Unintentionally Sympathetic / Anime & Manga

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• Akihisa from Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts seems to get it really bad in as far as protagonists of such shows go. Even when he does nothing wrong he always find himself in bad situations because of chance or someone else's spite. Not to mention in episode 10 of the second season where Miharu accuses Akihisa of treating Minami horribly. Note that Miharu is a notorious man-hater who always attacks Akihisa out of fits of jealousy, while Minami always assaults and belittles Akihisa through the slightest provocations. What makes this worse is that Akihisa is forced to double down and admit his feelings for Minami, making what was meant to be a heartwarming moment only look like a kid finally succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome.
• One episode of Case Closed featured a man dying from a poisoned drink from a vending machine. It turns out that the man in particular was a Stalker with a Crush and the woman who killed him was acting out of desperation. If she didn't kill him, he would have probably kidnapped her (and given he had supplies to do so, he was very likely about to do just that before she took him out). It's mentioned that perceived threat is a mitigating factor in terms of law, but still.
• The World of Mana in Cross Ange displayed extreme Fantastic Racism against the Norma due to their lacking magic, thus the ending where they lose magic and have their civilization destroyed forcing them to go though what they imposed on the Norma is treated as Laser-Guided Karma. But this belief was created by the omnipotent creator of the world, Embryo, who programmed them to be hostile to the Norma, which the few who learned the truth were shown to be able to overcome. In short they're being punished for what was imposed upon them as opposed to anything they brought on themselves.
• Cells at Work!: The biggest reason why Cancer Cell has such a large Misaimed Fandom that spawned a Broken Base over making cancer a Tragic Villain is how the author accidentally leaned a bit too hard into the "tragic" part, as while he may be an irredeemable monster with a case of Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse to represent how cancer can only be cured by killing it, since once a cell becomes cancerous it can never be fixed, the tragic wording of his dialogue, dramatic framing of each time he dies, and emotional acting of his actor in the anime, make it seem like he has an understandable and appreciable point.
• Code Geass:
  • While the Black Knights gained a reputation as Unintentionally Unsympathetic after their betrayal, because of the complex morality of the series, just as many are quick to think the Black Knights did warrant some sympathy for the situation. Namely, while they were performing a back room deal with Schneizel to get Japan back, the majority of them were still reeling from the Tokyo Settlement being destroyed by the F.L.E.I.J.A. warhead. And because Zero had made numerous questionable decisions during R2, they were more willing to believe Zero was just using them and just wanted their home back. Not helping matters being their lack of knowledge on Geass allowing Schneizel to color their perceptions of it, along with Asahina trying to warn Tohdoh not to trust Zero before he was caught in the F.L.E.I.J.A. blast, and doctored evidence by Schneizel making it sound like Lelouch willingly caused the Special Administrative Zone Massacre via Euphemia. To many, the Black Knights were ultimately just scared, hurt, and confused, making their reactions more understandable, and by the time Lelouch had become Emperor, he was deadset on his Zero-Approval Gambit, making them think their fears were justified.
    • The compilation movies seemed to agree, since it alters events so that the Black Knights aren't trying to execute Lelouch, but just want answers and are willing to give him a chance to explain himself, only for Schneizel's forces to open fire anyway. The events of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Re;surrection demonstrates that several members regret their part in Lelouch's seeming mental decline, with Ohgi in particular initially Driven to Suicide.
• Dragon Ball Z
  • Chi-Chi is made to be an unbearable and irredeemable character in most of her scenes (especially in the anime) with horrible qualities being more emphasized and her good qualities being either ignored or downplayed. Her goal of having an educated son or working husband isn’t portrayed as a good thing at all. It’s shown as an obstacle to Gohan’s development. While Chi-Chi won't be taking any Mother of the Year awards home due to her My Beloved Smother and Education Mama-style of parenting, she’s still not completely wrong about Gohan needing an education due to heroism not really helping out in the real world. This becomes even more understandable when one remembers that she herself didn’t grow up with a proper education; wanting to give your child something you were never able to get is only natural for a parent. Her wanting Goku to get a proper job and not literally spend all his time training, is pretty reasonable too no matter how important being strong is in The 'Verse. It gets even worse in Dragon Ball Super when some of her character development in the Buu Arc is ignored and thrown in the trash and she’s back to being an overbearing mother/grandmother in an attempt to make her even more unlikable than she was. Despite this drastic change in Super, she's still seen as sympathetic to a few fans. Another factor in this is that fan favourite Bulma often has the exact same flaws as Chi-Chi, but thanks to Bulma being more important to the plot — with her genius inventions she gets away with/is forgiven with being selfish and obnoxious despite having less excuses for it than Chi-Chi does (being a rich businesswoman, not living in poverty in the mountains).
