Unintentionally Unsympathetic / Anime & Manga

Unintentionally Unsympathetic in Anime & Manga.

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Works with their own pages

• Pokémon
• Sword Art Online

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• Akame ga Kill!: Seryu Ubiquitous, the mentally-ill Imperial Guard with a strong sense of justice, is no-less an Anti-Villain than her friends in the Jaegers, having been orphaned at a young age but having grown up wanting to stop anyone and anything that could harm the things she holds close. In all honesty, she simply intends to protect her Empire, and she cares about her Jaeger comrades. She even loves children, and is willing to play games with them on her off-time. However, her Ax-Crazy nature when fighting those she believes are villains trying to oppose the Empire, and her hypocritical blindness towards the benign motives of Night Raid make her incredibly hard to sympathize with when she acts like a batshit insane murderer in a guard's uniform simply out for blood. It didn't help that she was also the first one to brutally kill a Night Raid member, and on top of that, the victim being fan-favorite Sheele. As a result, she receives far more hatred from the fandom than the actual Hate Sinks.
• Aquarion Evol tries to make Mikono Suzushiro come off as a shy girl that despite of having daddy issues and insecurity problems because of her apparent lack of powers as an element, tries her best to help and understand the people around her. But to many, she comes across as uncaring, spoiled, indecisive and useless (both in and outside the Aquarion!), and only makes up misunderstandings that Amata must apologize for, showing no concern over his issues or how her indecisiveness causes him and Zessica trouble.
  • Zessica Wong also became this for many other fans. According to them, Zessica's extreme emotional dependence on Amata (including trying to kill herself over her feelings him at some point, and asking him towards the end if he'd love her in another life) eclipsed all of her other character traits, and since the show kept trying to write her as a good person going through a Break the Cutie process, she instead looked like a selfish and creepy Stalker with a Crush girl who kept throwing herself at a man whose heart was set on another girl and clearly couldn't like her that way.
  • For others, there's Kagura Demuri. He was supposed to be a Hot-Blooded rival with a Dark and Troubled Past and an Unrequited Love for The Hero's girlfriend, but his attitude towards Mikono was seen as increasingly creepy, selfish and entitled. The Freudian Excuse that the plot whipped out and Mykage's Mind Control of him can easily be seen as a cop-out to make Kagura look more sympathetic than he actually is.
• Area 88:
  • In the manga and OVA, Shin is intended to be sympathetic because his dreams were crushed after he was tricked into becoming a mercenary. However, he's not a particularly heroic or moral character. His self-absorption, wangst, and failure to contact Ryoko during his deployment make him unsympathetic in some fans' eyes. In the TV anime, he's so emotionally flat and withdrawn that it's difficult to sympathize with him.
  • Mickey, a traumatized Vietnam Veteran who struggled to adapt to civilian life, is intended to be sympathetic as well. However, he comes across as amoral, self-pitying, and self-absorbed, abandoning a fortunate life and the people who loved him. Instead of getting therapy, he chooses to fight in a bloody civil war that is tearing Asran apart. His anger issues and overbearing personality in the TV anime make him even less sympathetic.
• In Assassination Classroom, the Reaper's dying moments were supposed to paint him in a sympathetic light. However, he was also a remorseless killer who betrayed Koro-sensei just because he didn't give him enough attention. There's also the fact that he begged Koro-sensei to train him, showing no empathy for the fact that he murdered his father.
• Attack on Titan:
  • Gabi is meant to represent the viewpoint of Eldians living in Marley, and is initially presented as a naive but ambitious military cadet who cares a lot for Reiner, who is her older cousin. However, as the arc progresses, Gabi grows increasingly unlikable due to her treatment of Falco and her buying more and more into Marley's anti-Eldian propaganda. Fans' dislike towards her has reached a peak when she is directly responsible for Sasha's death, and even to this day is regarded as one of the series' most hated characters.
    • Even ignoring all that, the fact that the Marleyans are basically Nazis who took over the world and the Eldians are the Jews in analogy, down to being forced to wear badges identifying them as such, Gabi comes across less as a precocious soldier-in-training who wants to make the world a better place and more as a Hitler Youth who wants to become a Sonderkommando ^note That is, a Jewish collaborator with the Nazis.. The rest of the Warrior Unit is pretty much in the same boat as her on this, though perhaps not quite as hated.
  • Annie shares her backstory that she was born to a Marleyan woman and an Eldian man, but abandoned her and was subsequently adopted and trained by Mr. Leonhardt. It could have worked to make her more sympathetic in the eyes of fans who only view her as a sadistic monster... had she not stated that if she had to kill everyone she had killed all over again to get back to her father, she absolutely would.
• Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts: The three main female characters are usually meant to be portrayed as the more sympathetic counterparts to the boys. However, their actions throughout the two seasons doesn't earn them any such sympathy at all.
  • Minami Shimada is your archetypical Tsundere. She is supposed to have feelings for Akihisa, but you wouldn't know that because she constantly beats the crap out of Akihisa for stupid reasons. These would often leave him with something broken, and unable to figure out if Minami likes him or hates his guts.
  • Shouko Kirishima is an even bigger offender of Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male than Minami is. Like Minami, she too has a supposed love interest in the form of Yuuji. Sadly for him, she's a Yandere Stalker with a Crush who does things to him that would get her arrested anywhere else. What set audiences off was episode 7 where a couple makes fun of her. Does she get a Heel Realization and Character Development by realizing how much of a piece of shit she was to Yuuji and vows to be a better person? Nope! Instead, it gets treated as a Moral Event Horizon and she continues harassing Yuuji to the point of forcing him to marry her. She learns absolutely nothing.
  • And last but not least, Miharu Shimizu. She's a sexist Psycho Lesbian who refers to people other than Minami as "disgusting pigs" and treats Minami as an object of lust. Her actions range from ignoring her consent to spying on her, and even assaulting, blackmailing, insulting, and/or attempting to kill her classmates (usally Akihisa) just for being near her. She gets worse in Season 2, where she accusses Akihisa of treating Minami badly. Considering all the things she does to everyone else, she is the absolute last person tell Akihisa how to act with girls.
• Bayonetta: Bloody Fate:
  • There's the titular witch herself. While the movie stays true to her characterization in the game, it also plays up Bayonetta's more negative traits such as her Blood Knight tendencies, violent sadism, and her general Sociopathic Hero persona. It certainly doesn't help that some of the fight scenes are rather anticlimactic, making her come off as a boring Invincible Hero rather than the Showy Invincible Hero she usually is. Also, in the games she was very protective of Cereza, but in here, she leaves her with Luka and doesn't think about her until near the end.
  • Then there's her fellow Umbra Witch, Jeanne. While she played a villainous role in the first game, it was only because she was brainwashed into serving Father Balder and the Angels of Paradiso. The anime, however, makes no mention of said brainwashing, so it seems she's serving Father Balder willingly and takes great joy in the chaos she causes, such as shooting up a train full of people during her first meeting with Bayonetta. Thus, her sudden Heel–Face Turn near the end of the film comes off as shallow and fake.
  • Enzo also ends up being this. While he was was jerk in the games, he was largely entertaining due to his Butt-Monkey status and was noted by Bayonetta herself to be a respectable family man. Like with Bayonetta, the film plays up his more negative traits, transferring his Butt-Monkey status to Luka and portraying him as a greedy sleazeball who overcharges families for funerals, something that even disgusts Rodin. The fact that he never gets punished for this makes it worse.
• Beastars: An incredibly bizarre example in Melon. Because originally the whole point of his character was that he was a villain through and through, and that try as he might any attempts on Legosi's part to redeem him were futile. But then for whatever reason the original ending for the series was completely derailed. Melon was given a Freudian Excuse of an abusive single mother who ate his dad and named him Melon because she thought he would taste sweet like a Melon.^note  Melon's dad is not actually dead but that's a whole other mess of retcons that isn't particularly relevant to this example His personality was also changed from Axe-Crazy Villain with Good Publicity who does things For the Evulz to temperamental manchild with mommy issues. At any rate, the whole thing comes off as trying to shoehorn sympathetic qualities into a character who by design is completely devoid of them.
• Bleach:
  • Both of the captains who ditch Soul Society with Aizen. Tousen abandons his closest friend Komamura to travel the “path of least bloodshed” to justice, which apparently includes supporting Aizen’s slaughter of an entire town, and he repeatedly mocks Komamura’s appearance when he gains sight. Gin Ichimaru spends over a century helping the Big Bad with little reservation, and seemed to have a personal cruel streak regardless of Aizen’s influence. When he reveals that he was always looking for an opportunity to kill him as revenge for taking a piece of Rangiku’s soul, the mournful tone over his death can feel a bit undeserved.
  • Hiyori Sarugaki, one of the exiled Vizards, comes off as incredibly bratty, hot-headed and just an overall Jerkass ever since her debut. Sure, what happened to her was a horrible situation out of her control, but the Turn Back the Pendulum arc shows she was always a jerk, regularly attacked Shinji for no reason and gave Urahara a lot of shit just for being promoted to Captain and replacing the woman Hiyori looked up to, not to mention the other Vizards went through the same thing and manage to not lash out at every person who even slightly pisses them off. She even casually mentions wanting to kill Chad and Orihime for getting too nosy about the Vizards, even though Shinji is the one who suspiciously joined Ichigo's school despite clearly not being a teenager in order to put pressure on Ichigo. When she gets bisected by Gin when she rushes to attack Aizen (despite Shinji specifically warning her not to do that) during the Fake Karakura Town arc, a lot of the fans felt like her brash, reckless behavior finally and deservedly bit her in the ass.
