Not a Morning Person



""It's far too early in the morning for it to be early in the morning.""

- Nanny Ogg, Witches Abroad

""The morning is evil.""

- Avatar Korra

Some characters get up in the morning smiling, their hair perfectly in place, ready to face their Morning Routine with a song and the help of cute animal critters.

And then there are these characters. They don't want to get up in the morning at all if they can help it, and when they do they wobble around as if they're some sort of zombie, often sporting bags under their eyes and Messy Hair that would devour combs whole. It's best not to talk to them in the morning, because goodness knows they'll take everything you say as an insult. From the merely lethargic to the downright dangerous, these characters are just Not a Morning Person. No Instant Waking Skills for them.

In Anime and Manga, it seems to often be implied that characters are this way because they have low blood pressure. In the west, these characters are more prone to desperately need coffee in the mornings instead. Of course, coffee isn't exactly known to lower blood pressure, so both can go hand in hand.

If you Wake Up, Go to School, Save the World, you will most likely be like this. Crime-fighting always beats out sleep, for some reason. Sometimes these characters are also Heavy Sleepers in general, but not always. They may also have a tendency to kill roosters and smash alarm clocks. Then again some days you really don't want to wake up early.

Truth in Television for some people.

Anime and Manga

 * Ryoma from Prince of Tennis. A whole anime episode was dedicated to him sleeping in before the Saint Rudolph match and his friends trying to fill in before he gets to the courts.
 * Kyouya Ootori from Ouran High School Host Club. He's sometimes referred to as the "Low Blood Pressure Overlord" because of it. Also, Token Loli Hani has been known to beat up a soldier for waking him up too early.
 * More like annihilating an entire platoon, complete with bunny shaped mushroom cloud. Of course, it may not be accurate given that the narrator is not known for his reliability.
 * According to an extra chapter in the manga, Mori becomes sociable and flirty when he's sleepy. Considering his character, it's hard to say whether or not this is being played straight.
 * A bonus story in a volume of D.N.Angel shows Satoshi's morning routine. It says that he gets up early in the morning and spends "half an hour wandering around in a daze" before he fully wakes up and gets ready for school. Again, the cause is given as low blood pressure.
 * Yuki from Fruits Basket, to the point that he often gets up and sleepwalks in the morning. His karate-trained reflexes are still in effect however, and he'll often swing punches at his rival in his sleep without being fully aware of it.
 * Nayuki from Kanon is this, as well as a Heavy Sleeper. She says that she got her spot on the track team because she often has to run to school in the morning.
 * In Azumanga Daioh, while the characters are on vacation at Chiyo-chan's summer home, Osaka wakes up and announces that she's going to wake Yukari up by banging on a frying pan. However, she's not yet fully awake herself, and the implement that she retrieves from the kitchen is a large knife, much to the shock of the other characters.
 * Yukari herself is not a morning person, often needing her mother or Nyamo to wake her up for work.
 * Ayaka Kisaragi from Phantom Quest Corp.
 * Asuna in Mahou Sensei Negima! is known for being bad at mornings (she gets up early on weekdays for her paper route, then sleeps in heavily on weekends).
 * Nabiki Tendō of Ranma ½ is portrayed as such, especially in the anime. It tends to be played up in fanfiction.
 * That might possibly be because she tends to get woken up at around the crack of dawn by the sounds of Ranma and Genma sparring. If my "alarm clock" was two guys audibly beating on each other, accompanied by insults and random battle cries, I wouldn't be particularly energetic either.
 * Usagi in Sailor Moon.
 * Chieri from The Cherry Project, who is similar to Usagi and also written by Naoko Takeuchi.
 * Naru from Ghost Hunt is not good when he wakes up. Then again, it's his fault for sleeping in a van (vol. 1) and
 * Roger from The Big O has this problem, credited both to his character and to his late-night "negotiating". Other characters have repeatedly complained about his tendency to wake up past noon. Thankfully, Dorothy's there to play a little "Run Down" on the piano...
 * If Kyon's sister from Suzumiya Haruhi doesn't wake him up every morning with glomps, he'd most probably be late for school.
 * Misato Katsuragi from Neon Genesis Evangelion has this problem, even if she has not been drinking the evening before. Well, that and the fact she's incredibly lazy when it comes to household chores.
 * Funnily enough, the thing that gets her fully alert is...more beer.
 * Naruto: In the words of Deceptive Disciple Kabuto, Sasuke "can be a bit cranky when he wakes up."  Yeah, thanks Captain Obvious.

