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.