• Saya Kisaragi of Blood-C. At first, the show presented her as a skilled warrior against the Elder Bairns. But the problem is that she fails in protecting and saving people. The most egregious example is episode 8 where she just watched several of her classmates die before she could attack and at the end, all of them, except the class representative, are dead. Her mourning of their deaths was supposed to come out as sympathetic. But given the track record of how many people died throughout the show and the Idiot Balls that these people had been holding on, it's not.
• In Case Closed. The culprit of A June Bride Murder Case, Toshihiko Takasugi. While he does have a Freudian Excuse, his eventual redemption and the fact that he got a very light sentence for his attempted murder can make some feel sour. First, there is the fact that he goes for a Revenge by Proxy, instead of going after the man responsible for the death of his mother. And even then, Superintendent Kiyonaga Matsumoto wasn't fully responsible. He didn't see her when she was wounded during a car chase, because he was pursuing a criminal, and he never forgave himself for that. At the end of the episode, he feels remorse for what he did but it's only because he realizes that his victim was his childhood friend (and crush) all along, not because she was an innocent victim.^note Watch him gloat about how easy it was to trick Sayuri and then his reaction when he learns the truth about her. Moreover, he has the dubious honor to be one of the few culprits in Detective Conan who don't go after an Asshole Victim, yet he has one of the lightest punishments and gets a happy ending three years later. All in all, he comes off as an Easily Forgiven Karma Houdini to some people, when a lot of the series' Sympathetic Murderers have their lives destroyed or even die.
• Citrus
  • While Mei definitely has her reasons for being the way she is, the fact that Yuzu ends up putting in much more effort to get her to open up and keeping the relationship going to the point that it seems like the latter is carrying the entire thing on her back is not lost on many readers. This is especially apparent in Chapter 35 when it's noted that a full year had gone by and Mei is still more or less the same. Then when it's discovered that Mei is in another Arranged Marriage, the fandom hoped that she would finally open up to Yuzu. Chapter 36 then reveals that Mei did tell Yuzu at the last moment in a letter, which is basically the equivalent of getting a divorce via text message. While her reasons for doing so were also understandable, it felt like less of a want to protect Yuzu from a heartbreak and more of a result of Poor Communication Kills since there was really no reason to not let Yuzu know about it early on ^note If anything, letting Yuzu know about the Arranged Marriage early on would've relieved them both from a nice chunk of the drama by letting the fact sink in and giving them time to either prepare for the eventual break-up or formulate a plan to stop everything, or Take a Third Option and run away together. In Chapter 40, Mei becomes even more divisive when she quits school in order to rush the arranged marriage.
  • Additionally, Shou himself is meant to be seen as sympathetic given how he's remorseful for being absent from Mei's life. However, from the looks of Chapter 40, he's done nothing to make his father reconsider the situation despite Yuzu telling him that she's in love with his daughter. Granted, he is shown talking with his father about it, implying that he did, in fact, play a role in getting Mei out of the Arranged Marriage, but some think he should have acted sooner.
• Cross Ange: Zola Axberg is the captain of Arzenal's First Company, and is intended to be a hard yet benevolent leader. The problem is that she is a rapist who regularly molests and sexually harasses her subordinates and tries to force herself on Ange, with the heavy implication she does this to all her new recruits. When one of the DRAGONs kills her, she is mourned by her old comrades who scroll her virtues. In essence, the only reason she gets away with it is because both she and her victims are women and it is played for fanservice. To be exact, she is a Norma, meaning that she also went through all the shitty tribulations every Norma went through and with the Norma's lives being considered Cannon Fodder, she and the rest of the older Norma already resigned to the fact that their lives wouldn't worth much anyway. So in the long run, thinking for normal moral repercussions wouldn't be worth it. But all those were at best just a Freudian Excuse for Zola, and they were all not shown on screen for the audience to realize. She also died before all of the extent of Norma abuse — which would've given her sympathy — were shown.
• Daltanious: Emperor Dolmen, while having a Dark and Troubled Past that even the heroes sympathized with, can feel like this. While him bringing the fall of Helios Empire was Laser-Guided Karma, he lost the plot when he began invading and attacking several planets that had nothing to do with his oppression. Despite claiming to be the voice of the oppressed clones, not once does he use his power to help them or challenge their societal mistreatment. He's more than happy to use Kloppen in the same way the Helios Empire exploited their clones, and abandons him once he can no longer service him. Dolmen comes off as a Narcissist with a victim complex based on his past who believes that he's entitled to do whatever he wants because he had a shitty upbringing.
• Danganronpa 3:
  • Ruruka Andou. Her and Seiko Kimura were supposed to be portrayed as two former friends that ended up having a fallout together, but it came across as a victim finally standing up to her bully. Andou believes that the only thing good about herself is the sweets that she makes, but Kimura is on a medication that has a deadly reaction to sugar, so she can't eat Andou's sweets. Despite stating this multiple times, Andou blames Kimura for their All Take and No Give relationship, because if Kimura won't eat the sweets Andou has to offer, thus nearly killing herself, she must not care about her at all. The manga anthology shows that Andou is well aware that it might kill Kimura to eat her sweets, and doesn't seem to get why Kimura might be upset about that. Made even worse by Kimura's Extreme Doormat attitude, quietly accepting Andou's abuse until Komaeda indirectly causes their fallout.
  • Ryota Mitarai is a Hikikomori who works to the point of near-starvation or collapse, but considering it's his anime that directly results in the brainwashing of the Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair cast, thus creating Ultimate Despair for Junko and he is never directly punished for this left a very bad taste in a lot of fan's mouths. While the whole thing was Junko's fault, Mitarai keeps this information to himself for years, even when he could easily create a countermeasure, and refuses to admit his part in Junko's crimes until it's almost too late. Even then, he only focuses on how he was personally victimized as opposed to the damage he unintentionally caused.
• DARLING in the FRANXX:
  • Zero Two resents her environment and the people in it because she feels she's treated like an experiment and a monster. However, some of the squad's reservations with her certainly are true. Her reputation as a dangerous Pistil is backed up by seeing the extent of the damage done to Hiro, Mitsuru, and the Plantation 26 members, and she seemingly feels bad for only one of these incidents (but only because the Stamen she hurt this time around turned out to be her "Darling" after all). Her backstory in episode 13 made her more sympathetic due to how she was treated and experimented on by the adults, but she spends the next episode not explaining anything to her teammates (though to be fair, neither does Hiro), telling them she never considered them teammates to begin with, and then beating them unconscious when Hiro isn't in the hospital room after they decided to let her see him a final time.
  • Ichigo has loved Hiro since they were children, especially since the latter was the one who named her and helped her through hellish childhood upbringing by the APE. The way she acts on her feelings, however, is very questionable. While its understandable she wouldn't trust Zero Two at first because of her reputation, a lot of her actions make her feel like she's acting out of jealousy and trying to force her feelings on Hiro, who only sees her as a sister and holds no romantic feelings for her whatsoever. Despite being the leader of Squad 13, she gets very emotional and makes critical mistakes on the battlefield when Hiro is in danger. This culminates in Episode 14 where while she's justified in wanting to keep Zero Two and Hiro apart because the former almost killed the latter, she takes advantage of the situation and tries to grow closer to Hiro and declares her love for him when he's clearly emotionally distressed after Zero Two is removed from Plantation 13.
  • In the case of Kokoro, her reason for abandoning Futoshi was due to his over clinginess towards her which made her uncomfortable. That would be all fine and good, except she never explained these insecurities to Futoshi and so it's made to look like she was only stringing him along. Nevermind the fact that she promised to be his partner forever and no less than five minutes later broke it. Add to the fact that Futoshi was genuinely in love with her and had no idea that she didn't return his feelings at all. He is given no other choice but to accept that she doesn't love him back, leaving a bad taste in the mouths of many fans. Then there's the fact that she could have simply tried to explain the problems that she had to Futoshi — instead of breaking her promise after so little had passed, which makes her appear as rather manipulative. She seems to be somewhat aware of this as well as she later tells Mitsuru that she doesn't see herself as a nice person.
  • The Klaxosaurs. We're supposed to feel for them because VIRM invaded Earth a long time ago and forced them to flee underground to save their species, then tried to do it again, but it falls flat when you consider that they were attacking cities full of innocent humans for something they didn't even know they were doing wrong (no one knew that "Magma Energy" was actually the souls of dead klaxo-sapiens). It doesn't help that the Klaxosaur Princess explains this while she's tied up Hiro and just given him a Forceful Kiss, making her look like a sexual assaulter on top of it all. Although this behaviour is somewhat justified in that she's the last inteligent member of her species and has gotten a little bit too fixated in stopping VIRM, but still...
• Digimon
  • Digimon Data Squad: Yggdrasil is meant to have a point about how Humans Are the Real Monsters and uses that as justification to destroy the human world to save the Digital World after Kurata destroys the barriers separating them both. However, 99% of the evil humans did against Digimon were entirely on Kurata's initiative, and Yggdrasil didn't lift a finger to stop either of his genocidal campaigns. When Kurata was defeated by humans and digimon working together, only then did Yggdrasil get off his ass...to commit genocide against humanity.