Comic Books

 * Captain Boomerang from Suicide Squad. His reaction to being waking before dawn for a mission was "Why have I got to be up before the sun? I ain't going to make the flowers grow!"
 * Scott Pilgrim qualifies, if only because there isn't much morning, if any, left by the time he wakes up.
 * In fact, the one time he does get up early, it's the first sign that something is wrong.

Literature
"Its habit of getting up late you'll agree That it carries too far, when I say That it frequently breakfasts at five-o'clock tea, And dines on the following day."
 * Nick Mallory in Diana Wynne Jones's Deep Secret/The Merlin Conspiracy is very much not a morning person. Not only is he grumpy, he can't even speak coherently or open his eyes until he's had four cups of coffee. It's later shown that he can wake up... he just feigns being really out of it so no one will bother him until he's less grumpy.
 * Apparently, this is based off of Wynne-Jones' friend Neil Gaiman's actual morning routine.
 * Running gag in the Aubrey-Maturin books. Aubrey sleeps easily and wakes fresh as a daisy, while there's at least one book where Dr. Maturin is woken up to perform a vital surgery on a dying patient. His response? Cussing, throwing things and then refusing to go anywhere near the sick bay until coffee had been provided.
 * Stephanie Plum considers five in the morning to be the middle of the night. Most of her associates disagree, to her disgust.
 * In Child of the Hive, Will is oblivious to all of Alex's attempts to encourage him to wake up. When Alex then phones Ben, his reaction is, "Bugger off, 'm hungover."
 * In The Hunting of the Snark, this is one of the signs by which snarks can be known:

"If I ever breakfasted at half past eight I should walk on the Embankment, trying to end it all in a watery grave."
 * Bertie in Jeeves and Wooster is like this, complete with Must Have Caffeine. In his Establishing Character Moment, he describes being rudely woken up "in the small hours"—at half-past eleven. If you insist on waking him before noon, don't try talking to him until he's had his Spot of Tea and a bit of breakfast--he's pretty patient after that, but not before.

"Mike was a stout supporter of the view that sleep in large quantities is good for one. He belonged to the school of thought which holds that a man becomes plain and pasty if deprived of his full spell in bed. He aimed at the peach-bloom complexion."
 * Also from the ranks of Wodehouse, there's Mike from the Psmith series:

Live Action TV
"Professor: Questions about ethics can be answered with one simple thing: a mirror. [...] After the fact, can you wake up the next morning, look into the mirror, and like what you see? Pearl: At what time in the morning? [...] 'Cos I've never seen anything in the mirror before 8 o'clock that didn't belong in a horror movie..."
 * It's been established that Columbo isn't coherent until he's had his coffee.
 * Rachel in Friends is one of these.
 * She even shouts at the Singing Guy!
 * Charlie in Two and A Half Men rarely wakes up before early afternoon.
 * Susan Ivanova in Babylon 5 has problems waking up when it's still dark outside—and she works on a space station.
 * This is J. Michael Straczynski writing what he knows, as he tells on the commentary track to "Signs and Portents"; he doesn't morning at all well either.
 * The short-lived sitcom Pearl gave us this gem between Rhea Perlman and Malcolm McDowell:


 * Father Ted generally will not start his working day until at least 11 am and frequently later. Consequently, being woken at 5am with an airhorn during Lent comes as something of a shock.
 * In Red Dwarf the reason that Lister gave for not finishing college was that there were lectures at two o'clock in the afternoon 'Come on, who's awake then? You can still taste the toothpaste'
 * Penny in The Big Bang Theory. She has a "Don’t knock on my door before eleven o’clock or I punch you in the throat" rule.

Newspaper Comics
"Garfield: I'm not a morning person. Jon: Good afternoon, Garfield."
 * Garfield is often shown to be like this. Lampshaded by the following exchange:

""Ain't summer vacation grand?""
 * Roger Fox, the father of the household in FoxTrot, tends to be... rather incoherent before his morning coffee.
 * "Coooooffeeee...""The pot's over by the fridge." "Coooooffeeee..." "The fridge is that way." "Coooooffeeee..." "See that thing with the little red light?... Roger, that's the answering machine!" "* glug glug glug* "
 * Jeremy from Zits, as amply demonstrated by the image above. For those who are Not a Morning Person, what he is describing is familiar—that time between being rudely awakened by an alarm, and actually being able to get out of bed.
 * In another strip, he asks his mother to sign a note reading "Please excuse Jeremy from this morning's classes due to excessive gravity."
 * Dagwood from Blondie.
 * A Heart of the City comic deals with this. Heart comes down and complains that she hates morning people like Mrs. Angelini, who responds that it's noon.


 * Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes. In a particularly memorable strip, his mother dragged him out to the bus stop still clinging to his bedding.

Tabletop Games

 * GURPS offers the Slow Riser disadvantage, in which, for an hour after waking up, your character suffers -2 to self-control rolls and -1 to IQ rolls and IQ-based skill rolls. So, in other words, they're irritable and can't think properly. They also get an extra penalty for missed sleep.

Video Games

 * Link in The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass.
 * And The Wind Waker. And Ocarina of time. And The Minish Cap. Possibly also A Link to the past—OK, let's just say, Link's Not a Morning Person in general...
 * And now Skyward Sword as well.
 * And since it's always at the beginning of the game, it overlaps with Good Morning, Crono.
 * Though apart from the games' openings Link tends to qualify as The Sleepless.
 * Rin Tohsaka from Fate/stay night. She's not quite as bad as the other examples but tends to be decidedly grumpy in the mornings... Actually, it clashes with her perfect schoolgirl image so badly that even after knowing her for awhile, people are outright shocked to see her dragging about in the morning, completely at a loss for words and unsure if what they've just seen was real.
 * And then they forget about it.
 * A Running Gag in Rockman EXE / Mega Man Battle Network is that it's nearly impossible to wake up Netto/Lan Hikari on time. On one occasion in the anime he woke up, assumed he overslept, then got all the way to school before realizing it was Sunday.
 * In Harvest Moon: Animal Parade, the Wizard is not a fan of mornings. Until a certain quest event, you can only meet him around or past 2 AM. He also loves coffee.
 * Grumpty-type villagers in the original Animal Crossing sleep in until around 10 in the morning, most days. In all games, they'll also gripe about it being early in the morning until around noon.
 * Rose from Street Fighter is this. Low blood pressure...

Web Comics

 * Since Dechs "Shadehawk" Rashart—a.k.a. Antihero for Hire—habitually "works nights", he takes this to extremes. Forget mornings—waking him up before sundown has this kind of effect.
 * There's a Casey and Andy strip where Andy has made coffee—despite not drinking coffee himself. The question of "why" is answered when Satan enters—in the form of a seven-feet tall, winged, clawed, fanged, bright-red and particularly grumpy-looking demon. One gulp of coffee later, she reverts to her familiar form, brightly remarking "Morning, all!". "Yeah," comments Andy, "It's best if she gets her coffee right away."
 * See it here.
 * It's Walky!: "Morning people suck ass."
 * K from Blip. "I am Monday's bitch."
 * Eric Remington, as seen in this strip of Loserz.
 * Arthur in Arthur, King of Time and Space, as seen (amongst other places) here. Also Morguase, in order to contrast with her son Gawaine, who rather famously is.
 * Sarah of El Goonish Shive, as seen here and on the next page.
 * White from Grey Is, he likes to sleep in and if you wanna wake him up early you'd better have coffee
 * Baby Blue in Sinfest. Then, she is disgruntled for additional reasons.

Web Original

 * The Onion: "I Tell Ya, Until I've Had My Morning Coffee, I Am Just a Rapist."

Western Animation

 * Dexter's Laboratory: Dexter's parents are like this before they have their coffee. The coffee is a magical elixir that turns them into the parents we see the rest of the time.
 * Jane and Trent Lane from Daria are both like this, and according to Daria, so is Quinn.
 * Princess Luna in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic; shortly after her Heel Face Turn she turns down Celestia's invitation to join her for breakfast, simply grabbing a piece of fruit and excusing herself. Justified, as she is the literal embodiment of the night.
 * Eda from The Owl House; even a witch and practitioner of Wild Magic needs her morning coffee, it seems.

Real Life

 * People who routinely stay awake during the night and sleep in the morning are usually stereotypically considered terminally lazy, but science now tells us they might just have delayed sleep phase syndrome.
 * Otherwise known as college students.
 * Also known as high school students.

Who the heck let the morning people run things?