  • Many fans gloss over just how brutal the Saiyans were before Frieza's genocide against them, and instead look at them only as victims. And Frieza can't be blamed for making them that way, since they were already committing genocides of their own before he forced them into his army. Presumably this is because of Vegeta still espousing his "Saiyan pride" even after his extended Heel–Face Turn, leaving fans to see what Vegeta has become (a no-nonsense but well-meaning Anti-Hero and loving father) as their example of the Saiyan race. In fact, his original introduction (as a cruel mass murderer) best shows what the Saiyans were really like before Frieza killed them. Helping this is that more recent media like Dragon Ball Legends retroactively put the Saiyan race in a more sympathetic light, which clearly wasn’t the original intention of Toriyama when creating them.
  • Raditz has become this thanks to a retcon in Dragon Ball Minus - Dragon Ball Super: Broly. Previously he was just a barbaric Hate Sink Saiyan who went to Earth too see if his brother Kakarot/Goku had genocided the human race and was disgusted to see Goku had gone native. However it’s revealed in Minus/Broly, Bardock and Gine sent Goku to Earth out of fear of Frieza rather the usual Saiyan conquest and Gine sends a message to Raditz to go get him in case anything happens to them, only she neglected to explain said details to her eldest son. Thanks to this, Raditz goes to Earth to retrieve his brother not knowing any better and gets killed. Not to mention the fact as scummy as Raditz was, he was genuinely respectful at Goku’s Heroic Sacrifice while dying, showing he had good qualities like the rest of his family and could’ve been a better person if circumstances had allowed it.
• Durarara!!: In the light novels, Izumii Ran was a sociopathic Big Brother Bully to Aoba. However, in the anime, his abuse towards Aoba was only mentioned in passing, which makes Aoba setting his room on fire and subsequently getting him beaten by their abusive father look less like Laser-Guided Karma and more like Disproportionate Retribution. In the light novels, it's also explained that the reason Izumii was abusive towards Aoba was because he was under the belief that he was The Un-Favourite, and considering that his father was more concerned about him smoking than the fact that his room was on fire before breaking his nose, he wasn't wrong.
• Katsuhiko Jinnai from El-Hazard: The Magnificent World is either this or intentionally sympathetic, given his status as The Resenter, tendency to wobble between impressive and ineffectual (often purely based on unforeseeable chance events like the heroes deciding to climb a cliff instead of taking the path he expected because one of them is a crazy mountain climber), and the fact that his bug-like allies are more funny than threatening. It's really the fact he tends to lie and cheat that causes one to wonder if this sympathy was not meant to happen. Admittedly, for some viewers, the fact that Jinnai is leading an invasion and unleashed an ancient Weapon Of Mass Destruction first undercuts the sympathy somewhat.
• The writers of Fate/Zero have expressed surprise at the popularity of Kariya Matou. They describe him as a Chuunibyou making an ass of himself while trying to win over his married childhood friend and her children. Though Kariya is Secretly Selfish, he is far more sympathetic compared to everyone around him. He was spurred into action by learning that Aoi's daughter Sakura was given to Zouken Matou, who he knew would put her through horrifying and invasive tortures in the name of magecraft. Sakura's father, Tokiomi Tohsaka, did this to protect her from a Fate Worse than Death at the hands of the Mage's Association, but Sakura ultimately fared no better in Zouken's hands. Tokiomi's explanation of this to Kariya is supposed to be a miscommunication, but it's hard to blame Kariya when Tokiomi, as per Word of God, wouldn't have cared about the horrors Sakura went through— only that Zouken wasn't training her to be a mage. Even Kariya's most unsympathetic moment when he snaps and strangles Aoi to near-death is understandable: He's lost the Holy Grail War, has been framed for Tokiomi's death, and is being Eaten Alive by Zouken's parasitic familiars, so Aoi finally standing up for herself and wrongly blaming Kariya for the loss of her husband and daughter was clearly the last straw for him.