  • Though Yggdrasil in Digimon Adventure tri. is indeed the main villain, he's intended as a Well-Intentioned Extremist: his actions against humanity are to protect the Digital World, because he believes that humanity is a threat to Digimon. This is more or less a Recycled Script of his actions in Digimon Data Squad... with one big exception. In Savers, the villain for the first half of the series was an evil human who, of his own initiative, committed horrific atrocities against Digimon, so Yggdrasil's fears, while ultimately inaccurate, weren't unfounded. In tri, there is absolutely no precedent to this idea that Humans Are Bastards. Every single threat the Digital World faced in the Adventure continuity was the result of an evil Digimon, with the sole exceptions being the Digimon Emperor and Oikawa, who were mind-controlled or manipulated by an evil Digimon. On the other hand, those same threats were resolved by humans and Digimon working together, so not only does this attitude make little sense outside of naked prejudice, but it also makes Yggdrasil come across like an Ungrateful Bastard.
• This trope is the main reason why Kyoma Mabuchi from Dimension W is such a divisive character. He is meant to be portrayed as a Jerk with a Heart of Gold with a soft spot for kids and a Dark and Troubled Past involving the deaths of his girlfriend and his fellow soldiers. But while his past is genuinely tragic, it does little to garner any sympathy for him, especially with his horrendous treatment of Mira due to her being a robot ( and resembling his deceased girlfriend). He spends most of the series bossing her around and treating her like a robot and not a person, never calling her by name and referring to her as a piece of junk. One particularly egregious example is in episode 5 where after Mira manages to escape the other world, instead of being concerned, Kyoma punches her for not being there when he needed her (hurting his hand in the process). The fact that he warms up to Mira in the end does very little to make up for him treating her like shit for 11 episodes straight.
• Domestic Girlfriend: The protagonist Natsuo has this going for him. Early on, Natsuo calls out Shu for having an affair on his own wife with Hina. While he is right in all the things he says, Shu himself does note that Natsuo is doing this partially because he appears to have feelings for Hina himself. Eventually, Hina calls her relationship off with Shu and enters into a relationship with Natsuo. This, of course, puts her in a different, but still precarious position because later on, her relationship with Natsuo is discovered and she's forced to leave the school. Given how Natsuo tried to help Hina out of one toxic situation but ended up landing her in a different, but equally scandalous scenario, his moral lecturing in front of Shu and Hina can come off rather flat. One can't help but feel that Natsuo is technically in the moral right... but for all the wrong, selfish reasons of wanting Hina for himself and couldn't really care less about how Shu's wife was hurt in the grand scheme of things considering he did eventually get together with Hina, the exact same woman who cheated with Shu on his wife that Natsuo was so adamant about defending. And then he and Hina break up and he ends up in a relationship with Rui instead... only to change his mind and dump Rui for Hina after already getting her pregnant. While Rui forgives him for it and leaves on good terms, this has the effect of making Natsuo look like a hypocritical, philandering deadbeat dad who toys with the hearts of the women he supposedly loves.
• Dragon Ball:
  • Vegeta from Dragon Ball Z can count in the Frieza Arc, due to the first Funimation Dub's attempt to make him an Adaptational Nice Guy. He originally started out as an Arc Villain of the Saiyan Saga who wanted to destroy the earth, but did an Enemy Mine with Goku, Gohan and the rest of the Z-Fighters (except for Tien and Piccolo, who rightfully didn't trust him). In the Frieza Arc when Vegeta gets killed by Frieza, the first Funi Dub version of the show tries to get fans to feel sorry for him when he tells Goku his sob story about how Frieza groomed him to be the ruthless person he was. This ignores the fact that Vegeta still committed a lot of atrocious acts without Frieza. The manga, Japanese anime, and Kai Dub lack this sob story in favor of rightfully portraying Vegeta as the villain he actually is at the time, and instead when he's dying, Vegeta simply tells Goku that Frieza is responsible for the extinction of the Saiyan race, and is annoyed that he had to submit to Frieza.
  • Mai (member of the Pilaf gang from the original Dragon Ball) from Dragon Ball Super is seemingly supposed to be viewed as a cute Love Interest for Kid Trunks. However she can come off as unsympathetic considering she's a grown woman in a child's body, and flirts (like with a flirtatious wink) with a child who's unaware of the truth (which is essentially rape by deception, realistically). Eventually dating the child, largely because it keeps a roof over the heads of the Pilaf Gang, and gives them food, and potential access to gadgets and the dragon balls. Made worse in the future timeline where the manga reveals she, and her comrades used up Shenron's last wish on the selfish desire for her, and her comrades to have young bodies again, preventing Future Gohan from wishing any of those killed back as shortly after Piccolo was killed causing the Dragon Balls to disappear. It also helps that if the genders were reversed in this scenario, people will be horrified and there would be many complaints about this aspect of the show.
  • In general, it can be difficult for some people to root for the main cast to succeed when they make some appallingly stupid and selfish decisions. Goku spares actual megalomaniacs when they make it clear they won't give up, and the fighters later revive one of those maniacs for a tournament and let him run free with no attempts to stop him from suppressing more planets, because he's not going after their planet. The tournament in question from Dragon Ball Super was kickstarted by Goku and it put entire universes at risk. When called out on this, he callously tells the other universes to bring their best fighters. The fact that the tournament turns out to be a Secret Test of Character doesn't excuse how he acts, as he didn't know about it. He just endangered whole universes, and he didn't care. It's at that point where one could think he deserves to be wiped out in that tournament. He has also become more selfish in general such as when he hired Hit to kill him so he could fight him at his full power with no regard for his family.
  • Androids 17 and 18's reactions to the tournament make it difficult to root for them too. 18 considers bailing out of this tournament that decides the fate of their universe, because there's no cash prize. Meanwhile, 17 initially considers just letting their universe die. Him changing his mind later would probably mean a lot more if he didn't have a wife and child, who apparently he just didn't think were worth saving when he was asked to join the tournament.
  • Master Roshi apparently overcame his Dirty Old Man tendencies... after years of groping and harassing young women (Bulma was just 16 at the start of the show) and even sending two children out bring him a sex slave, which could easily be seen as a Moral Event Horizon.
  • Bardock (Goku father)'s later appearances try to portray him as more sympathetic, completely ignoring all the pain and destruction he inflicted on other planets with about as much sadism as any other Saiyan as a Punch-Clock Villain. Dragon Ball Fighter Z even gives him a chance to prevent Planet Vegeta's destruction, which so much doesn't come off as a badass moment as it does making a whole planet of karma houdinis. Granted there’s gentle Saiyans such as Gine (Goku’s mother) who didn’t invade other planets and is deserving of sympathy and rescue from genocide but she’s left Out of Focus compared to Bardock and more cynical fans could argue she’s an Accomplice by Inaction.
• Durarara!!:
  • Aoba Kuronuma is meant to be sympathized with because Izumii used to hit him out of envy for their parents attention. While Izumii is second only to Izaya to being the farthest thing from a saint in the series, Aoba comes off as being just as bad as Izumii when he sets his room on fire just to get him beaten by their abusive father. Not helping matters is that the anime tones down Izumii's abuse towards Aoba, so it makes that act seem more like Disproportionate Retribution. His backstory doesn't justify manipulating Mikado and causing him to Jump Off The Slippery Slope.
  • The author intended to paint Mikado Ryuugamine as a fundamentally good kid becoming more cynical and morally grey thanks to the setting that surrounds him. To many, though, he ends up looking more like a hypocritical Jerkass who's every bit as bad as the villains he opposes. He founded the Dollars to do good deeds and help those in need, but generally uses them as resources to solve his own personal problems more and more. In the original books, he only founded them because he wanted to make his boring life interesting. The anime added the part about them being forces for good in an attempt to make him look more heroic, but obviously didn't read ahead in the books because this reasoning ends up making him look like even more of a Hypocrite later down the line. Later on, he descends into full-on villainy after usurping the leadership of the Blue Squares, forming them into a vigilante group that mercilessly assaults any troublemaker on Ikebukuro's streets in order to make the city safe for his two best friends Masaomi and Anri (never mind that both of them are very capable of defending themselves). The narrative presents it as being solely due to Aoba's manipulation, but many fans don't buy that thanks to Mikado's earlier behavior not lining up with that. No one ever calls him out on his hypocrisy until the very end, when Masaomi finds out what he's been doing and angrily calls him on it, and Mikado's response is to pull a gun on him and shoot, invalidating his only sympathetic reason for his behavior. Anri arrives too late to stop him, but both are ultimately saved by Celty, and the three have a touching reunion that's meant to be a Heartwarming Moment. To many fans, it falls flat, because not only does Mikado not seem very remorseful about his behavior, he basically gets off scot-free for everything he's done, and it's very out of character for Maasaomi and Anri to forgive him so easily, especially since he basically hit both their Berserk Buttons at once (Masaomi hates gangs due to his past and has promised to never let his friends get involved in them, and Mikado became the leader of the very gang that tortured Saki and broke her legs, and Anri hates when the people she cares about lie or keep secrets from her).
