Honestly, most of them. In general they are even more self insert-y than twilight and it’s gender swap variant edition, and somehow have worse personality than… no personality.
Just gona say it - LaLouche from Code Geass is terrible. Kinda biased because I didn’t like anything about the show but the mechs. I made it about 15 episodes in before I started to watch MSG Zeta//Double Zeta back to back.
I liked the character design of the female lead, but ended up hating the story/characters so much I never finished it. And my standards when watching anime at that time were pretty damn low
It started off interestingly, the character designs were nice, but it just got progressively worse and worse and worse. I called it torture porn because it felt like the writers were getting off on putting the characters through horrible situations and being horrible to each other.
I love me some depressing stories, but Guilty Crown was just depressing for the sake of being depressing.
It’s one reason I stopped reading Freezing and had no interest in the show. Ironically I find the warhammer 40k lore fascinating and love having videos about it on in the background even though I have no interest in the miniatures.
The protagonist I’ve most hated was Ishitaka from I’'s. The whole problem with him is that he’s an angry coward - he’s a pathetic, insecure piece of shit, and he compensates for that with seething rage and righteous indignation, which just made me want to punch him in the face every time I saw him. And Iori deserved so much better.
My vote goes to Subaru from Re:Zero. I have never hated an anime character so viscerally.
Not only is he a useless waste of meat, an arrogant prick who refuses to ever learn or better himself in any way despite having the ultimate cheat to do so... He had Rem -- the best best girl that ever was best girl -- confess to him in possibly the most beautiful moment ever, and he's like "that's nice but I still love the boring cardboard elf chick who has been mostly ignoring me all this time."
I love the show and get that it’d kinda the point, but yeah. He’s absolutely a failure of a human and only makes small steps towards improvement pretty late in.
And not only that, but the boring cardboard elf chick he claims to love explicitly asked him to do exactly and only one thing - to stay at home and not butt into things in the city - so what does he do? He rushes off to butt into things in the city, and fucks up literally everything for literally everyone.
Kouta, from the Elfen Lied anime series. I’ve seen statues with more personality than him, and the way that he unleashes at Nyu near the start is really bad.
Makoto from Shool Days takes my vote. I got the series recommended and did not enjoy it at all but pushed through because I was promised the pay off would be worth it. By the time ‘stuff’ happened I honestly felt like he deserved it and was just glad it was over.
Other than that, Yukiteru from Mirai Nikki was pretty bad too. And most controversal, I disliked Mikado from Durarara - he was good in the beginning, but he peaked during the first Dollars meeting where he send the mail to everyone. After that, it was just downhill for him.
I agree about Mikado. The whole cast of that show was full of more interesting characters that I wanted to see more of whenever he was on the screen as it went on.
As the viewer, you’re not required to like Makoto. As a character, I thought he was great. He felt extremely human as the kind of guy who let his dick make all of his decisions for him and tried too hard to please everyone at once.
Keyaru is a great suggestion. He is terrible in a whole different way from Kazuya, but still terrible. I read a bit of the manga to see what the fuss was about with that series, but haven’t watched the show. I still can’t believe they actually adapted it into a show if I’m honest.
Hiro is fine. The villain of DitF is whoever rushed the writers for the last few episodes.
Imma say Souta from Re:Creators. His only contribution to the plot is pretty much just driving a friend in need to suicide. He then just exists for the entire anime, saying annoying things and pretending to be a viewer self-insert, but who would ever want to be him?
I fucking adore Re:Creators, but it would literally be twice as good if Soutas sorry ass of a main character was deleted. The show is already hard carried by the other characters.
I’ve got a big soft spot for DitF so I wouldn’t say Hiro. I could definitely be convinced of Kazuya tho, and would also like to submit Asta from Black Clover for consideration.
IMO I’d much rather a MC be ‘irredeemable trash’ or even a boring Kirito clone than be actively annoying. I dropped Black Clover in large part because of how obnoxious Asta was, and I don’t think a MC can do much worse than causing someone to drop their show.
I mean, it has to be Kazuya from Rent a Girlfriend, right? I haven’t watched the anime, but if it is even remotely similar to the manga, it is definitely Kazuya.
I haven’t seen Darling in the Franxx, so I can’t personally speak to how bad Hiro is.
Forgetting about Kazuya is like winning the game. As soon as you remember he exists, you lose.
It blows my mind that he is the main character of a wildly successful series. I used to read the manga as it came out because it was so much fun to make fun of it with the rest of the manga subreddit. However, as the series kept going, and going, and going, it stopped becoming fun any more. Now, if you were to check the subreddit, the Rent a GF chapter threads basically languish in obscurity because it isn’t even fun to make fun of anymore; it’s just sad.
I had that exact same experience. There was a while there when it was fun to make fun of the series, but it’s not even that any more. It’s just awful.
I think the central problem is that the setup was supposed to be that the characters were other than they appeared to be - that she was going to turn out to not be a shallow, self-absorbed slut and he was going to turn out to not be a pathetic creep, but then they both turned out to actually be exactly and only what they initially appeared to be.
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