How To Make The Perfect Anime Protagonist
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Humor, Television, Satire, Culture, Anime

How To Make The Perfect Anime Protagonist

Make the protagonist an orphan.

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

1. Give The Protagonist A Rival

Make sure the rival treats the protagonist like absolute shit, yet the protagonist still wants to win his love and affection, despite his repeated attempts to murder the protagonist by stabbing him through his chest. Preferably you’ll want the rival, who should vacillate between a close ally and a villain, to be emo, brooding, prideful, and looking for some kind of revenge.

2. Give The Protagonist A Shallow Female Love Interest

Make sure the protagonist fits the trope of the domineering, physically, and verbally abusive lover with a soft side. Have all the female characters in the protagonist’s life fit this trope, making them essentially useless damsels-in-distress for the protagonist to save. Also, they must have huge breasts.

3. Give The Hero Endless Power-Ups

Make sure the protagonist is an underdog with an annoying and unrealistically positive disposition. He must start out weak but become inexplicably stronger every time he faces a new villain. Ensure there is no limit to the number of power-ups the hero has, and make sure to always write another level of the power-up. Your protagonist might have two legs and an arm torn off, but even with one hand, he can awaken some supernatural ability, like changing the color of his hair or surrounding himself with lightning, by sheer willpower.

4. Make The Ending All About The Protagonist

Towards the end of the anime, make sure all the focus is on the protagonist and one or two of his close friends and/or rivals. All of the side characters you’ve spent time developing must now become mere members of the audience that watch in awe of the protagonist’s God-like power, like his ability to destroy entire cities with a single punch. The final 30 episodes must focus only on the protagonist and his new-found powers equivalent of a nuclear warhead that he, for some reason, never had before.

5. Make Your Protagonist An Orphan

Your protagonist must be an orphan abandoned by his birth parents so they could stop a nuclear power plant from melting down and killing a bunch of sea otters. But keep it ambiguous as to whether the parents are actually dead so you can bring them back at a random point.

6. Make The Hero A Christ Figure

The protagonist needs to be some sort of Christ figure who reaches out to become friends with other people. Write your character’s stubborn determination as annoying, but have other, less important characters see his determination as charismatic. By the end of the anime, your protagonist must have won over the entire world because of his Christ-like disposition, transforming even evil and depraved perpetrators of genocide into redeemed heroes.

7. Give The Protagonist Foolish And Gullible Villains

You need to have the villain initially overwhelm the protagonist, but then get too arrogant too quickly so some sort of unexpected intervention saves the day. No matter what terrible and awful thing the villain has done, how many people he’s killed, or how many children he’s left orphaned, the villain must be turned into a last-minute, valuable ally to fight the next, even more evil and powerful villain.

8. Make The Protagonist Preach Friendship

The protagonist must convey the message that friendship is the answer to all the world’s problems. Having close and loyal friends must be the reason why the protagonist didn’t give up, even when he was on his deathbed. If a friend dies, manipulate the intense emotional grief to give the protagonist another power-up, and include a scene with a villain crushing a friend with his bare hands as a plot device to reveal the protagonist’s Earth-shaking punches.

9. Make The Protagonist Annoyingly Scream His Attacks

In fights, the protagonist must scream his attack before attacking the villain, usually the name of some exotic bird like “flamingo!” Despite the fact that the protagonist’s attack moves are well-known to any villains that have done a shred of research, the latter must be intellectually incapable of knowing what’s to come.

10. Make The Protagonist Gullible To Love Interests

Once the protagonist acquires some sort of success, be sure to introduce more girls, who must all start vying for his attention. Make these girls shy, and also make sure the protagonist is oblivious to their interest. And make sure that these women, too, are helpless damsels-in-distress with huge breasts.

11. Make The Protagonist A Teenager

Above all, make sure the protagonist is a coming-of-age teenager, who, with the rest of his teenage friends, saves the entire world from the evil radioactive alien-looking reptile from an unknown planet. Your protagonist might only be 15 years old, but he needs to put to shame the accomplishments of smarter and more competent people, and defy logic by saving the world from destruction.