• The Familiar of Zero:
  • We're supposed to sympathize with Louise because of her enormous insecurity complex, her miserable school life, an abusive older sister, emotionally distant and incredibly strict parents who are more interested in their daughter as an asset than as a person. Not to mention that being a noblewoman of minimal magical talent makes her a complete laughingstock by the norms of Halkeginia society. However, while Louise has plenty of reasons for the audience to side with her, she still drives off any supporters due to her infamously brutal and non-stop abuse of Saito; which is not only horrible on a basic human level, such as the legendary incident where she flogged him to a bloody pulp with a horse whip, but also makes her a blatant hypocrite given her home life.
  • Less commonly, some fans view Saito himself in this light. This mostly stems from his lechery and his seemingly deliberate dedication to being a Jerkass, and is especially fuelled by one incident in the light novels where he makes a deliberate attempt to rape Louise. The sympathy level for Saito remains so high in comparison because, A: he genuinely does grow and become less of a hornball prick over the story, and B: most of his treatment by Louise is so awful that he looks better in comparison.
• Akito Sohma from Fruits Basket. While her childhood was understandably horrible, it all kind of rings hollow due to the fact that she herself horribly abused the rest of the Sohma family for the most childishly petty reasons. Just to start off, she put Kisa and Rin in the hospital due to their respective relationships with Hiro and Haru, verbally and emotionally abused Yuki, half-blinded Hatori and ruined his relationship with his girlfriend, planned on locking Kyo away from society once he became an adult, and tried to kill him and Tohru during a Villainous Breakdown. To say the fandom felt she was way too Easily Forgiven at the end would be an understatement.
• Nakago, the Big Bad of Fushigi Yuugi, is supposed to be seen as a victim of circumstances that drove him to evil, and as a result, the intent is to make him come across as pitiable and worthy of forgiveness. Because of the horrific atrocities he commits, like driving Suboshi to murder Tamahome's family, this doesn't work so well: by the time his Dark and Troubled Past comes to light, many readers had lost all ability to sympathize with him.
  • The Eikouden sequel attempted this with Mayo Sakaki, insisting at the end that she was like Yui, an innocent girl thrown into a situation that overwhelmed her. Readers didn't exactly buy this either, considering the reason she ended up in the story world in the first place was because she was actively searching for a way to steal Miaka's husband, and she only got worse from there.
• In "Ginga Densetsu Weed", Weed is supposed to be right in exiling Jerome after the latter killed the Doberman assassin brothers, Lector and Thunder. However, Jerome killed Lector and Thunder because they had been trying to kill Weed, and they were never going to give up until they succeeded. Therefore, Jerome was trying to protect Weed, and Weed comes off, to some, as an ungrateful brat who would happily let a dangerous enemy live, all for the sake of the moral high ground.
  • Also, later on in the series, Weed is not shown to have any problem with Tesshin and Hiro committing far worse acts of violence (the former giving Genba brain damage, the latter castrating Kamakiri); both of which were arguably under far less justified circumstances.
• In Happy Sugar Life, while Satou's reasons for being the way she is are explained (like how she lost both of her parents and was made to live with an aunt who was clearly unfit to raise her), this nevertheless does little to cover the fact that she commits horrible actions — the most damning being murdering Shouko due to suspecting that she might go to the police to notify them about Shio's whereabouts.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: The main character had this in The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya. Nagaru Tanigawa wants you to feel sorry for her after Kyon scolded her, but take it into account that the reason Kyon lashed out at her in the first place was because she spiked Mikuru's drink for a scene in a movie, kept hitting her, and said "Mikuru is my toy." This is probably the only time she ever gets called out for her Jerkass behavior.
• Matsukaze Tenma from Inazuma Eleven Go got this from a handful of people, especially in the western community. Many people find his trait of speaking about soccer like it's a person to be very annoying and childish, rather then cute and innocent like it's supposed to come off as. Incidentally, the characters in the show and the game make fun of Tenma for this exact reason.
• Hunter × Hunter:
  • Meruem, the Arc Villain of the Chimera Ant Arc. He has something of a god complex, believes that genocide is the answer for humanity's atrocities, and abducts several gaming prodigies to test his own intellect and kills the losers. One of said prodigies is a blind girl named Komugi, who becomes a Morality Pet to him and eventually falls in love with her. Meruem's relationship with Komugi is supposed to be treated as his redeemable quality, but with the way he treated her, it bordered on Stockholm Syndrome. Not helping matters is that after he contracts radiation poisoning, rather than let Komugi leave with her life, he decides to play Gungi with her one last time. While he does warn her that his condition is contagious, he makes no effort to stop her when she refuses to leave.
  • By extension, the entire Royal Guard can be this. The narrative tries to portray them as noble and heroic. However, they have no problem aiding in mass murder and genocide. Neferpitou, in particular, spends a good chunk of their screentime acting sadistically. As such, this can damper the effect their deaths are supposed to have.
  • Gon can come across as this on numerous occasions due to his morality centering around his personal convenience rather than trying to accommodate to others. Some people didn't sympathize with his quest to find his father simply because he searched for a deadbeat that admitted he didn't want him, but shut out any information about his biological mother because his mind couldn't comprehend having two motherlike figures.
  • Killua. He's apparently meant to be seen as a sympathetic Anti-Villain who just wants a buddy and has some issues that he needs to work out; however, when these "issues" are "I gut people who so much as take a tone with me while grinning ear-to-ear", it's hard to see him as anything but a monster. He gets better, however.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Phantom Blood: George Joestar may come off as this to some viewers. He knew full-well that Dario Brando was an awful human being, and yet still enabled him and should have known that he couldn't have raised Dio right. Then there was his tendency to condescend Jonathan while praising Dio.
  • Stardust Crusaders: Malèna is supposed to be seen as a sympathetic caretaker of Jean-Pierre Polnareff after Alessi transforms him into a child, as well as giving him his one pleasant experience in the bathroom. Unfortunately, she isn't by the fact that she picks up Polnareff off the streets with very little provocation, strips down to her undergarments while bathing him, and even says some mildly flirtatious lines. Coupled with the fact that she seems enamored with Polnareff after he turns back into an adult because of him as a child saving her, Malèna appears less like a nanny figure and more like a pedophile.
• The Kindaichi Case Files almost always try to portray their killers as Sympathetic Murderers, with varying degrees of success.
  • One of worst examples of this is how they treated Eiji Touno or Hikage Miyama. Although his murder motive is probably one of the least sympathetic among the Kindaichi villains (his girlfriend died during an accident because someone with an S.K. initial didn't let her on an already-full lifeboat, so he decides to kill 9 people from the incident whose names bear those initials), he is later given the chance to live a new life as a completely free man after he loses all his memories after his attempted suicide (which is what most Kindaichi villains tend to do when they are caught) and became a new leaf. While the manga tries to portray what happened to him as a positive thing, viewers disagree that he should be completely let off the hook just because he didn't remember his past crimes.
  • The murderer from "The Undying Butterfly" case is the biological son of Midori Madarame and her deceased lover, Minoru Suga, who wants to exact vengeance on his mother, whom he believed had betrayed his father and drove him to commit suicide. He does this by (almost) killing the whole Madarame family as a form of Revenge by Proxy on his mother. After the truth is uncovered, he and his mother reconcile and promises to be Together in Death, giving him some sense of closure and even happiness during his final moments. To a lot of viewers, even his Bittersweet Ending is undeserved, as he essentially intended to kill several innocents to avenge the father he's never even met, and doesn't believe that Midori should forgive, much less defend, him after he ruined her life.
• Just about everyone except Shinobu, Mutsumi, and occasionally Su in Love Hina can be very hard to find empathise with given how they treat Keitaro like dirt. It's hard to believe anyone would want Keitaro to get with anyone EXCEPT for Mutsumi given that they come off as sexual predators or regularly assault him for incredibly minor things. Of course, nobody gets this harder than Naru — who the narration tries to make us sympathise with all the time, especially the time she and Keitaro get drunk and give each other a "The Reason You Suck" Speech. Just about everyone found themselves cheering with Keitaro as everything he said, compared to what Naru said about him, is pretty minor — and on top of it all? Naru just runs off and makes Keitaro pay the bill for their drinks.
• Macross Delta has its own villain faction, the Kingdom of Windermere. At first glance their reasons for going to war seem understandable: they fought a bloody revolution to free themselves of the New UN, which culminated in a superweapon being detonated on their planet. Now they want to liberate other worlds from the New UN. For a portion of the fans, though, their methods of going to war, particularly the fact that they enslave anyone who tries to stand in their way via Mind Control, invalidates any moral high ground they might have otherwise had. Additionally, none of the planets they "liberate" are shown to have any problem with the New UN, making the Windermerians' actions seem unwarranted. This gets particularly bad as the series goes on and they announce their intention to conquer the whole galaxy because they believe themselves to have been "chosen" by the Protoculture. The narrative seems to want the audience to feel sympathetic to them, but the fact that they are the aggressors in the current conflict, justifying their conquering and enslavement of other people via notions of racial supremacism, made many fans give up on them as anything other than evil.
