Creator / Anna Akana

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Anna Kay Napualani Akana (born August 18, 1989 in California) is an American YouTuber, comedian, filmmaker, actress, and musician. She currently has over 2.8 million subscribers on her YouTube channel, where she's known for her comedic life advice videos, short films, and scientific research.

Anna's career began following her little sister's suicide in 2007; Kristina Marie Akana died at the age of 13. Anna laughed for the first time in several months while viewing a Margaret Cho special on Comedy Central and was inspired to turn her grief into art. Thus began Anna's venture into stand-up comedy where she performed at several local venues under the stage name "Anna Math" (a play on the stereotype of Asians being good at math). Around this time she also had a mildly popular Funny or Die video of her mother discovering she masturbates, and started acting in 2010 with uncredited roles in a The Sims 3 trailer and as a background extra in Beverly Hills, 90210.

In March 2011, she started her own web mini-series called 10 Second Traumas with Deirdre Devlin, in affiliation with Funny or Die and FML.com. The series consisted of 10-second sketches of Anna and her friends' sexual endeavors as women in Los Angeles (where Anna had recently moved). It gained popularity once Ray William Johnson liked the videos and starred in the sketches as Anna's celebrity crush-then-boyfriend; Anna and Deirdre then starred in his series Breaking Los Angeles. This encouraged Anna to start her own YouTube channel in August 2011. Around this time she also received her first credited acting roles with a background cameo in Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" music video and on MTV's Awkward.. Though the 10 Second Traumas brand dissipated, Anna continued to produce content with Ray until the cancelation of their Runaway Thoughts podcast in July 2014.

In 2013, she starred in Riley Rewind, the first scripted series by Ray William Johnson of =3. After making a cameo in Marvel Studios' Ant-Man, she landed recurring roles in two Disney Channel animated series: Big City Greens (as Gloria Sato) and Amphibia (as Sasha Waybright). In 2020, she had a main voice role as Daisy in Magical Girl Friendship Squad and its pilot series. In 2026, she lent her voice to the title character of Matt Braly's follow-up animated project, Clara and the Below.

Her works include:

• 90210 (2010) (uncredited)
• The Sims 3 trailer
• 10 Second Traumas (2011)
• Breaking Los Angeles (2011)
• Katy Perry's "Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.)" music video
• Awkward. (2011)
• Shake It Up (2012)
• Inappropriate Comedy (2013)
• Riley Rewind (2013)
• H A L L U C I N A T I O N (2014)
• Afflicted Inc. (2014)
• Emergency Call (2014)
• PREGNAPOCALYPSE (2014)
• Miss 2059 (Pilot released in 2014 as Miss Earth; Official series ran in 2016)
• Command Center (2015)
• Loose Ends (2015)
• Hipsters (2016)
• The Transformers: Combiner Wars (2016) as Victorion
• Metro Manners (2017-2018) as Super Kind
• Youth & Consequences (2018)
• Big City Greens (2018-present) as Gloria Sato
  • Big City Greens the Movie: Spacecation (2024)
• Amphibia (2019-2022) as Sasha Waybright
• Let It Snow as Kerry
• Dicktown (2020) as Meg
• Magical Girl Friendship Squad (2020) as Daisy
• Jupiter's Legacy as Raikou
• Oni: Thunder God's Tale (2022) as Ann-Brella, Ninjin and Momotaro
• Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur (2023) as Odessa Drake
• Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake (2025) as Fennel
• Clara and the Below (2026) as Clara

Discography:

• Casaulty (2019) (debut studio album)
• No Longer Yours (2021) (EP)

Books:

• Surviving Suicide (2013)
• So Much I Want to Tell You: Letters to My Little Sister (2013)

"I wish I had all the tropes. How many tropes is too many tropes? There's no such number!":

