Yuno Gasai and the Yandere timeline

Yuno Gasai from the Anime/Manga Mirai Nikki aka Future Diary is the single most well known Yandere, or at least she was when I fully joined the Anime Community in the mid to late 2010s, so much so that Gigguk’s Yandere video could make a Joke out of pretending she’s the only one who matters.

But unlike most characters who have become virtually synonymous with their Archetype she is not the first or even the first really popular one, or even really among the first.  I would dare say by the time of her creation the Yandere was already becoming an overplayed Cliche.

Now when I started researching this thesis I was shocked how much older Mirai Nikki’s source material is, I’m not used to popular Manga taking over 5 years to get an Anime.  But it was still not old enough to destroy this premise.  It started publication on January 26th 2006.

Now I’m someone who is fairly strict in how I even define a Yandere, I talked about elements of it in a post I made earlier this year.  So for example the character from Shuffle who some call a Yandere (I’ve heard she’s more of one in the Anime then in the original VN) I’m iffy on counting.  But if we count her then Shuffle’s Anime ended on January 6th 2006.

Amelie Doree has a video on the 2003 Visual Novel Cross Channel, from it I can conclude it has a character who can be considered a Yandere.

Most of Higurashi was released by the end of 2005 including the two most Yandere relevant chapters.  Getting back to the relative strictness with how I define a Yandere, Sonozaki I consider a Yandere even if atypical in some ways, while Ryugu is not a Yandere, when she acts Crazy it has nothing to do with romance, apparently she's considered a Yangire a term I know less about.

The original School Days Visual Novel was released in 2005.  And in my opinion Kotonoha is still the best Yandere.

The first Durarara!! Light Novel came out in 2004 and the second came out in 2005.  They feature even by my strictest definition multiple Yanderes.  And if you loosen the definition it might just be possible to argue this is a saga where (almost) everyone is a Yandere.

And that’s the key to my thesis really, it is particularly the role Yanderes play in Durarara!! that even in these early novels makes it feel like it’s already a cliche, like the author is on a Meta level joking about how arguably overused this character type is.

All that and I still have a hunch none of these is where the Yandere trend began.  It’s difficult to research because characters who technically qualify have always existed, with some even suggesting the first Anime Yandere was a character from Uresei Yatsura or Ranma1/2 or something like that, or even Jojo.  And Gaijin Goomba of course wants to connect it to some pre-modern Japanese Folk Tale.

But when I ask who the first Yandere is I mean the beginning of this trend in Otaku oriented Visual Novels and Light Novels of the early 2000s which may have actually began in the mid to late 90s.  There may not be a definitive single first one, but I get the sense that even the oldest of the ones I’ve discussed above were already part of a trend.

But let’s return to the mystery of why Yuno Gasai was able to steal the spotlight from all these predecessors.  Is it because she’s the best?  I already said I consider someone else the best.  But this is one of those tropes where so many people want to argue why the one they like is the only one who was written with a complex Psychological profile that makes their insanity not truly only about the person they are romantically fixated on, but the truth is they were all written with depth.

Maybe why Yuno overshadows the rest is because of the Anime adaptation, because of how well she was performed by Tomosa Murata and later in the English Dub Brina Palencia?  

Glass Reflection I remember said in his Future Diary review that he didn’t like Brina as Yuno and that ticked me off.  One of Brina’s unique talents is to sound vocally more "normal" then most Anime characters even while still having an eccentric personality.  And for the Bipolar quality that a good Yandere is supposed to have that kind of voice is actually perfect.  

Cross Channel still doesn’t have an Anime, but besides that all those Pre-Yuno Yandere also made their Anime debut before her.  Mirai Nikki started airing in the Fall of 2011.  School Days technically was an Anime in its source material but got its TV Anime in 2007.  Higurashi had its Yandere Arcs in its first season in 2006.  And both of the first two Durarara!! LNs were covered in the first season of its Anime in the first half of 2010. And they all had good VAs who did a great job bringing their character's Insanity to life.

It honestly might be more that Yuno was the LAST notable Yandere as far as actual Japanese media goes.  The shows that copy everything else about Future Diary make their female lead very much not a Yandere. Instead for the terminally online the Yandere has been kept alive by a perpetually in-development American Indie Video Game and ASMR videos.  And maybe there's some V-Tubers who's gimmick is that they're a Yandere I wouldn't know.

So when Anitube as we currently know it started Yuno was the freshest Yandere in everyone’s memory.  And for plenty of newer Anime fans she may have been the only Yandere recent enough for them to have seen in action when she was new.

Update February 13th 2026: I recently learned of a 2000 Visual Novel called Silver that has who can perhaps be considered the first Yandere of VNs named Sasai Yuuna.

The Toxic Masculinity of Hating on Male Anime Protagonists

I mean a certain kind of Male Anime protagonist here but I didn’t want to make the title too long.  Thing is, the protagonists meant to be morally hateable are often the ones people like as characters, Light Yagami being the big one.  

I kind of felt like specifying “Bland” in the title, but some of these are hard for me to consider that word as even an accurate description of how their haters view them.

Sometimes people who self identify as Feminists and people who more uncritically accept traditional Gender Roles as they currently function sound shockingly the same as each other, not when talking about Politics directly but when critiquing fiction.  That includes male characters being critiqued for being too Passive, for not “making a move”, for being Romantically indecisive and so on.  

And in the context of Anime, partly thanks to Mother’s Basement, two posterchilds of the kind of Male Anime Protagonists unfairly hated in this way in my head are Yuki Amano from Mirai Nikki aka Future Diary and Kazuya Kinoshita from Rent-a-Girlfriend. Both those shows and a lot of the other shows whose protagonists I’m defending here are flawed shows that don’t always do what I like about them perfectly and sometimes drop the ball in close proximity to the very scenes I praise.  But at their core I think they are good entertaining shows including their protagonists so how their protagonists are hated on bugs me.