• Nami from The Girl Who Leapt Through Space was clearly intended to be seen as a whiny, spoiled brat who turns evil when she doesn't get her way. This doesn't work so well though, considering how her sisters treat her callously, ignoring her obvious depression and pleas for help and attention, which causes Nami to slide more and more into despair. A lot of the mess could have been avoided if someone would have bothered to listen to Nami for once.
• Seita, the main character from Grave of the Fireflies, is not supposed to be likable in the slightest, according to the author. You're supposed to blame him for everything that goes wrong, as a result of his shirking his duties and retreating from society. Partly due to Values Dissonance, many audiences (including Japanese audiences) see him as a kid who's in over his head and trying the best he can to deal with a horrific situation. That, and the fact that he's based on the creator, who ostensibly felt his best wasn't good enough.
• In Gundam Build Divers, Game Master and the administration are treated as villains heading for the Moral Event Horizon for wishing to delete Sarah, who was revealed to be a living digital being born from within Gunpla Battle Nexus Online, to save the game. We're supposed to be siding with Riku and the rest of Build Divers as we and the team has watched Sarah from the beginning and thus we know she's just as alive as they are. However, due to a combination of Sarah's existence threatening to destroy the entire game meaning she'd die anyway and Riku's immaturity over it (his friends Momoka and Yukio show restraint on the low probability of saving her, but Riku's completely gung-ho on the idea), many fans see this as a pragmatic Shoot the Dog instead.
• The Computer Club from Haruhi Suzumiya. When they first appear, Haruhi steals a computer from them using false blackmail. In a later episode, they challenged them to a game in order to get it back, but attempted to cheat in doing so. Tanigawa wants you to see them as bastards for cheating, but it becomes a Broken Aesop when the computer was taken from them because Haruhi did some cheating of her own.
• Hanebad!: Ayano is meant to be seen as going down the Jerkass route as the story progresses and her teammates believe she makes lame excuses for her loses. None of them ever find out that she suffers from serious abandonment issues.
• Mobile Suit Gundam SEED has ZAFT launch a Roaring Rampage of Revenge in Panama after losing 80% of their forces in Alaska, with their (except for Yzak) slaughtering hapless, surrendering Earth Alliance forces treated as He Who Fights Monsters. But by this point, The EA was shown to have racist, corrupt leadership who murdered their allies there to seize their political influence and used the attack to gain support for a Final Solution against ZAFT. It implied that most of the forces in Panama were evacuated from Alaska due to being loyal to said racist agenda. This made the EA come off more as an Asshole Victim.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion:
  • Hideaki Anno designed Rei Ayanami to be creepy and inhuman to the point where the audience would find it hard to sympathize with her. What the audience found, however, was a cute, tragic, and hurting girl, who would later go on to be the inspiration for a countless number of characters. Ironically, after so many imitators and expies abounded in anime and manga, things came full circle in the Rebuild of Evangelion series, where Rei was considered just as creepy and uncanny as originally intended, and considered a deconstruction of the Emotionless Girl trope she helped popularize... without seemingly changing a thing about her character at all.
  • Anno tried again later in the series with Kaworu Nagisa, Rei's Spear Counterpart, and got the exact same reaction. Kaworu was intended to be even further into the Uncanny Valley than Rei, complete with a shocking reveal that he isn't even human; fans saw a heartbreaking Tragic Monster manipulated into destroying the world by the bad guys, something even he seemed less than enthused about, and ultimately committing suicide-by-giant robot in one of the series' most iconic tear-jerking moments. It doesn't help that both Kaworu and Rei have good chemistry with series lead Shinji Ikari, which was enthusiastically lapped up by the shippers.
  • Honestly, Shinji Ikari. Shinji is supposed to be an unlikable, pathetic Extreme Doormat that does nothing but Wangst about how horrible his life is. But as the series goes on, his life does genuinely turn out to be that horrible, he's usually the one trying desperately to save everyone (like episode 19), he has to put up with two of the worst roommates in 90s anime, his father really DOES treat him terribly, and by The Movie he's such a wreck it's hard not to pity him.
• One Piece: Donquixote Doflamingo, at least when he was a child. Despite being a Spoiled Brat among an otherwise friendly and peaceful family of Celestial Dragons, the cruel hardships he endured (i.e. Living in extreme poverty, watching his mother die from illness and being strung up and tortured by an angry mob for crimes he wasn't personally responsible for) really are things one wouldn't wish on their worst enemy, much less a kid. It doesn't excuse his atrocious actions later on in life, but it's easy to see why he's so utterly batshit in the present.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Ursula. She does get a fair bit of Draco in Leather Pants, but even many of those who won't deny that she's a Jerkass think she would have been an interesting character, and would have liked her to get more development. Plus, some disgruntled fans don't understand why they're supposed to boo and hiss at a girl who is at least shown to love and respect her Pokémon, while at the same time they're supposed to admire Paul, who is repeatedly shown to abuse or release Pokémon he deems as weak.