• Actually Pretty Funny: After Anna learns that the expression "Over my dead body" dates back to at least the 1800s, she decides to look up what passed for a joke back then. She finds one amusing Pun-centric anecdote, which she acts out for the viewers. A child sees his mother making bread, and calls her "very lazy", explaining that making bread "...is neither more nor less than loafing!" As punishment for the insult, the mother denies him hotcakes for the next few days. Anna then calls this "comedy gold" by that period's standards.
• Artistic License – Biology: PREGNAPOCALYPSE has females of all ages get pregnant, including prepubescent girls. Pregnancy cannot be achieved until a female begins ovulation.
• The Artifact: Her song "Six Cats" was released in 2017. As of 2026, Beetle is the only surviving of the original cats, meanwhile a Russian blue cat named Benji is the only confirmed new addition to her cat crew. Despite this, she will still mention having six cats as a cheeky reference to the song, like in one of her jokes from the It Gets Darker standup hour. Even by the time Ghost ran away during the writing session of "Pretty Girls Don't Cry", Anna still mentions having six cats before bringing attention to Ghost's disappearance.
  "I got Six Cats, but one ran away. Pretty fitting that Ghost was her name; she ghosted."
• Ascended Extra:
  • On Breaking Los Angeles, she went from being credited as a "Video Hoe" in the episode "Nerd Party" to appearing in the opening credits and being credited respectfully under 'Starring' during the closing ones by "Meat Mouth".
  • Benji went from a foster cat held by Anna in "My highest self talking me down from a menty b" to Congress' Replacement Goldfish.
• Asian and Nerdy: Her original standup stage name was Anna Math. Anna wore thick-rimmed Nerd Glasses and was a sucker for superheroes (particularly Batman, having modeled her Signing-Off Catchphrase after Gotham city). She even had a channel reviewing fantasy and sci-fi novels called Boner Book Club.
• Author Appeal: Cats. She's featured them in her videos since Day 1 and will bring attention to them at random at least once a week. Her most iconic song has her bragging about the Six Cats she had. Word of God is that her love of cats is a means of coping with her sister's death (confirmed in Surviving Suicide, where she mentions having gone to Petco 2 months within the aftermath and being made to choose between a puppy and a kitten; guess which one she chose).
• Bestiality Is Depraved: Played for Laughs in a cutaway for "Why I can't do one night stands", where Anna calls Congress a "handsome sexy little boy" and starts kissing him while one of the Macedo twins says "Oh my god it's like Shane Dawson all over again".
• Bland-Name Product: "How to feel pretty" features Vague magazine and Grand Theft Otter V.
• Bottle Episode: Her post-2023 videos have majorly headed in this direction, a majority of them being analyses of scientific studies where she talks to herself using her clones. Not only are new actors very seldom used for these videos, but they take place solely in one room (usually the office or living room) and have no cutaways.
• Brain with a Manual Control: The Command Center shorts feature Anna in charge of some policemen who work inside a young woman's head, and try to help the young woman make rational decisions.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: In "The War on Masturbation", Victorian-Anna turns to the camera and says she hates the 19th century after receiving bizarre and unhelpful advice from her doctor.
• Break-Up Song: In "Screw You", Anna calls out a guy who cheated on her with other women, then boasts that she found someone bigger and better.
• Buffoonish Tomcat: Congress was famously described as the one who's dumb and doesn't do anything. His lack of expression made for hilarious exploitation especially when Anna was having her cats review products. In the case of the bubble backpack, Anna guessed Congress would be the only cat who'd like it since "he's too mentally challenged to know any better". There was also his Catchphrase of randomly saying "fish!" as an Inner Monologue.