Yuki is as passive as he is to contrast with Yuno Gasai, and I already talked about the innate Gender subversion of the Yandere.  One part of the show I often think about is the part where the antagonists they are facing are this weird couple, and the guy keeps insulting Yuki’s masculinity for being protected by his Girl, telling him he’s supposed to be the protector, but not even in quite the most cartoonishly obvious Sexist way you’d expect either, they’re framed kind of like the villains who’s advise the Hero will actually take later on.  So I loved when at exactly the point when it seems like now is when that will happen, instead Yuki doubles down, he embraces the fact that in this relationship the Girl is the fighter, the Protector, and so he should actually just leave the frontline entirely so she can focus, completely placing his trust in her.

I know a lot of people are going to think there’s something inherently Patriarchal about my love of Polygynous Anime like Isekai Smartphone and Girlfriend, Girlfriend.  But the thing is the Internet Neoreactionaries who defend specifically Patriarchal Polygyny as what should be the norm have specific ideas about what kind of Man is supposed to attract multiple women that those Anime and even the Harem Anime unwilling to go for Non-Monogamous resolutions don’t play along with, to them it’s not supposed to be Soft Gentle Kind Hearted Beta Males who have Harems.

And yet even critics who supposedly have more Left of Center perspectives on Gender watch these shows and express bafflement about how these “spineless” men are so attractive to women.  They don’t want to say that Traditional Masculinity is the thing these characters lack that makes them find it so unbelievable they’d be so popular, maybe they don’t want to admit it to themselves.  But that is what it is.

A lot of the time people hate these characters not for anything they do but for what they assume about the intended audience.  They are characters who aren’t Perverts but are put in Perverted situations so the Perverted audience can project onto them guilt free.  And yeah a lot of the time I do think that’s what the writers are thinking.  I however don’t like watching these characters I like put into situations that make them uncomfortable.  I would prefer the Nudity in Anime be characters unashamed of being Naked disrobing in front of characters who are equally totally comfortable with it.

Then there’s the “Nice Guy” and “Friend Zone” discourse, I really don’t want to have to explain what that is, if you’re somehow reading this and don’t already know what it is just google it.  I do not disagree with the Tumblr Feminism critique of these ideas. But I am annoyed at how it’s resulted in a hatred of every fictional character a self described “Nice Guy” might identify with rather than explaining to these people why they aren’t like these Actually Nice fictional characters.

Of course the focus of this post is on Protagonists of Harem or Harem adjacent Anime, where these men aren’t being “Friend Zoned” if anything it’s them “Friendzoning” the girls. But that’s the thing, once a character is deemed to have the vibes of a “Nice Guy” the critique becomes that their getting the girl is a wish fulfillment fantasy.  At that point I think critiquing a show for such Meta reasons is the embodiment of Bad Media Literacy. I never get the sense any of these shows are trying to tell the audience who’s entitled to love, they just want to write romances that start out being built on kindness.

I could go off on a tangent about how the characters in Anime that actually resemble a self described “Nice Guy” are a certain type of character in Yuri Anime who some of the audience will root for over the protagonists intended endgame, like Yaya from Strawberry Panic.  I’m not even the first to say this, I’m basically borrowing a talking point from the old WhiningAboutYuri Tumblr Blog.

I currently identify as Gender Fluid with Any/All pronouns on Social Media.  But I was assigned male at birth and saw myself as Cis until less than a decade ago.  And I still mostly live as a Cis-Het Male offline.  And that makes me very hesitant to write something so predicated on disagreeing with other Feminist and Queer Media Critics. So I’ve been thinking about all this holding off on actually writing it for a while.  But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that these are the only non Crossdressing Cis-Male characters I’ve at all related to while sitting on the fence about my gender identity.

However the Feminine Side of my personality also disagrees with the notion that it's unrealistic these guys would be so popular.  To whatever extent there is a Straight Girl inside of me, this is the kind of Boyfriend she would want.

So I want to finish by briefly bringing up School Days again. But I don’t want to retread stuff I already covered in my huge School Days post titled Sekai Did Nothing Wrong.  At first glance Makoto doesn’t seem relevant because he can’t really be called innocent of any wrongdoing.  But he’s relevant mainly because those who think of School Days as a “Deconstruction” see Makoto as this type of Harem protagonist actually suffering the consequences of their “indecisiveness”.  Of course for most of these characters the indecisiveness results in getting truly intimate with no one not everyone, and in the VN Makoto doesn't get with everyone on a single timeline.  But even Makoto in the Anime isn’t as bad as people make him out to be, mostly because they downplay the times when he is a victim of Sexual Assault.  He is a flawed character who makes dumb decisions as a horny Teenager, but a lot of it comes from his not wanting to hurt anyone’s feelings.  And I’m sick of seeing every few years a new School Days Video on Anitube that just repeats the same shallow reading of his character and Sekai’s, they’re always so boooring.

Update January 2025: Sometimes the male characters who get this treatment aren't even the main character.  For example I recently learned that some people inexplicably hate Kazuki from Wixoss, how can anyone dislike Kazuki?  He's adorable?

It seems whenever a Male Character is liked by more then one Female Character a lot of people just go "I don't see what his appeal is" and leave it at that.  When Anime Girls I respect like a Boy I make an effort to see him through their perspective, and it's usually not that hard to find the appeal when you actually try.

Update May 2025: I recently stumbled upon a Hentai Doujin geared towards a female Audience where the Male lead very much resembles the Generic Isekai protagonist look.  So yes clearly that look does appeal to Girls at least in Japan.