10 Amazing TV Shows (With Terrible Lead Characters)
5. Future Diary
If there's anything negative that NGE contributed to anime, it was starting a trend that lasted all throughout the late 90's and 2000's where shows seemed convinced that the best way to be dark and mature was to make your main character not do anything or make even the most basic of decisions in favor of laying around moping all day long.
Yukiteru Amano from Future Diary is by far the worst example of this trend, dragging down an otherwise entertainingly sick and wonderfully depraved death game anime pretty much every moment he was on screen by being just the biggest wet napkin wuss on the planet.
There's a reason that every ad you see of this show revolves around his psycho stalker girlfriend, because trying to sell this show via its actual protagonist is an exercise in futility. Yukiteru is one of the biggest pansies in anime history, and that threshold is vast.
In fact there's only one anime character that could top Yukiteru for being a terrible protagonist in an otherwise great anime, and it's the one that's to blame for him existing in the first place...