fang, yaeba, and jagged teeth, gizaba ギザ歯.

Character: Matsuoka Rin 松岡凛
Anime: Free!, フリー！ (Various Episodes)

Top: Rin, elementary school age, yaeba 八重歯.
Bottom: Rin, high school age, gizaba ギザ歯, "jagged teeth."

Rendering

The way the anime fang is rendered varies depending on the character, series, and style. There are cases when:

The fang is drawn when the mouth is closed.
- The fang is always drawn.
- The fang is only sometimes drawn with the mouth closed.
The fang is only drawn with an open mouth.
- The fang is always drawn when the mouth is open.
- The fang is normally not drawn, even when the mouth is open, and it's only drawn in rare cases when the character is angry or shouting or in close-up shoots.
The typically white upper teeth...
- ...are all visible, and the fang is rendered as a pointy indentation.
- ...are not visible except for the fang, which is drawn as a triangle under the upper lip.
- ...are not visible at all, and the fang is rendered as a skin-colored indentation on the upper lip.
There's always only one fang.
- It's always on the left side, or always on the right side, which means that the character physically only has one fang-like tooth in only one side of his mouth.
- It's sometimes on the left, sometimes on the right, and that depends on the camera angle, which means that the character might have two misaligned teeth, but that doesn't matter, what matters is that its design features always one fang drawn.
There's sometimes one fang, sometimes two.
There's always two fangs, in which case those are probably actual fang-sized canines and not just two normal teeth that just coincidentally misaligned symmetrically.
- Besides the two fangs at the top, there's another pair at the bottom.