Draco In Leather Pants / Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • In the first game, at least, one could also place Miles Edgeworth into this category, as he is portrayed as the antagonist for much of the first game, being an Amoral Attorney who primarily cares about winning. This is credited to his really sad back-story—as a child, Edgeworth was in an elevator with his father (a defense attorney) and a security guard, when the elevator got stuck. Tensions rose as they got claustrophobic, Edgeworth threw a gun at the other two to get them to stop arguing, and he passed out, waking up to find his father was dead from a gunshot, the whole case being referred to later as the DL-6 incident. The reason Edgeworth became an amoral prosecutor is credited partially to thinking he'd killed his father for fifteen years and trying to get as many criminals found guilty to soothe his conscience, and to being raised by even more amoral prosecutor Manfred von Karma. There is also a fair amount of Depending on the Writer involved; some cases have him using underhanded tactics to secure a guilty verdict (1-2, 3-4), while Case 1-5 suggests that he never intentionally forged evidence, which makes it easier to gloss over his earlier tactics and motivation.
  • Acro from Case 2-3 gets this treatment frequently from fans who say he was the only truly good person in the circus, Regina was annoying, etc.; never mind the fact that he admits he was wrong like Godot below. He tried to kill a 16 year old girl, and while showing remorse when it turned out he killed his own father figure, still pinned the crime on an innocent Maximilian Galactica, and concealed the murder weapon despite the fact that if he had have told everything, he likely would have been given a lighter sentence.
  • Oddly enough, Ace Detective Luke Atmey from trial 3-2 has also gotten quite a bit of a following. This is mostly because his over-the-top temperament, general eccentricities, and quirky Catchphrase make him a joy to be around, in spite of his arrogance. His list of crimes includes murder, fraud, blackmail, larceny, being a Magnificent Bastard, and also being quite a bit of a Jerk Ass to the other detectives. Like Knightly, he also has very few redeemable traits.
  • In 3-5, the killer is revealed to be Diego Armando, aka Prosecutor Godot, who committed murder in the name of vengeance on Dahlia Hawthorne and Misty Fey for the death of Mia Fey. Granted, he's much more sympathetic than many of the villains in the series, and the murder he committed was out of defense of someone else. But the fact remains that the murder could have easily been avoided - he deliberately allowed the situation to reach the point where he had to kill someone out of a misguided desire to play the hero. The killer himself cops to the fact that the entire sordid affair could have been avoided if he'd just swallowed his pride for a few minutes and told Phoenix what was going on. The killer ultimately believes he deserves to be punished for what he's done, even going so far as to interrupt the judge’s verdict when he would have gotten off scot-free. So while the killer is portrayed with some sympathy, he's still the one at fault, and he even admits that he really messed up. Even so, the fans treat this killer as if he did nothing wrong, even saying that Phoenix is the bad guy for continuing to press the issue. This is in spite of the fact that the killer set things up so he'd get found guilty, that several people are dead because of his pride, and that things had spiraled so far out of control that it's likely the body count would have been even higher were it not for a few strokes of good luck.
  • In the fourth game, Valant counts too. Zak may be the bigger jerk overall, but trying to frame him is still a bad thing. Not that many of the fans want to believe that. (At least he shows contrition for what he did, though.)
  • Fans often make out Horace Knightley in Investigations 2 to be far more sympathetic than he actually is. Sure, he does have a Dark and Troubled Past and a close friendship with another character, but people seem to forget that he murdered a fellow bodyguard in cold blood out of sheer jealousy, and shows absolutely no remorse over it. In fact, he goes so far as to harshly insult him after his death, in front of his boss! That and during Case 1 he takes a level in Jerkass so extreme he makes even Daryan look tame. Admitedly though, all the killers in this game (with the exception of Blaise Debeste) have at least some sympathetic qualities, so they're just asking for this treatment.
  • Also from Investigations 2 there's the Big Bad, the mastermind Simon Keyes who while having a tragic backstory like Knightley above, shows no hesitation in giving Kay amnesia, killing a president of a fairly prosperous land (albeit an Asshole fake president), has about zero trust in people aside from the assassin who saved him, frames Kay and John Marsh for his crimes, and actually succeeds in getting Edgeworth to fall for his act all while he sits back and plays Xanatos Speed Chess with the heroes. And yet people paint him as a innocent on par with Regina Berry who, "didn't realize what he was doing was wrong". Even the game gives him the leather pants treatment by having Edgeworth admit he was a victim in all of this too.
  • And to round out the Ace Attorney characters there's Geiru Toneido from 6-4 (Turnabout Storyteller). Geiru gets sympathy from the fans and the game alike because her murder was more or less spur of the moment, she was snubbed by her master: the victim, has a lethal allergy, and is currently doing something she hates just because her master in her eyes wouldn't let her follow in her father's footsteps to become the next famous Rakugo storyteller instead giving the title to her junior fellow disciple. While this girl has had it rough, saying she's an innocent who's done nothing wrong, and shouldn't have been caught is misleading.
• Toma from Amnesia: Memories came in at number 1 on a Japanese popularity poll for the game in spite of being the love interest who treats the heroine the worst by a wide margin. Apparently a lot of fangirls found a Yandere who drugs the heroine's food and locks her up in a cage to prevent her from leaving his home to be justifiable or even sexy. Even Toma himself expressed bewilderment at being ranked so highly in the poll. This is largely limited to Japanese fans, however; the vast majority of Western fans detest him.
• Pick any one male character in Diabolik Lovers. In canon, the majority of them are cruel, abusive bastards who happily pick on the main character; however, writers love to tone down the jerkassery of one or more of them to justify pairing them with their OCs.
• Monika from Doki Doki Literature Club! is an offender, whom many fans latch onto because of her sympathetic qualities due to her being deliberately programmed to be attracted to the player, but she would never attain that due to her not having a route. However, many fans tend to overlook that she intentionally hijacked the game, and is overall responsible for the abrupt shift of the game from light-hearted to horrific starting with experimenting with the character files to amplify the negative traits of the girls to outright deleting them.
• Hatoful Boyfriend fandom has a degree of this towards Dr. Iwamine Shuu. Monstrous as his actions are - cutting off the heroine's head and boxing it so her childhood friend can open the box and see it is the least of it - most of fandom's focus is either on how cool blood apparently is or on how he crushed on someone who died without ever returning his feelings years ago and isn't over it. That said, though, most of Shuu's fans enjoy him because he's so monstrous and make no attempts to pass his actions off as a good thing.
  • The second game brings The King. Many fans won't even acknowledge that he does anything wrong - and he does a lot wrong - because his backstory is genuinely terrible. They also won't acknowledge that he had some responsibility for his own fate.
• This is done in Tsukihime fandom to Nrvnsqr Chaos and Roa. True, they are complex villains with personalities who go much beyond the cookie-cutter bad person (and actually get sympathetic on occasion in Roa's case), but the fans seemed to have forgotten that, in the end, they are still villains.
• Umineko: When They Cry:
  • Ironically, despite her definitive Scrappy/Hate Sink status after EP5, Erika seems to becoming something of this after EP6, especially in Japanese fandom. Ryukishi certainly did intend for her to be a sympathetic character, but saying that she was the hero of the episode is a bit...
  • Beatrice, A.K.A Sayo "Yasu" Yasuda, too. While she has massive, massive reasons to be the person she is (or better said, persons), many fans seem to believe she is ~perfectly justified~ to go kill them all and no one should criticise her, thinking that the terrible life she led (or rather, they led) should be enough of a reason to completely leave them off the hook for her own actions.