• Mad Bull 34:
  • Sleepy. In episode 4 of the anime we find out that he turned in his old partner and best friend despite his sympathetic criminal motivations, which results in him quitting the force and ending up killed by the local mob. The justification he gives for this is that he has to uphold the law no matter what and can't make a concession that would be illegal. This is all well and good... except for the fact that Sleepy is a Cowboy Cop of the highest order who doesn't think twice about blowing away any criminals he encounters with deadly force or using his prostitution money to help fund counseling centers for victims of crime. In other words, he comes off as a complete hypocrite who gets several of his comrades killed despite being perfectly willing to bend the law himself. This is the guy the viewers are supposed to be rooting for?
  • The Capricorn Killer herself counts as well. She's supposed to be a tragic individual who lost everything when Sleepy turned in her brother and decided to lash out in revenge. The problem is she goes after several innocent cops who were just doing their jobs rather than the guy who caused her suffering to begin with. When she does finally confront Sleepy she can't bring herself to kill him and instead just has sex with him before running off to murder the mobsters who actually carried out her brother's execution. While her backstory is certainly sad its very hard to truly sympathize with someone who so nonchalantly murdered potentially dozens of cops while turning a blind eye to the people who were really at fault for her misery.
• Magical Girl Site:
  • Sarina. While the story paints her as a Jerkass Woobie who just lost a friend, it's hard to feel sorry for her when said friend was killed in self-defense because she was trying to get her boyfriend to rape Aya.
  • Keisuke. He spent the majority of his page-time obsessing over Nijimin and tried to murder Kaname just for talking to her. Kaname using Nijimin's Stick on him is supposed to be his Moral Event Horizon, but since it's really hard to sympathize with Keisuke, many fans read/watched the scene thinking that no matter who kills who, it would be a good outcome.
• In Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force, the Huckebein are this, essentially having a condition in which they must kill others in order to remain alive. While they were apparently intended as characters doing what is necessary to survive, and the author admitted to being surprised by how many people did not find them sympathetic, they come off as sociopathic mass murderers rather than sympathetic or well-intentioned characters.
• Masamune-kun's Revenge: The protagonist Masamune has a Freudian Excuse backstory for being bullied when he was young and being rejected in a really cold manner. However, when you look at Masamune in the present, he's become fit and popular with women enough that he could basically go out with any girl he wants and not be defined by his past anymore. But because he's still so fixated on the one girl, Aki, who he thinks rebuffed him and ends up rejecting the girls in the present like Tae and Neko who do like him for who he is, Masamune can come off as a rather narcissistic, unlikable douchebag who doesn't deserve to succeed in his revenge scheme at all and the viewer's sympathy by then might drop to the point of not caring in the least whether or not Masamune and Aki get together at all.
• Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny: Shinn Asuka was supposed to be a Tragic Hero whose anger issues from his tragic past — and manipulations by the main villain — caused him to become his own antithesis and descend into villainy himself. The one thing that was supposed to show he was still sympathetic was his romance with Lunamaria Hawke. But their get-together only happened after he seemingly killed Lunamaria's sister Meyrin, and her then Love Interest, Athrun Zala. Despite the fact that Shinn regretted and apologized to her for what he did — but he still thought what he did was necessary — and this was the turning point for his character, it only came off as an example of how screwed-up they were as opposed to showing a redeeming side to either of them. Not helping matters is the fact that Shinn nearly kills Luna in the Final Battle — a result of him being blinded by anger when she tried to stop him from fighting Athrun — which was supposed to be when he realized his wrongdoing and stopped his vehement train of action. Obviously, this didn't work out due to the rushed ending, leaving no time for him to do or express anything meaningful over it. Instead, his role in the story ended when Athrun would save Luna from Shinn's wrath by kicking his ass and demolishing his Gundam. This was somewhat fixed in the Special Editions where the extended ending shows he's attempting to make up for his actions. But it's only in Super Robot Wars Z, which revised his character and story, that he's considered redeemed.
• Mobile Suit Gundam AGE:
  • The Vagan: We are supposed to feel sorry for them because they live in disastrous conditions, infant mortality is high, and they were abandoned by the rest of the Earth Federation following the botched Mars colonization. However, nothing justifies their brutal attacks on civilians and slaughter of innocent people who had nothing to do with their plight.
  • Lord Ezelcant: He's a Visionary Villain who lost his son to the Mars Rays Disease and only has a few months left to live. He wants to create a new humanity that will be free of war and violence, but his methods are both so brutal and nonsensical that it's impossible to think he has a point.
  • Kio: His hypocrisy, constant whining about "understanding" and stubborn refusal to listen to more reasonable points of view overrides the fact that we're expected to pity him for being a naive Child Soldier. The utter stupidity of many of his actions, and the fact that the series itself considers him 100% right, painting negatively all those who disagree with him, and the plot bends over itself to make sure he's always right... don't really help.
• To a non-contemporary-Japanese audience, Momotaro from the World War II propaganda film Momotaro's Divine Sea Warriors comes off as a monster rallying adorable animals together to go to war and brutally kill British soldiers.
• My Hero Academia: A portion of the fanbase sees Aizawa as this. While the story portrays him as a harsh Sink or Swim Mentor, it also makes clear that the reason behind Aizawa's teaching style is to make sure his students are properly prepared for a potentially dangerous job. However, many fans find his teaching methods excessively demanding, and his expelling of a whole class on the first day a previous year because he judged them unfit to be heroes was seen as extremely unforgiving and unreasonable. Though he's established as a strict teacher, he seems rather selective in who and when he applies these standards to. His inaction in regards to Bakugou's violent tendencies and Mineta's perverted antics doesn't go unnoticed by fans, but some argue this is a combination of Values Dissonance and Rule of Funny at play. What's harder to justify is his tendency to scold Midoriya and only Midoriya when it comes to the impracticality of his quirk. While others chide him for injuring himself with his quirk, Aizawa's argument seems to hinge on how such conditions could render him useless in the field and in need of saving. Though this is a fair point, students such as Kaminari, Satou, and Aoyama all overuse their quirks just as fast and end up vulnerable afterwards, but aren't subjected to the same criticisms. This makes it seem like Aizawa is only strict when it enables him to pick on students with quirks he doesn't like but is fine with sleeping in class or being otherwise apathetic when more complicated matters arise. In the end, many fans see Aizawa less as a tough but fair teacher doing what he has to do in order to make sure his class is well prepared to be heroes, and more as somebody who holds his students to absurdly high standards, expects them to already behave like trained professionals, and constantly dangles the threat of expulsion above their heads the moment they make a mistake or break a rule. It seems like Horikoshi caught wind of this and did some damage control by retconning the aforementioned mass expulsions into being expelled for a single day before he re-enrolled them back so he could scare them into stepping up their game.
• The title character from Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water. She is an emotionally unstable, distrusting, paranoid, bad-tempered character who sometimes acts ungratefully even to people who are on her side. She dislikes grown-ups, eating meat, and abhors killing of any kind, to the point where some viewers find her alienating as a character. Case in point: she shows no gratitude to Nemo when the latter kills a soldier (to save her from being shot) and loudly calls him a murderer. She also nearly ruins her friendship with Jean out of jealousy when she suspects she may lose him to Electra (despite his occasional obliviousness, Jean is otherwise dedicated to her). The island/Africa arc overemphasizes her character flaws and turns her into an insufferably bratty jerkass. Because of this, it is difficult for some viewers to reconcile this with the show's 35th episode finally shows her maturing. (All this, despite showing scenes where she's obviously growing to care for her new friends, notably Jean and Marie.)
• Naruto:
  • Sasuke Uchiha rapidly becomes this as the series progresses, at first his Freudian Excuse is very strong i.e. his brother Itachi murdered his parents and his entire clan and he naturally wants Revenge. However that excuse for all Sasuke’s misdeeds stretches thin when he antagonizes his allies and dismisses the tragedies of those whom have also lost their loved ones compared to his own trauma, Kakashi in particular highlights how self-centred Sasuke is as he reveals to him that his loved ones (his father Sakumo, friends Obito and Rin and mentor Minato) are already dead after Sasuke threatens them. After Sasuke's Face–Heel Turn it becomes even harder to sympathise with him as he betrays the village, actively tries to murder his friends, attacks the Kages and generally acts like a terrorist. It comes to the point where the whole cast (except for Naruto, Sakura and Ino) being prepared to bring Sasuke to justice is entirely justified and Naruto’s determination to redeem Sasuke is almost nonsensical. Also Sasuke being as Easily Forgiven in the Distant Finale conflicts matters more as the worst punishment he gets is being “somewhat exiled” from Konoha which is barely a slap on the wrist in the weight of his crimes.
  • The backstory of the legendary "Salamander" Hanzo, the ninja against whom the Sannin won their titles by surviving a battle with him sets Hanzo up as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who lost sight of his goals but is honored in defeat by his rival as a man who strove for peace. By starting a lot of wars and turning his homeland into an unlivable hellhole that produced the most psychologically broken, defeated human beings in the series, just because he was arrogant enough to think his strength could unite the world. Most fans still consider Hanzo an utterly unsympathetic character whose violent death at Pain's hands was richly deserved, as his claim of good intentions didn't make him any less of a paranoid warmongering dictator.