• But I Can't Be Pregnant!: PREGNAPOCALYPSE begins with Anna and her friends panicking over suddenly developing baby bumps without having sex beforehand. They soon discover that this happened to every female in the world, regardless of age or species. Things go From Bad to Worse after Anna gives birth to a baby alien, which gobbles her up when she tries to touch it.
• Celebrity Crush: A 10 Second Traumas sketch of the same name has Anna admit hers is Ray William Johnson.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome:
  • The Macedo twins stopped appearing in her videos by 2023. In a case of Demoted to Extra, they still work on the production from time to time.
  • Benji's twin Milo was seemingly a One-Shot Character for the episode "My highest self talking me down from a menty b" who hasn't been seen since. He was a foster cat after all.
• Clones Are People, Too: All of Anna's clones represent individual characters despite being genetically indifferent from her. In her scientific research videos, their names are Bestie, Carl, and Sheryl.
• Cluster F-Bomb: In a cutaway from "The weirdest thing that turns me on", a drug addict with no money tries to persuade her dealer into giving her free drugs. When her attempts fail, she gets out a gun and goes ballistic with rage.
  Drug Addict: GIMME THE MOTHER[bleep]ING DRUGS YOU MOTHER[bleep]ING C[bleep]SUCKER BEFORE I POP A MOTHER[bleep]ING BULLET IN YOUR MOTHER[bleep]ING CUNT!
• Comeback Tomorrow: Anna recalls in "Too late for a comeback" when a grouchy old lady at the gym interrupted her training session, by demanding Anna and the trainer to move out of her way. Anna laments failing to come up with any retorts until after the session, until she decides they might have pissed off the lady even more.
• Comical Overreacting: Anna often uses this in her videos to demonstrate how not to behave.
• Coming-Out Story: In "how I came out^note as bisexual (although she notes in the video that she has a preference toward men, and did not explore her attraction to females until she engaged in a threesome with two other women) (and what my parents think)", which is self-explanatory.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: According to Curse Of Eve, God created neckties and high-heeled shoes to torture Adam and Eve after they ate the Forbidden Fruit.
• Corruption of a Minor: "Explaining my 20s to my teens" has Anna gift her own vibrator to her 13-year-old self, justifying it because her younger self apparently won't have her first orgasm until age 21 without it. This is lampshaded by Anna's 40-year-old clone, who asks if she stole her vibrator and gave it to a child.
• Crazy Cat Lady: Despite one central video debunking the claim, Anna has still fostered dozens of kittens, has a song bragging about her (then) six cats and how she wishes she had all the cats, claiming there's no such thing as too many cats.
• Cross-Cast Role:
  • She often takes on male roles in her advice videos usually accompanied by wearing a gag mustache, although sometimes she gives them to her brother or her boyfriend instead.
  • She plays Batista in Max Landis' Wrestling Isn't Wrestling, in which several young women portray male WWE Superstars.
• Cutaway Gag: It was very common for Anna to incorporate cutaway gags when depicting hypotheticals or real events she'd witnessed, typically utilizing her clones or friends. This was dropped once she shifted her focus to analyzing studies.
• Death of a Child: The stop-motion short film "dolor" revolves around Anna's little sister Kristina being dragged by a strange lady into various dimensions before being shown dead in her coffin. "When I always wanted to die" takes a darker turn by depicting a live-action reenactment of the argument that lead up to Kristina hanging herself.
• Depending on the Writer:
  • The sponsor of her videos is either Squarespace or Better Help, though "Stalking is ruining my life", "Feeling forgiven by God can reduce the likelihood of apologizing", "Emotionally absent fathers create sons who don't invest in love" and "Want female friends? Dress like a tomboy so they don't feel threatened" are all sponsored by Incogni.
  • Whether she says "kitten season" or "fundraising season" when explaining Squarespace in her sponsorship outros, the latter becoming more common.
• Despair Event Horizon: In her video on religion, she stated that her little sister's bullying-induced suicide essentially broke her, disconnecting her from things such as the devout Christianity she was raised on, which made her go atheist at the time.