  • And of course Team Rocket. Very often the show liked to play on their pitiful qualities more than their actual villainy, and in some cases they even get condemned for taking Pokemon and goods through legitimate means (just they have a more dastardly demeanour about it). The Running Gag for each episode is the trio getting viciously barraged with Pokemon attacks until they go "blasting off" (launched in the air and crashing down somewhere nearby), and depending on how provocative they are, this can often be applied for very petty reasons or even after doing little to nothing wrong at all. Alternately, only one or two team members play up while one is uninvolved or even opposes, something the heroes very rarely make exception for. This generally happened a lot more in the Hoenn and Sinnoh eras, due to undergoing the worst of their Villain Decay and Straw Loser roles. Maddie Blaustein, one of the voice actors for Meowth in the English dub, once put it very well when half-joking to the fans on message boards that "Team Rocket are the good guys. The Twerps are the villains."
  • At the end of the Indigo League, Ash is scolded for moping about his loss and told not to make excuses. However, this results in some of the audience siding with Ash more, for the previous episode had Ash getting kidnapped by Team Rocket and being forced to use his more powerful Pokémon to get away... and fight Richie using Squirtle, Pikachu, and a disobedient Charizard. Thus, some people feel that his sadness at the loss of the league (which he fought pretty hard for) is justified.
  • May comes off as this in the second half of the Rubello Contest Two-Part Episode. She did yell at Ash just for giving her a helpful tip with her Bulbasaur, which then suffers from Performance Anxiety during the battle against Savannah's Lairon. Not helping May's case was her blindness to her Seed Pokemon being paralyzed by a Shock Wave of all moves ^note Shock Wave is an Electric-type equivalent of Swift, neither of which induces paralysis, which results in her losing. But then the judges quite harshly call her out for her attitude towards her Bulbasaur, making her run off crying. It isn't as excusable a loss as the one above with Ash, but still...
  • Burgundy from the Best Wishes arc of the show comes off as this due to the fact that she barely wins any battles with Cilan. It also helps that she comes off as a Straw Loser who looks so pathetic and is barely taken seriously.
  • There were numerous times when Misty and Brock would self-righteously claim that Ash only got his first two badges out of pity. However, they're exaggerating at best, and lying at worst. Misty's sisters gave Ash the Cascade Badge because he saved their gym from Team Rocket, who attacked in the middle of Ash and Misty's match- which, by the way, Misty technically cheated in. She coddled Pikachu so that it wouldn't want to battle against her, in other words- tampering with her opponent's Pokemon, which is both unsporting and frankly unprofessional. As for Brock, Ash had him and his Onix on the ropes, when Pikachu accidentality set off the gym's fire sprinklers and only relented because Brock's siblings threw a fit and guilt-tripped him into forfeiting. It was Ash who felt sorry for Brock, so he chose not to win when he could have. It's unfair to label Ash as a charity case, when all he did was be the better sportsman, which comes off as Unintentionally Unsympathetic for his two companions, since repeatedly saying that Ash only got their badges out of pity, when he simply showed better sportsmanship than them, can come across as sour grapes for Misty and outright hypocritical for Brock.
• Pom Poko: Wonderland's owner. The tanuki hate him for taking credit for Operation Specter, but it sounds like the authorities and public opinion had already decided Wonderland did it, so his options were limited. He was also willing to find and hire the actual participants, and if the tanukis had taken the offer they would probably be better off than working in desk jobs and snack shops.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Yaten/Sailor Star Healer and Taiki/Sailor Star Maker. While it was wrong of them to blame Usagi for their troubles when she was in no way directly responsible for anything that happened to them, the Three Lights/Starlights were still dealing with the trauma of losing their princess and their planet being destroyed by Galaxia and while Yaten and Taiki are portrayed as unreasonable for berating Seiya — who was supposed to be their leader — for constantly trying to see Usagi, they were on a mission to find their princess and rebuild their destroyed home planet and save their people. With an important responsibility like that on their shoulders, it's a little hard to sympathize with Seiya whenever he brushes off his teammates.