  • Sakura Haruno's angst over her Single-Target Sexuality — the aforementioned Sasuke — really makes her unsympathetic in many viewer’s eyes. Kishimoto claimed in interviews he tried to make her feelings for Sasuke as “realistic” as possible but that falls flat as in the manga she hasn’t even had a proper conversation with him, and when she did talk to him he just called her annoying (even after she told him she loved him and was willingly to ditch her peaceful life just to be with him) and knocked her out. After the Time Skip she mellows out... until Sasuke comes back into the story and she Took a Level in Dumbass trying to take Sasuke down herself and of course fails, requiring Kakashi and Naruto to save her ass from the boy she loves. The Final Battle and Distant Finale makes it worse as Sakura easily forgives Sasuke for trying to kill her multiple times, and she settles down and marries him having learned no lesson whatsoever. Also Kishimoto’s insistence that Sakura would be a “terrible woman” if she moved on from Sasuke didn’t help matters.
  • Tobi AKA Obito Uchiha. He's supposed to be a world-weary counterpart to the protagonist who has given up hope on any chance of world peace, preferring to put everyone in a Lotus-Eater Machine where they can escape all the problems of reality. Instead, many saw him as a whiny Manchild who can't get over Rin's death.
  • The way Utakata's master Harusame tries to extract the Tailed Beast from his disciple in an anime-only Filler is supposed to be seen as good intentions to the point that upon realizing this, Utakata eventually rebuilt the pedestal with him after accidentally killing him. The problem is, extracting the Bijuu from a Jinchuuriki will also directly kill the host, and with no indication of Utakata having trouble with his Bijuu, nor even knowing why his master does it in the first place against his will, it comes off as Harusame crossing the Moral Event Horizon with Utakata having every right to defy his master and killing him sounds more justified than what is supposed to be.
  • Madara Uchiha, the Big Bad of the story. He’s apparently meant to be seen as someone who was forced to grow up in a ninja world full of war, and is just trying to create a utopia so his dreams of peace can become reality. This is all well and good, if you forget that the story shows that he and his former friend, Hashirama, managed to accomplish peace with the creation of the Hidden Leaf Village. Hell, Hashirama even tries to make him leader of that new village, but Madara refuses. It’s even harder for viewers to see him as someone who wants peace at any cost due to his obvious glee before every battle. Add that to fact that a part of his Start of Darkness is caused by him wanting to remake the world in his image, even screwing over his best friend to do so, and this makes him come across not as a Well-Intentioned Extremist, but more of a hypocritical Jerkass.
  • Boruto Uzumaki, Naruto and Hinata's son. It's hard to sympathize with the boy who only wanted his father to come home when he is as bad (if not worse) than Naruto during his childhood. Unlike Naruto, Boruto doesn't have a crappy childhood but takes it all for granted and does the same antics his father used to do, all so his father can pay more attention to him. He keeps calling his father a bad parent, going as far as to wish he was dead and is unable to understand other people's feelings (such as complaining that his father is never around in front of Sarada, whose father was never with her for her whole life). And when Naruto finally spends some time with him, he ignores him and brushes away his affections.
  • Naruto isn't exempt of this when it comes to Boruto. You're supposed to feel bad for Naruto because he is so overworked as Hokage that he can't go home to spend time with his family. Problem is, there is no reason for this. Naruto could easily create Shadow Clones to split the workload (like he did with training) or allow his super genius assistant Shikamaru to help. Instead, Naruto explicitly creates dozens of Shadow Clones... which he uses to keep up with people around the village and deliberately uses a more exhaustive method to do so than necessary^note Naruto's method allows him to control each clone and experience what they do in real time, which is stated to leave him completely exhausted each day. Normally, Shadow Clones are autonomous and Naruto would just receive their memories when they dispell, a method Naruto has proven capable of using to maintain hundreds of clones for hours without a problem. Naruto of all people should know how important a father figure is in a child's life since he had 3 of them (Iruka, Kakashi, and Jiraya) yet denies not only his son, but his wife and daughter as well. Boruto gets upset when Naruto sends a Shadow Clone to Himawari's birthday party intead of coming himself and dialogue mentions that this isn't the first time it has happened. Also, Naruto is Hokage at a time of unprecedented peace in their world, he should have time to spare. Yeah, Naruto has to worry about Kaguya's family but his predecessors had to worry about wars and the Akatsuki so it's not like this is a new problem.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • Gendo Ikari. While his villainy is entirely driven by his own self-hatred and loneliness, it's hard to feel much for him given his downright horrible treatment of his son, creepy grooming of Rei, and generally coming off like he's completely insulting the memory of his late wife. It's no wonder that many Fix Fics have him face some kind of Laser-Guided Karma at the hands of one of those three.
  • Asuka Langely Sohryu is this for one half of the fanbase. She's clearly meant to be a Jerkass Woobie (even providing the page image) and her Dark and Troubled Past is undeniably tragic, but her abrasive and egotistical personality made her detractors feel her backstory wasn't enough to cover her more obnoxious traits. The downright ungrateful way she acts about Rei saving her from a horrible Mind Rape and general treatment of Shinji are just two of the many sore spots people have with her character.
  • For the fans that don't find him The Woobie, Shinji is this in spades. While he has plenty of good reasons to be an emotional wreck, his detractors can't help but find his fixation on his terrible circumstances to be over-the-top to the point of coming off as hysterical. As a result, they wish they could slap him and make him shut up and grow a spine.
• One Piece:
  • Boa Hancock can fall under this, being an extremely self-centered, misandrist and petty bitch who embodies Screw the Rules, I'm Beautiful!. Her Freudian Excuse that she was enslaved by World Nobles doesn't make her misandry any less irrational, as there are plenty of female World Nobles and male slaves, and the later Fishman Island arc's narrative is quite adamant about not judging humanity as a whole based on the World Nobles making the lack of criticism toward her general hatred of men a Broken Aesop.
  • Fujitora is clearly meant as a complex old blind man who sees right through (with all the blind/sight metaphor) the corrupt Marines and World Governement and wishes to reform it completely with his plan. However, his completely passive attitude during the Dressrosa arc, doing nothing while citizens are slaughtered by the arc villain pirate and at some point, crashing a meteorite made up of most of Dressrosa's resources has caused some readers to completely despise him. Despite Fujitora having made clear he doesn't act so the World Government can't take merits for a trouble caused by its own Warlord system.
  • Zeff for a good portion of fans is this in regard to the Wouldn't Hit a Girl stance he hammered into Sanji’s head since childhood, even threatening to cut his balls off if he heard about Sanji hitting a woman. Putting aside the sexism and toxicity masculinity accusations, while it’s meant to show how chivalrous Zeff is and how much he means to Sanji it’s still ultimately A Lesson Learned Too Well and a flawed philosophy that’s pointlessly put his loyal adoptive son’s life in jeopardy from Dark Action Girls (whom he would otherwise defeat handedly) multiple times and often at the worst moments^*Like in Enies Lobby where Robin was moments away from getting taken away to World Government. Zeff never seems to have considered Sanji will meet women who aren’t innocent and will want to kill him and his friends and though it’s good to want teach Sanji to be a good man, it’s bad to raise him to be someone who can’t combat the opposite sex at all.
• Princess Knight: Franz comes off as a selfish jerk to a lot of modern readers, who is more interested in a girl he knows virtually nothing about than actually ruling his kingdom.
• Altair/the "Military Uniform Princess" of Re:CREATORS wishes to get even with a world that bullied her Creator relentlessly and then drove her to commit suicide. OK, that in and of itself sounds sympathetic... except that she goes all Omnicidal Maniac about it and tries to cause a Negative Space Wedgie that would wipe out the planet and everybody in it (even the people said Creator loved), goes psycho and overkills the living hell out of the one Creation on the protagonists' side that tried to reach out to her and understand her (for having the gall of trying to understand her), and essentially weaponized Popularity Power In-Universe to manipulate reality and become an In-Universe Villain Sue that killed most of the cast via curb-stomping and then, in order to appease her, had to be given a twisted variation of Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending by the shell-shocked Creators of the people she killed and thus allowed to go away as a Karma Houdini. As a result many viewers felt the series had a tremendously disappointing finale.
• Sailor Moon: Haruka/Uranus and Michiru/Neptune during Sailor Moon S. The season presents them as soldiers burdened with the responsibility of dealing with outside invaders and grapple with the fact that they would have to sacrifice talisman holders, innocent people, to prevent The Silence from happening. The end of the season portrays them as being rightfully angry with Usagi for the outcome of the battle and for sparing Hotaru, seeing such actions as being too idealistic. However, it can be hard to sympathize with Uranus and Neptune when one takes into account that they were not considering any options beyond sacrificing people, choosing killing as their first and only option, and were condescending and dismissive towards Sailor Moon and the Inner Guardians even though the five of them are more experienced soldiers who outnumber them and while they (judging by comments and flashbacks from the anime, were active for roughly a year, with the Death Busters as their only threat to investigate) were two rookies who only had vague premonitions to guide them. They place all the blame on Usagi for the outcome of the battle with Pharaoh 90, but the way they were needlessly antagonistic towards Sailor Moon and the Inner Guardians by refusing to cooperate and share information that could have led to better solutions, contributed greatly to the way things turned out, making them partially responsible as they were producing unnecessary drama out of arrogance. Even their reasons for wanting to kill Saturn makes them unsympathetic since not only were they unaware of her true purpose, they acted on vague premonitions rather than legitimate proof of Saturn being an evil figure and would have killed her for nothing.