• Double Vision: Anna often plays multiple roles at once in her advice videos.
• Downer Ending: "Emergency Call". A terrified Anna desperately reaching a 911 operator from a dark room trying to hide from a killer is eventually found, and the operator is ultimately unable to do anything but listen to Anna's tortured screams in horror.
• The Dreaded Toilet Duty: "The shittiest day of my life" revolves around Anna's roommate clogging the toilet and leaving out rain boots by the bathroom door hoping it would cover up the smell. Anna goes into the bathroom with a mask and cleaning supplies and, grossed out, exclaims...
  "I'M CLEANING SOMEONE'S SHIT!!"
• Driven to Suicide: "When I wanted to die" shows us a live-action reenactment of the tragic suicide case of Kristina Marie Akana, found with a scarf hung around her neck and pronounced dead at the hospital.
• Exact Words: "Pokémon GO Ruins Lives" eventually culminates in Anna making a Deal with the Devil for him to bring her a Pikachu. He doesn't let her catch it.
• Failed Future Forecast: In September 2020's "How 2020 Ends", the Anna representing November cries that Donald Trump got re-elected. Once November actually rolled around, he ended up losing the Election to Joe Biden.
• Fangirl: Of Megan Thee Stallion, if her TikToks featuring her music and the "aah" Verbal Tic of Bestie are anything to go by. She also covered "WAP" with the Macedo twins.
• Foreshadowing: In the video where Anna introduces Beetle to us, she says "This. Is. Beetle." in the same way as in the "Six Cats" song, which was released 6 months later.
• Gender Flip: "All Female Cast", written in response to the controversy surrounding Ghostbusters (2016), demonstrates sexist men's worst fears for all-women remakes of Rush Hour and Entourage, until the men admit that one movie might actually prove interesting if given that treatment.
• Generation Xerox: "I'm Mean to People I Love" includes a re-enactment of Anna shooing away company so she can concentrate on her work. She then wonders if she inherited this tendency from her Workaholic father, queuing a flashback of him shooing her away to concentrate on "work". Anna's delivery and dialogue for her father sounds exactly the same as that she used for her present self (except he at least calls little Anna, "Sweetie", before she leaves).
• Genre Shift: "Things Only Cat People Understand" begins as another advice video, until Congress marches in with a giant robot suit, and Anna must prevent him from taking over the universe.
• Girls with Moustaches: Anna very often wears a fake mustache when taking on male roles in her videos.
• I Am Not Pretty: Anna recalls in "How to feel pretty" when her attempt to compliment a friend's appearance resulted in the friend stating, "I don't feel pretty", provoking a Flat "What" from Anna.
• Incest Subtext: Anna calls Squarespace her "biological father" in her sponsorship outros and sometimes goes as far as to call it her "sexy daddy". This is obviously a Subverted Trope because Anna does not exhibit this behavior to her real father in any of the videos he's featured or mentioned in.
• Inherently Funny Word: Anna admits in "How to Get Fired From Phone Sex" that the word "penis" makes her giggle.
• Ironic Nursery Tune: Her song "Against the Darkness", a rap from the perspective of her talking to her late little sister, ends with her coldly narrating a grim variation on the "Itsy Bitsy Spider" nursery rhyme that instead has the spider drowning itself in the rain from the water spout.
• It's All My Fault: "Against the Darkness" has Anna blame herself for her sister's suicide. "Selfish" takes a deeper turn by having Anna outright admit that she herself was the problem, as she had everything she wanted in her famous lifestyle but still wasn't happy all because her sister wasn't around.
• Kindhearted Cat Lover: Anna used to have six cats which she spoiled rotten and often featured in her videos. Although now Beetle is the only remaining from the song she made about it, while she adopted a newer one named Benji. However, she refuses to call herself a Crazy Cat Lady.
