Warning: As this trope deals with attempted Heel-Face Turns - more specifically with those meeting resistance and the natural consequences thereof - spoilers naturally abound.
Characters who struggle to be accepted while making a sincere effort to reform in Anime and Manga.
- In Concrete Revolutio: Choujin Gensou, Judas was a member of a criminal organization called the Diamond Eaters. After meeting the superhero Earth-chan, he attempted to reform, but ended up drifting back to the Diamond Eaters because they were the only ones who respected him and his abilities. Judas eventually decided to turn good for real, turning on the Diamond Eaters and serving time in prison for his past crimes, but Earth-chan views him as an incorrigible villain and refuses to believe his reformation is genuine.
- In Digimon Adventure 02, even after Ken loses his Digimon and goes into an emotional breakdown after he realizes what he had done as the Digimon Kaiser, most of the kids are still very wary of his intentions. This is especially true when he has Stingmon kill a rampaging Digimon, rather than calming or trapping it. However, they quickly learn that the rogue Digimon was actually an artificial being created from a Dark Tower by a new enemy and Ken was truly trying to atone, and they slowly start trusting him more. Some sooner than others; the friendly and emotionally intuitive Daisuke is the first to believe in Ken with little more than a hunch and Ken's Crest calling out to him, while the younger and more logical and justice-oriented Iori struggles to accept him and needs a couple extra months to bond with Ken and finally consider him a friend.
- An unorthodox example at the end of Danganronpa 3. While the Remnants of Despair have long since reformed for their actions with help from Makoto Naegi, they're forced to take the blame for Tengan's role in orchestrating the final killing game, which saw almost the entirety of the Future Foundation's leadership get killed. At the very least, while they do get to live their lives in peaceful exile on Jabberwock Island, they will never forgiven for their actions by the rest of the world. The fact they all suffered the Despair Event Horizon and were Brainwashed and Crazy only makes this more poignant.
- Dragon Ball Z: Vegeta gets this treatment after the Frieza Saga. Aside from Goku and Bulma, not one of the other Z-Fighters can stand him and have no qualms against informing him as such to his face, not that he really gives a damn what they think. Case in point: after Vegeta is curb-stomped by Perfect Cell, Krillin tells him point-blank that he's only helping him for Trunks' sake and wouldn't care one bit if Vegeta did die. It's justified; even if he was technically on their side, Vegeta was still a self-absorbed Jerkass, and their Token Evil Teammate. He didn't pull an actual Heel–Face Turn until the end of the Buu Saga, to which the Z-Fighters' hatred for him ceased.
- Fairy Tail:
- Iron Dragon Slayer Gajeel gets this treatment at first when Makarov lets him into Fairy Tail after his guild of nasty meanies has been destroyed, since among other things, he kidnapped Lucy and beat up Team Shadow Gear(Levy, Jet and Droy). General incredulity is quelled after he unexpectedly appears in the talent show in a silly hat with a guitar and sings a heartwarming song about acceptance, but the main characters remain suspicious despite his total adorableness. Subverted in that just around the time the reader starts to like him, he seemingly betrays them, only to turn out to be a Double Agent who was on their side the entire time.
- Jellal gets the same treatment. It takes multiple chapters to convince Erza, the only person likely to still have any faith in his ability to turn over a new leaf, that he's developed amnesia and believes from the bottom of his heart that he needs to help her cause. Granted, once she accepts him he starts to get a little more slack (barring needing to take a shot to the gut to convince Natsu to accept a powerup to beat the Arc Villain), until the new council says they don't care that he has amnesia and became good or that Nirvana would still be rampaging were it not for his aid and arrests him anyway.
- In Fire Punch, Agni encounters the very man who destroyed his hometown and set him on fire, now running an orphanage. Although he tries to convince the man he's gone straight, Agni just can't believe him and murders him in one final fit of revenge. When it turns out nothing was being done to the kids and he really wasn't lying, Agni realizes what he did and decides to embrace his role as the "villain", wiping out the orphanage and getting the man's daughter to reignite him again.
- In Gintama, nobody would hire Catherine after her release from prison. She almost went back to her old life of crime out of desperation, but was saved when Otose offered her a job to keep her off the street.
- Habara from Daily Lives of High School Boys had not been the Enfant Terrible-grade The Bully known as Archdemon for eight years and is more a generically sweet girl... except all the teenage boys in town are still too scared of her old self to approach her, let alone ask her out.
- Gemini Kanon from Saint Seiya tries to pull this and is completely honest. However, as he once was The Man Behind the Man and the Evil Twin to the Tragic Hero Gemini Saga, the Saints do NOT believe his intentions. Milo even subjects him to a brutal Secret Test of Character to make sure he's sincere.