• Sailor Moon Crystal: Prince Demande is given a sympathetic death that wasn't in the manga, which doesn't really add up when you consider that he is an attempted rapist and all-around horrible person, and that he had literally just attempted to destroy the universe before this death happens. The Mexican dub of Sailor Moon R Abridged lampshades it.
• Sailor Moon S: The Movie:
  • Luna, who's unrequited love for Kakeru would be endearing if she weren't blatantly cheating on Artemis in the process.
  • Kakeru, whose obsession with the Princess Kaguya legend and his anger that Himeko doesn't believe in it the same way he does makes him seem like a deluded douchebag.
• Shaman King has Hao Asakura (the manga version), who is supposed to be a Tragic Villain, and the audience is supposed to see his eventual ascension to Shaman King as a good thing. Unfortunately, the cold hard truth is that most of the cast have pretty tragic backstories too, to one degree or another, and none of them grew up to be genocidal monsters out to exterminate "baseline" humanity! Many readers instead regard him as a Karma Houdini of the highest order, and one who hasn't necessarily abandoned his plans for worldwide mass death and destruction so much as delayed them. What doesn't help matters is that Hao's goals come as petty, arrogant, and hypocritical. He goes on big rants about how Humans Are the Real Monsters with them always fighting, killing each other or things that are different than them, and destroying the harmony of nature. The final nail in the coffin is that Hao is all of those things, and he's killed far more people than he cares to count (the body count is at least in the thousands). Many of his actions killed other humans or shamans alike; one of which that caused Lyserg's start of darkness. Compared to Hao who only lost a total of three people in his past lives: his mother, his first friend Ohachiyo (by his own fault due to revenge), and Matamune (who abandoned him when Hao went off the deep end). No wonder he comes off unlikable by a lot of readers. At least the anime adaption pointed out, in-and-out of universe, how wrong his philosophy and views were, and how they are most definitely not something you should sympathize with. Plus he avoids being a Karma Houdini in the anime. The manga tries to do this, but fails spectacularly and seems to almost agree with Hao.
• Shitsurakuen: Tamao calling Sora out for not considering how the boys feel about acting like misogynistic bastards. Apparently Sora not stopping to think "What if these guys feel bad about committing horrible atrocities?" while constantly preventing said horrible atrocities is meant to be poignant, but it just comes across as one big Never My Fault from the boys' side. This is even more obvious because there are boys like Sumita and Akane who didn't act like misogynistic bastards, but we're supposed to feel bad for the likes of Tougyu and Shoujo who tortured girls for absolutely no reason. There are good ways to show that boys can also be the victims of misogyny to a degree, this is not one of them.
• Naoka Ueno from A Silent Voice (especially in the anime adaptation). Whilst the rest of the cast are deeply sympathetic, tragic and likeable people, especially Shoko Nishimiya and Shoya Ishida (after he Took a Level in Kindness from his bullying days), Ueno on the other hand continued to torment poor deaf Shoko well past elementary school and explicitly says to Shoko in private (before slapping her) that she doesn’t regret her bullying her at all, yet Ueno is still accepted into the main group of friends and Easily Forgiven by Shoko herself at the end. The manga worth noting does actually flesh Ueno out more and does have her gradually feel regret for what she's done and work at bettering herself, but even there it has the added wrinkle that the primary motivation for her hatred for Shoko, rather than just a stubborn refusal to truly grow and mature, was the jealousy she felt toward Shoko due to a Yandere style crush she has on Shoya, which is taken to some creepy levels while Shoya is hospitalized. The beatdown she gives Shoko after she just had tried to commit suicide can also easily come across as a Moral Event Horizon for a large portion of readers and even those who have sympathy towards Ueno can admit it’s a massive Kick the Dog moment.
• Chris Thorndyke from Sonic X is this for many viewers of the show. He’s written as an Audience Surrogate for children to relate to, but this backfired horribly. First off, he’s not the average kid. He’s wealthy and he has adults around to keep him company. He also had friends his age at his school. Second, while his parents aren’t necessarily good parents, they show many times that they do love and care for Chris and would drop everything just to help Chris when he is in trouble. Despite this, Chris still acts as though his parents are too neglectful. Even Cream calls him out on his attitude towards his mother one time because she saw Chris’s mother crying about how she felt she was a bad parent.
• Strange Dawn: Yuko. She was clearly intended to be a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, and given the situation that she and Eri are in, we're clearly meant to sympathize with her. However, she spends so much of the story being obnoxious, rude and selfish with her nicer moments being too few, too little that it's difficult to see her as anything but an insufferable and selfish asshole.
• Strange Love: One of the biggest problems with the OVA is that virtually all of the characters are unlikable and/or annoying including the main characters.
  • Karasawa is probably supposed to be an "unlucky everyman" type but is so horny, pathetic and just plain unlikable that it quickly becomes frustrating to watch him ineptly stumble through the first episode in his pursuit of Chizuru's affections. The fact that he sees no problem with threating to rape his own student and even goes so far as to make an actual attempt at it when she handcuffs him to a table makes him come off more as a complete scumbag than the dorky loser the writers were probably going for. Not exactly the type of guy that makes the viewers want to root for him.
  • Chizuru herself is arguably the worst character on the show, which is unfortunate as she's supposed to be the main protagonist. She regularly manipulates and toys with men mentally and emotionally and plays weird sex games with them, fully expecting to get out of any serious consequences afterwards. Not only that she chooses to stick around with Karasawa after he makes a rape threat towards her and even lies that she's a virgin in spite of having a rock star boyfriend. While some viewers may feel sympathy for her conflicted feelings between her new crush and current boyfriend she comes across as way too manipulative and arrogant to truly pity when she gets caught up in the center of a love triangle in the second episode.
• In Tenchi Muyo!, both Ryoko and Ayeka have been this to some fans, but the one character most fans strongly view as this is Haruna from Tenchi Universe, the Big Bad of The Movie Tenchi Forever! Originally Yosho's lover back on Jurai, the two ran away together because they could not get married due to her not being a noblewoman. But, on the way, she took ill and died by the time they reached Earth. Yosho buried her, and eventually fell in love with Tenchi's grandmother. But Haruna's restless spirit remained behind, and when she became aware of this, she was outraged. She kidnaps Tenchi into a pocket dimension, where she brainwashes him into forgetting all about his old life and believing himself to be her lover. This would be creepy enough, except the film makes it pretty clear that their relationship includes sex. That's right, Haruna is, by almost every definition of the term, raping Tenchi repeatedly during the events of this film. Needless to say, most fans who pick up on this subtext are appalled and regard her as nothing more than a villain.
  • Although she's not as strongly disliked as Haruna, the OVA version of Washu falls into this for a significant number of the fans due to one particular case of Never Live It Down. Although we're supposed to feel bad about The Reveal that she had a son and a husband once, but her husband's family took them both away because she wasn't considered of sufficient social status, the infamous scene where she emotionally tortures her daughter Ryoko for giggles makes many fans skeptical that she deserved to be a parent in the first place.
• The Rising of the Shield Hero: All three cardinal heroes, particularly Motoyasu and Itsuki after they fall to their Curse series and subsequent Heel–Face Turn. While it's made explicitly clear that every one of their screw-ups is on them and they are not meant to be sympathetic for the messes they create, the narration tries to prove that they are not beyond redemption. However, their constant bullying of Naofumi, disregard for the innocent lives they're supposed to protect, and absolute stupidity and refusal to learn leaves a sour taste in the audience's mouth. Combined with Motoyasu's creepy pedophilic tendencies towards Filo and Itsuki's overbearing arrogance, many would rather see the heroes dead than redeemed. The only one who doesn't fully fall into this is Ren, as he has sympathetic traits to balance out his Jerkass tendencies, and even then he can be just as self-centered and Lethally Stupid when he teams up with the other two.
• The hero clan from The Testament of Sister New Devil come off as this. They deeply resent Basara Tojo for his involvement in the Brynhildr incident. It's supposed to be viewed as Jerkass Has a Point since their family and friends were all inadvertently killed when it happened... except that Basara's life was in danger from a demon hunter and would have been killed if nothing happened and that demon hunter caused that incident. Not to mention their over-eagerness to murder Mio Naruse, who Basara has sworn to protect, goes far beyond what they were ordered to do and the way they planned to throw it right at Basara once they succeed. Mio deciding enough is enough and calling them out with a Shut Up, Hannibal! was highly satisfying.
  • In the later manga adaptation this feels a bit more like extreme negligence in the manner of Naruto: pre-Brynhildr the main characters from the hero clan are young children engaged in playing and light training. It's clear the adults have misgivings about the character of that demon hunter (idolized by the children), especially as his primary motivation for hero work is that he really enjoys killing people, that are a bit complex to try to explain to that age. Immediately after the incident, nobody feels it's the right time to explain to young traumatized children either what exactly happened, why exactly Basara and his father are leaving, or why the deceased demon hunter was more a temporarily convenient asset than a moral role model. And apparently, afterwards the topics somehow never seemed worth getting into with all of that laid to rest from the adults' perspective... until all those children are almost unsupervised and choosing to creatively interpret their standing orders during an unstable political period.