• Lady Swears-a-Lot: This was most common in her earliest works, where Anna was noted for having a dirty mouth skilled in the art of Vulgar Humor. Her vulgarity became toned down as time went on and she aimed to produce more serious life advice videos than being solely comedic, but it still pops up from time to time, most notably in a 2025 study on the use of profanity as a pain reliever (although the swear words were bleeped out so she wouldn't get demonetized).
• Mama Bear: Exaggerated in You Wouldn't Understand, in which Anna becomes enraged at anyone who presents anything that could prove the least bit dangerous to her baby (eg, a pesticide-ridden lemon peel, a sharp plastic knife).
• Magical Girl:
  • The "Metro Manners" Public Service Announcements star Anna as Super Kind, who uses the power of music... and New Powers as the Plot Demands to punish monstrous "Metro Menaces" who act inconsiderate on the subway.
  • Plays one in the form of Daisy from Magical Girl Friendship Squad, a rebellious, punk stoner whose Tom Selleck-shaped bong gives her magical powers.
• Meaningful Name: Ghost ran away from Anna's home and hasn't been seen since. She lampshades this in "Pretty Girls Don't Cry".
  "I got Six Cats, but one ran away. Pretty fitting that Ghost was her name; she ghosted."
• Memory Trigger: A pizza she made reminds her of her Persian orange cat Congress, who had recently died.
• Musicalis Interruptus: Anna's Epic Rap Battle between a scientist and her clones runs shorter than an Epic Rap Battles of History video, because an Anna from an alternate universe barges in, and shoots everyone.
• Naïve Everygirl: Whenever Anna flashes back to her early adolescence, she plays a clueless and ingenious young girl with an innocent fashion consisting of braces, pigtails and colorful overalls, complete with a Valley Girl lisp. In "3 Things I Wish I Knew Before Having Sex", she recounts entering her sexual awakening only with the knowledge that she had from anime porn, reading her mother's romance novels, and the few images that were up online during the dialup internet era.
• Nerd Glasses: Anna wore circular, thick-rimmed black glasses in her early days to portray her under the Asian and Nerdy archetype, having had a penchant for superpowers, sci-fi, movies, anime and magna, and books (even running a series called ''Boner Book Club" on one channel).
• Nested Story: In "The Creepiest Night of My Life", Anna recalls when she tried to become a "cocktail waitress", and the man she served grabbed her hand, and ordered her to tell him a story. The tale she delivers to him in the flashback has the same beginning as the video itself.
• Ocular Gushers: Pretty much what the mental image of brother's eyes turning into two broken facets amounts to in "Against the Darkness".
• Open-Minded Parent: When Anna admits to her mother that she masturbates, she expresses disgust with hearing Anna's description of how she does it, but doesn't actually tell her to stop doing it.
• Out of Focus:
  • Beetle has appeared extremely scantily since 2023. Anna seems to be more in favor of Congress (before his death), Benji or the dog.
  • Benji is surprisingly starting to veer into this direction, having last been seen in a video in November 2025. Now Anna either has the dog or no animal at all accompanying her studies.
• Overcrank: Several of Anna's videos have slowed-down dialogue, such as "When It's Okay to Speak Up", in which Anna gives a slow-motion "The Reason You Suck" Speech to a boy rudely interrupting her "alone time".
• Parental Substitute: Played for Laughs. She calls Squarespace her "daddy" in sponsorship outros, sometimes saying that they play catch.
• Parody Commercial: Anna made one for "Rape Prevention Leggings", camoflauge-patterned leggings promoted to render the wearer's bottom half, including her vagina, invisible to rapists.
• Polar Opposite Twins: Miss Earth and Miss 2059 stars Anna as beauty queen Victoria Young, twin sister of intergalactic competitor Arden Young (played by Anna in Miss Earth, and Nikki Soohoo in Miss 2059).
• Prefers Going Barefoot: A lot of videos show her barefoot in the comfort of her own home, sometimes even for cutaways.
• Public Exposure: She's posed for a few nearly naked photoshoots, sometimes with Body Paint, and some fully nude ones (mostly covered by shadow).
• Remember the New Guy?: Studies from 2023 on up show a Bichon Frisé dog without a confirmed name that Anna sometimes holds, pets or talks to. Nothing has been confirmed as to whether the dog is actually Anna's or a crew member's.