- In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS, an odd variant happens with Hayate. While she is the master of the Book of Darkness/Book of the Night Sky, she was unaware that her knights, which had been summoned by the Book, were stealing Linker Cores in order to save her from the Book feeding on her own Linker Core. At the end of the Book of Darkness incident, she took responsibility for the incident, presumably to lessen her knights' punishment, and joined the Bureau. Most of the Bureau accepts her, even if they do not necessarily know the truth, but Regius Gaiz, a Ground Forces general, despises her and still considers her a criminal. Similarly, Auris Gaiz, Regius' subordinate and daughter, brings up how Regius has served the Bureau for 40 years, even back when Hayate was supposedly committing crimes, after Hayate accuses Regius of colluding with Jail Scaglietti, the Big Bad of the season.
- In My Hero Academia, Endeavor, the #2 ranked hero in Japan, was introduced as a brutal man whose obsession with reaching #1 led him to drive his wife to a mental breakdown and father children with her solely to make someone with the right set of superpowers to let them hit #1 in his place. Following a Heel Realization, he’s since started making slow but genuine attempts to be a better person to his family. However, his children have varying reactions about it. Fuyumi hasn't forgiven her father but is willing to make peace for her mother's sake. Natsuo is the most vocally resentful and blames his father for Toya's death. Shoto is also conflicted but does seem to want to forgive his father. For Endeavor's part, he accepts that his children may never fully forgive him for his past abuse. As for Toya, better known these days as the supervillain Dabi, he feels nothing but delight in his father's attempt to redeem himself... if only that his fall from grace will be that much more higher and more painful.
- One Piece: Hachi, in his original appearance, was one of Arlong's pirates and got his tail kicked by Zoro. When he reappeared later, he was much nicer, but it took a lot of effort on his part to get Nami (who went easy on him but still made it clear that she didn't trust him at all) to forgive him for the things that he'd done. He had to be shot down by humans and claim that this was fair punishment for the things he'd done to Nami, after she realized that the Arlong Pirates had just been mimicking humans all along.
- Pokémon: The Series:
- On the rare occasions that Ash and company encounter the Team Rocket trio when the latter group is out-of-uniform and not in the middle of performing a crime, the protagonists usually don't buy it, even if they're being sincere. Conversely, one movie has the trio jump to their deaths so Ash and Lugia live, which goes completely unacknowledged: at the end of the movie (they survived), they complain about how nobody noticed their good deeds.
- During an arc in Pokémon the Series: Black & White, Meowth claims to have been fired from Team Rocket, and Pikachu is suspicious of him much longer than the kids. He turns out to have been lying the whole time to buy time for Jessie and James to carry out an elaborate heist in Nimbasa City's subway.
- Faust VIII from Shaman King went through this too after his Heel–Face Turn, specially in regards to Yoh's friend Manta Oyamada whom Faust had tortured very painfully in the past. A whole episode in the anime was dedicated to him trying to act more human towards Manta and Manta himself being, very understandably, shit scared of Faust. He only gains Manta's trust when, during his, Ryu, and Yoh's fight with some shamans that Manta had befriended a while ago, he refuses to kill their rivals and tells them to live for the sake of their son.
- In The Summer You Were There, Shizuku Hoshikawa, the protagonist, suffers from suicidal depression that is partly due to bullying her elementary school classmate Ruri Ichinose in a misguided attempt to help her. Kaori Asaka, who was in Shizuku's elementary school the year her bullying happened and met her again in high school, encourages Shizuku to write an apology letter to Ruri and, as a friend of Ruri, arranges a meeting between Ruri and Shizuku. Unfortunately for Shizuku, neither Ruri nor her best friend Seri Ichihara have forgiven Shizuku, and only came because their mutual friend Kaori (who happens to be terminally ill) asked. Seri is hostile to Shizuku from the get-go, and while Ruri politely listens to Shizuku's apology, she tells her that the trauma from Shizuku's bullying has not gone away and she never wants to see Shizuku again. Later on, though, Ruri realizes that Shizuku has changed and, in the hopes of moving on from her trauma, asks if she can start over with Shizuku as acquaintances, if not friends. Shizuku realizes that this does not mean Ruri has forgiven her, but gladly accepts.
- Starscream in Transformers: Armada didn't technically pull a Heel–Face Turn, as he mostly joined up so he'd have a chance to kill Megatron (and because Megatron had tried to kill him). Most of the Autobots didn't accept that he could turn good, which is probably what prompted him to switch back.
