Anime with Messy Characters

There are a number of Anime I’ve watched where a lot of the appeal is how all the characters are very flawed making very human mistakes but ultimately no one is truly a Bad Person, (or very few at least).

But then watch the YouTube videos about them and their takeaway is that they are shows where no one is a good person.  Clearly we are mostly seeing the same thing but they simply have a much more cynical outlook than I do.

Take for example Shoji in Nana, I think one of the most compelling things about this show was their willingness to depict him so sympathetically even as he cheats on the main character in a Shoujo Manga adaptation.  But nope all the Antiubers feel they have to boil it down to simply him being a Jerk.  

Nana is a show where the only character I wouldn’t object to calling a bad person is Takumi (well there’s also Takeshi but I barely count him as a character) and even he has nuance.

Now maybe some will think my sympathy for Shoji is simply a biased result of my being an AMAB who identified as Male for most of my life.  But I feel the same watching Rumbling Hearts where Mitsuki cheats on the male protagonist in this Anime who’s source material is a male targeted demographic, anyone calling her a bad person I would also object.

Heck I’ll go further than that.  I think I find most unrelatable about the comments section under most NTR Hentai is how harsh they are the female lead even though she’s usually being Raped.  I’m the opposite, even in the rare one where it’s completely Consensual I still sympathize with her.  Even if she’s literally cheating for no reason other than the other guy is bigger I still can’t consider that entirely invalid.

And it’s the same with Nana which kind of is a prolonged NTR in its latter half.

Both White Albums are also similarly messy relationship Melodramas that I quite enjoy.

I think someone is only a Bad Person if their behavior is consistently harmful and unrepentant.

Woke Leftists like to claim they have a purely Harm based understanding of Morality, but then try very hard to define Harm so abstractly that they wind up becoming pretty Puritanical.