• Replacement Goldfish: Benji seems to serve as this for Congress in her post-2024 videos, being the cat she most often spoils and holds.
• Revenge Ballad: "Pretty Girls Don't Cry" is about an ex who screwed Anna over and Anna retaliating by one-upping her successful career in a brag-rap feminine empowerment anthem.
• Scatting: Does this in "Pretty Girls Don't Cry" to compensate for the lack of a real trumpet.
  "Can I just make like trumpet sounds with my mouth cause I don't know if we can afford like an actual trumpet person."
• Seamless Scenery: She's quite fond of doing this in her videos, the most prominent examples being "When I've Wanted To Die" and the "Intervention" music video.
• Seeks Another's Resurrection:
  • "Against the Darkness" has Anna telling her late little sister that she can resurrect from the ashes resulting from her cremation and shuts down anyone saying otherwise.
  • Riley Rewind revolves around a high school student to save the life of a dying suicidal classmate.
• Signing-Off Catchphrase: "Stay awesome, Gotham."
  • Copyright issues with DC Comics temporarily made her change it to, "I'm Anna Akana. You stay awesome."
  • After her cameo in Ant-Man, Anna remarked that she might have to change her catchphrase to something Marvel-related. On the spot, she came up with, "I'm Anna-Man. Stay Marvelous", which didn't stick.
  • Her newest videos now omit a sign-off catchphrase entirely and instead have her talking about her video's sponsorships before a simple "bye".
• Skewed Priorities: "Pokémon GO Ruins Lives" demonstrates some of the dangers of placing catching Pokémon as the utmost importance.
• Speech Bubbles: Sometimes Anna uses these to emphasize the important parts of her videos. Other times, she uses them for a more comedic purpose, such as translating her cats' meows.
• Split-Screen Phone Call: "When You're Unfriended" has one in which the split disappears near the end of the scene, allowing the callers to share an actual hug.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: The 2024 Verizon ad shows a golden tabby cat that is seemingly Congress' stand-in, seeing as he was the only two of Anna's cats alive at the time that bears the closest resemblance to the cat in the ad.
• Team Mom: Very often acts nurturing and maternal to her cats, often spoiling them rotten like having them review bizarre cat products like a backpack, wine, or costumes.
• The Talk: Anna recalls in "3 Things I Wish I Knew Before Having Sex" that her mother's version consisted only of scare tactics warning her not to have sex before marriage.
• Theme Tune Roll Call: "I Have Six Cats" consists mostly of Anna naming and describing her cats.
• Toilet Seat Divorce: Inverted in "The Little Things", which ends with Anna proposing to her then-boyfriend/roommate Ray William Johnson, who always put the toilet seat down for her.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Her cats, particularly Congress and Benji, would very often have an Inner Monologue say "fish". Anna mentions that the former likes fish in one of her standup jokes too.
• Twin Switch: Anna admits in "The Twin Fantasy" that she used to fantasize about pulling this, even though she doesn't have a twin sister.
• Unusual Euphemism: "Am I An Adult Yet" uses "zigazig ah", a phrase from the Spice Girls song "Wannabe", as a euphemism for "penis".
• Vocal Evolution: When Anna impersonated her Filipina mother in 2012's "Appreciate Art (TV is Awesome)", she didn't bother with the accent. In 2018's "3 Things I Wish I Knew Before Having Sex", Anna impersonates her mom with convincing Filipina inflections.
• Vanity Plate: Anna has experimented with various idents over the years.
• Verbal Tic: The "Bestie" character uses "aah" very often with a similar inflection to Megan Thee Stallion.
• Wham Episode: "how I came out (and what my parents think)" reveals that Anna is bisexual.
• What the Hell Is That Accent?: More recently, Anna ends her video advertising the sponsor of her video while speaking in another accent. It isn't uncommon for someone to complain about her accent. Although there was one interesting example where some said her Japanese accent didn't sound very Japanese and she did it again in a Japanese school girl outfit.