• Tiger & Bunny: Edward, seemingly meant to be seen as a Tragic Villain who let hatred consume him, becomes really hard to feel sorry for when his hatred is far from justifiable, blaming (and even trying to kill) his only friend for something that's almost entirely his fault. The fact is, Ivan's actions were perfectly understandable. Neither of them had ever seen real combat in their entire lives and now Edward is jumping into an extremely dangerous situation with total abandon. Most anyone in the man's position would have a hard time leaping into action, let alone when dealing with armed thugs.
• In Toradora!, we're supposed to be rooting for Taiga during her fight with Sumire Kanou, but the whole reason the fight happens is because Sumire rejected Kitamura's love confession (which he did onstage in front of the school, mind you) and Taiga's response to something that isn't her business is to throw a massive tantrum, physically attack Sumire and accuse her of being a coward who can't face her own feelings. It's only when Sumire explains that she rejected Kitamura because she didn't want him to throw away his dream in order to follow her to America that Taiga calms down, but by then both girls are bruised and battered and Sumire even breaks down crying. Taiga does get punished with a two-week suspension and Sumire more than held her own in the fight, but it does feel like Taiga got off too easily for her behavior, especially since when she writes an apology to letter, all it says is the word "FOOL" on it, cementing how immature and bratty Taiga's approach to the whole situation was, and that she thinks she was in the right to do it.
• TomodachiGame: In an attempt to get money, Yuuichi blackmails a teacher by sending him a nude photo of a female student, enticing the teacher to come over and attempt to rape her, which only stops when Yuuichi steps up to reveal he's recording it. Afterwards, Yuuichi's friends (even the girl who was almost raped) act like getting the teacher to quit his job because he was caught almost raping a student was wrong of Yuuchi and implore him to help him get his job back, treating the TEACHER like the victim. Yuuichi explains he helped the teacher get his job back and even paid him back after getting what he needed from him and everyone is relieved for some reason, and this is treated like a good thing, even though the guy is clearly a scumbag who shouldn't be around students.
• Toriko: Midora comes off as this. Because Frohze died while treating his injuries he got while getting Heal Water for her, Midora throws away all of her's and Acacia's ideals to become the epitome of It's All About Me. To the point that after he defeats Ichiryuu before the Timeskip... he unleashes Meteor Spice on the entire Human World which causes 80% of it to become a barren wasteland, causes over 100 countries to break down, and displaces 32 billion people. When Meteor Spice was first revealed, people thought its because NEO intruded on his fight with Ichiryuu and killed him, and he was trying to wipe NEO out desperately, but when none of that happened... yeah... any sympathy he would have had has gone out of the window.
• Wagnaria!!: For many viewers, Mahiru Inami. We're supposed to feel pity because she can't help but punch any man that comes across, but that's something really hard to sympathize with, especially as she doesn't seem to do much to fix it. She also gets a romance plot with the main guy that is supposed to be endearing, but fails because it just looks abusive (and when the guy complains about being punched, he's the one shown as the bad guy).
• A Whisker Away: The movie depicts Muge as a troubled but lovestruck schoolgirl who desperately wants someone to love her. Though this is sympathetic, and her troubled home life does explain why she is the way she is, her behavior towards Hinode reads less like a happy-go-lucky Cloudcuckoolander and more like a borderline stalker with a lot of disturbing behavioral issues. She relentlessly goes after a single guy, invading his personal space and boundaries, makes sexual comments about him loud enough for everyone to hear, refuses to take no for an answer even after it's implied that he told her countless times to stop, and even after she's called out on it, she never even considers that she might actually be in the wrong and that maybe she should leave him alone. Instead, she continues to go after Hinode, and the movie makes this worse by rewarding her for her behavior by having Hinode return her feelings. Not once does she ever consider how he feels about her relentless pursuit of him, nor does she ever feel any guilt or remorse over what she's done to Hinode and is more focused on her own pain. It can also be hard to appreciate how "troubled" her home life really is when it's clear that her parents and stepmother all love her dearly and try to be there for her, only for her to shut them out and throw their love back in their faces. Yes, it's very believable for a middle school girl to feel that way, and her mother walking out on her when she was a kid would scar her greatly. However, even if the viewer doesn't accept her mom trying to be in her life again, her father and stepmother were clearly always there for her and try their hardest to make her happy.
• Witch Hat Atelier: Although they were always meant to be more on the morally grey side of things, the Knights Moralis are considered as tertiary protagonists on a technical level. However, other than Lulucy, their stubborn and borderline inquisitorial approach to law made them very difficult to emphasise with. This has made them look far more dictatorial and cold than they actually are in private. This would later culminate with how they treated Garuga after he was mindwiped by Ininia. Even though Garuga was their former comrade, the fact that they decided to boot him to an island that is best described as a magical psychiatric ward, whilst coldly stating to Garuga's partner that there is nothing they can do to reverse the effect (Even though they could via forbidden magic), really soured the fandom's perception of them.
• You're My Pet: Shiori. It's hard to feel sorry for her sad past when all she does is lie, manipulate, and blackmail her way through every situation she's in.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Aigami, the Big Bad of Yu-Gi-Oh! The Dark Side of Dimensions, is meant to be portrayed as a Tragic Villain he is due to the hardships he endured and the death of his beloved Master Shin, but his actions throughout the film completely destroy any sympathy for him to the point that you'll feel more sympathy for his sister Sera and his friend Mani. It's been said that prior to the film, he'd been using his Quantum Cube to erase anyone he deems "evil". He wants to kill Bakura because Bakura killed Master Shin, however, Bakura was under the control of the Millennium Ring at the time, meaning he wants to kill Bakura for something that was not even his fault, which he should know due to Shadi's exposition about some Millennium Items being inclined to evil. He also tries to kill Yugi, someone who has shown him nothing but kindness, because Kaiba wants to resurrect Atem and if that happens, he would lose the power of the Plana, meaning he's willing to kill someone just to keep his powers. He also tries to kill Joey when the latter tries to protect Bakura by sending him to another dimension, sadistically taunting him about how he's going to slowly erase all his memories, even though Joey had saved him from Scud and his gang earlier in the film. Also, unlike Bakura and Marik, Aigami doesn't have the excuse of being influenced by some evil force as the Millennium Ring only posesses him at the climax of the film, meaning that all of his actions throughout the film were done of his own volition. The fact that he practically gets away scot-free, with the closest thing to a punishment being him losing his powers thanks to Atem temporarily returning to the physical plane to save Yugi, only makes it worse.
  • The Commons of Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V. They're the unwealthy majority of the city and are regullarly abused and oppressed by the Tops, with some even being forced into slavery during the Friendship Cup. The dimension revolves around gladiatorial combat where only the strong move forward, and the weak are mistreated. The problem is, the Commons are just as blood-thirsty as the Tops. Yuya sees such a competitive outlook as abhorrent and aims to change that, but neither the Tops or Commons care what he has to say unless he wins duels and provides blood entertainment. Yuya's may be fighting back a long-standing history of another world's different values, but the people he's trying to help still ignore his message and act like jerks.
    • Shun Kurosaki, the brooding Sole Survivor of the Xyz Dimension, who lost everyone he cared about shortly after his sister was kidnapped. His major motivation is rescuing his sister from the bad guys. Characters like Yuzu will point out his tragic past to justify his behavior as a cold loner. The problem is that he knowingly trapped innocent people in cards so he could lure out Reiji, kidnap him and use him as leverage against his Big Bad father. He's a cold jerk to everyone he meets and is quick to using violence. Once in the Synchro Dimension, he abandoned his mission to live out his dreams of being a pro duelist (He claimed he was going pro to get into the Friendship Cup and convince people to join their cause, but even the Lancers think it's bullshit.) He frequently rejects the Lancers every time they try to help him, even after they've saved his life twice and helped him break out of prison. Worse still, he still says that he doesn't consider them comrades and doesn't acknowledge how they've helped him. So it's kind of hard to sympathize with the lone wolf when the reason he's alone is because he's horrible and ungrateful to nearly everyone for no real reason, and still hurt innocent people because it was convenient for his plans.
    • Battle Beast, a feral duelist introduced midway through the Fusion Dimension. Yuya eventually determines that he's just cornered prey lashing out at perceived threats and doesn't really want to fight. His actual portrayal before this point is more like a sadistic predator, assualting and carding people who weren't even aware that he was there, physically attacking Crow between defeating and carding him, and then bragging about it to Yuya, all the while displaying a Slasher Smile indicating that he's very much enjoying all this. Also, he really only admitted that he didn't want to take part in Academia's war, not that he disliked fighting in general.
    • Zarc, the show's Big Bad, has the motivation that he was an entertainer who was pressured into brutalizing people by the crowds when they cheered him on when he accidentally hurt an opponent. Therefore, he's intended as a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who was corrupted by humanity's desires, with Reiji lamenting that they all had a hand in creating the demon he is today. The problem is, as far as we can tell, there was nothing stopping him from calling the crowd out or just not doing it again, and his initial disgust at accidentally hurting someone seems to subside really quickly in favor of hurting people For the Evulz. What's more, we never actually see Zarc claim any kind of remorse for it; his status as a victim is almost completely inferred after the fact. It's really hard to call him the victim when minimal outside pressure sent him Jumping Off the Slippery Slope, and he made no effort to stop it at any stage.

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