The world of anime is packed with exciting and memorable main characters, from the overpowered superhero Saitama to the rubbery pirate Monkey D. Luffy and the kindhearted Tohru Honda. Characters like these can make an anime truly memorable, but not all anime protagonists are designed like that. Some are generic on purpose.
A variety of series, many of them short, feature a generic and unmemorable lead who is designed to be a self-insert, someone a typical viewer can easily identify with. Some of these “blank template” characters can be fun to watch and have interesting adventures, but on the inside, they are rather boring since they don’t have a unique voice of their own. Who are these self-insert characters?
10 Touya Mochizuki Is Forgettable (In Another World With My Smartphone)
Many generic self-insert characters are isekai protagonists in particular, perhaps to fulfill a typical viewer’s wishes to end up in another world where their surroundings are much more interesting than they are. In Another World With My Smartphone has one such protagonist.
There is little to define Touya Mochizuki as a person. He is known mainly for his amusingly overpowered magic and his friendship with many local girls, who are all quite fond of him. He’s a nice person but hardly an exciting one.
9 Kazuma Sato Is A NEET Avatar (Konosuba)
Kazuma Sato is a sleazy NEET, and he is boring on the inside since he represents typical disillusioned youths who just want to cheat their way to comfort and wealth without having a real life of their own. But at least Kazuma is fun to watch — his personality is dull and unpleasant, but his adventures are great fun.
Kazuma formed a quirky adventurer party with the hapless goddess Aqua, the masochistic knight Darkness, and the explosion-loving witch Megumin, and they will fight any monster, and each other, to earn enough gold coins for dinner and lodgings.
8 Kirito Is A Notorious Self-Insert (Sword Art Online)
Kazuma Sato the gamer has a reputation in the anime world for a few reasons, one of them being his obvious self-insert nature. He doesn’t have many distinct or memorable personality traits, attributes, or interests aside from being a dutiful hero. He is like the raw material for a hero who hasn’t been reshaped into a final product.
Kirito has a generic appearance and personality, and he simply goes wherever the adventures lead him, such as the 100th floor of Aincrad or the Administrator’s palace to save the day. He’s a good swordsman, but there are much more interesting swordfighters out there, such as Ichigo Kurosaki and Roronoa Zoro.
7 Iori Kitahara Is Just Some College Guy (Grand Blue Dreaming)
In all fairness, Iori Kitahara can be great fun to watch in the Grand Blue Dreaming anime since he is a lively party animal who gets into all kinds of trouble, and on the outside, he’s not boring at all. But on the inside, he loosely fits the “generic self-insert” trend.
Iori has a strong but unremarkable personality, being the avatar for any college student who wants to cut loose and have some fun during these wild years. He is mostly driven by external factors, such as invitations to drinking parties and other hijinks. There’s not much that defines him from the inside.
6 Yuzuru Otonashi Doesn’t Steal The Scene (Angel Beats)
Angel Beats is a short drama anime series that does feature some interesting characters, from the gung-ho Yurippe to the petite and quiet Angel herself. This series also has a remarkable premise, with its high school setting being far more than it seems to be.
However, this series’ charm and intrigue owe nothing to the protagonist, Yuzuru Otonashi. He’s a run-of-the-mill high school kid with a simple personality, and he even has amnesia, which erases his backstory. That makes it even easier for viewers to put themselves in his boring shoes.
5 Arata Kaizaki Is Just Some Burnt-Out Guy (ReLIFE)
Arata Kaizaki is a 27-year-old man who is burnt out working for a Japanese “black company,” and he is desperate to find some real meaning and purpose in his life. He was given a special pill that reverted him into a 17-year-old boy, and he returned to high school to relive his adolescence.
It’s a fine premise with some interesting developments, but Arata can’t take credit for being terribly interesting. He goes with the flow and has an unremarkable personality, so any 20-something guy can see himself in Arata’s shoes and think back to their own high school days. How nostalgic.
4 Nariyuki Yuiga Is A Typical Harem Guy (We Never Learn: BOKUBEN)
Nariyuki Yuiga is an ordinary high school student who is good at studying, and that’s all there is to say about his personality. Nariyuki is a good kid since he works so hard to help his classmates study and prepare for college, but he does very little to stand out in the anime world. He’s easily forgotten.
Nariyuki has a generic appearance and personality to make him more suitable for his role in the series’ little harem. A handful of girls are quite interested in him, and naturally, viewers can put themselves in Nariyuki’s shoes if Nariyuki is nice and generic.
3 Takashi Komuro Is Only Interesting When Fighting Zombies (Highschool Of The Dead)
Highschool of the Dead is a zombie apocalypse anime based on the unfinished manga of the same name, and series like these tend to have more interesting zombies than human characters from time to time. Takashi Komuro is the protagonist, and he is a fairly standard self-insert.
Anyone watching this series would want to be Takashi and get a thrill from fighting zombies in a ruined world with no rules. Also, Takashi keeps the company of several attractive girls, which makes him a slight harem protagonist. And harem protagonists are nearly always self-inserts.
2 Yuki Cross Is A Forgettable Shojo Lead (Vampire Knight)
The world of shojo has its fair share of self-insert characters too, typically adolescent female leads who attract many handsome boys despite being described as plain, clumsy, or bad at studying. Yuki Cross is one such heroine, who might be seen as the anime version of Bella Swan of Twilight fame.
Yuki Cross does get a little more interesting later on, but for the most part, she fits comfortably into the self-insert category, and she lacks the vivid personality of shojo leads like Misaki Ayuzawa and Usagi Tsukino. Yuki isn’t a bad person by any stretch, but she’s also not terribly memorable.
1 Kimihito Kurusu Is Defined By His Harem (Monster Musume)
Monster Musume is a harem anime series with a monstrous twist, as per the title, and that almost inevitably means that the male protagonist will be a generic self-insert. Sure enough, Kimihito Kurusu is a typical Japanese fellow who is rather unremarkable on his own.
Instead, Kimihito’s adventure is defined almost entirely by the monster girls who surround him, from Miia the snake girl to Papi, Suu, and far more. This is a series where the protagonist does very little to keep things interesting, and in that sense, he doesn’t pull his weight at all. The monster girls pull it for him.
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