  • Zig-zagged for Usagi during the breakup arc. While she is a Clingy Jealous Girl and it is clear Usagi's depression is supposed to be tearjerking, the fact she gets little to no sympathy for her time of need (in the DiC, 'Amara even jokes about taking 'Darien' for herself before 'Michelle' tells her to knock it off) and Mamoru takes a while before getting back together with her makes this even worse.
  • You’re supposed to think that Usagi is a brat for not wanting to be Sailor Moon. The show doesn’t take into consideration that she’s only 14 and she is too young to be having responsibilities like saving the world as a middle schooler. It doesn't help that it the Doom Tree story arc, Luna and Artimis show reluctance to re-awaken the other Sailors on the grounds that they're all living happy lives, leaving Usagi to fight shoulder the burden all by herself.
• Soul Eater: While no one is going to defend Spirit's failures as a husband, the story tends to pick on him rather excessively in spite of his honest attempts to be a good dad, while putting a happy face on Maka's not-exactly-there relationship with her Missing Mom. It doesn't help that Spirit's positive traits show that he really does his best for Maka, while Maka's mom never appears once or does anything to show she is even remotely worth Maka's praises for.
• Yuzuha in Tenchi Muyo!: Daughter of Darkness; you could spend days drawing up alternative character interpretations due to the disappointingly short runtime of the movie, which allows for quite a bit of freedom since so much is raised and so little actually touched upon, and 70% of them would either result in Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds or an angry petulant demon child without the proper understanding of emotion.
• Hatoko in When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace has a moment at the end of the seventh episode where she has an outburst at the male lead. The intent was supposed to be that Hatoko is being a hysterical crybaby and the stuff she's complaining about didn't warrant that reaction. However, Hatoko's voice actress Took the Bad Film Seriously, and she sounds genuinely anguished and miserable instead, and her complaints struck a chord with a lot of viewers who'd had similar experiences. As a result, a lot of viewers took her side.
• Chazz from Yu-Gi-Oh! GX tends to act like a jerk most days, but gets a moment of this during the second season; specifically, before Jaden duels the brainwashed Alexis to free her from the Society of Light. Chazz gets reprimanded by Syrus, Hassleberry, and Atticus for having brought Alexis into the Society to begin with. The problem is that Chazz was also under the Society's brainwashing when he did that, so blaming him for actions beyond his control is pretty unreasonable. Making the Double Standard worse is that Atticus, one of the people mad at Chazz, should be more sympathetic to his plight; despite nearly killing the heroes while under the control of Nightshroud in the first season, Atticus doesn't face nearly as much scrutiny for the actions he took while possessed.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL:
  • Bronk and Caswell don't really have much room to berate Yuma for summoning Utopia in his duel with Shark, because despite Yuma promising he wouldn't, Shark blatantly asked Yuma to summon it. That should have been a clue that Shark was either prepared for it, or had a case of Honor Before Reason. It's hard to feel like Yuma should be shunned for "breaking a promise" when the one he made the promise to flat-out said he didn't care, and furthermore, why should Bronk even care that Yuma broke a promise to Shark when Shark doesn't respect Bronk at all, to the point of stealing his deck in the first episode?
  • A similar situation arises in the beginning of Episode 20 during Yuma’s duel against Number 96’s holder. While Bronk is also portrayed unsympathetically, Yuma having Utopia attack Dark Mist during the duel is meant to be seen as him being reckless in important duels. However, Utopia having 2 Xyz Materials at the time and an effect that allows him to negate his attacks means Yuma had a means of protecting himself, even had Dark Mist used his own effect. Though, Yuma continuing to act petty and abrasive back against Bronk for hours after the fact does make him lose some sympathy points.
  • A lot of the moves Yuma makes against Nistro are portrayed as cowardly defensive moves, induced by his Heroic B So D. However, using Gagaga Cowboy's effect seemed like a really good move regardless, and is one often exploited in the real-life card game. It helps that Yuma's Battle Phase had already ended and he couldn't attack with it anyway, plus it was too weak to destroy either of Nistro's monsters, so what else could Yuma do at that moment? Also, the Desert Controller Field Spell causes 200 LP of damage whenever a monster is summoned or attacks, so a good defense is a very good strategy there, especially since Yuma was able to combo a lot of his moves to damage Nistro's Life Points or destroy his monsters without attacking, thus costing Yuma fewer Life Points

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