You have anime series where the main character is always the champion of justice, and you have anime series where the main character is an anti-hero or even a downright villain. However, then you have the metamorphosis in the middle – a situation where you get to watch the main character transform into a villain. This may not necessarily mean that their friends turn against them, but it means they are certainly not considered to be on “the right side” of morality by the end. If you want to see a main character choose to walk the path of darkness, we have anime recommendations for that.
Best Anime With Evil Main Characters
Tokyo Ghoul
Tokyo Ghoul is perhaps one of the most notable examples of a main character going evil because it was so jarring. Kaneki in the beginning compared to Kaneki at the end are exact opposites in every way, right down to the hair color. So when you start watching the series and chuckle at that demure, kind-hearted nerd, get ready for a ride that showcases him becoming everything he hates.
Code Geass
Code Geass starts off as a story about school boy and exiled prince given a unique power and deciding to get back at his Emperor father through fanning the already smoldering flames of rebellion. However, as the series goes on, he decides that he does in fact care about the people of Japan and his motives shift to toppling the empire. This eventually works and he becomes a ruler himself. However, the series is excellent at highlighting that no ruler climbs to power with clean hands.
Death Note
Death Note follows Light as he goes from bored high school boy that believes it is justice to just kill all criminals to an actual criminal with a god complex. In fact, you could say that from the first time he murdered a person, he was a villain in breach of his own espoused morals. That being true, the series paints his decline to villainy as a slower burn where his personality becomes even more twisted the more the world praises the work that he is doing as Kira.
Attack on Titan
This series is one of transformation, and transformation in many ways. Characters transform into titans. World views transform. Character motivations transform. Even the main character goes from wanting to destroy all titans to wanting to destroy almost all people. As you watch the hidden secrets of the world unfold before you in this series, you watch the main character get increasingly backed into a corner until he feels that there is only one path for him to follow, and it is one that even his dearest friends disagree with.
Guilty Crown
Guilty Crown can cleanly be split into two parts. The first part follows a school boy learning to use a power he accidentally got in order to pull objects out of people that are manifestations of their soul. However, about half way through, a major event happens and the main character you see after is not the same man you once knew. He is hardened and not always inclined to do what’s right. Furthermore, now he sees most people as their potential uses rather than as actual people.
Future Diary
No one could call Yukiteru “heroic” through much of Future Diary, but you can definitely call him a villain by the end. As Future Diary documents a killing game in which the participants kill each other and the last one standing gets to be the new God, you can understand how morals can degrade. It displays that moral decline in almost all contestants to some degree or another. However, interestingly enough, the event that sent him over the edge actually had little to do with the game itself.
Black Lagoon
Now, being about mercenaries, everyone in Black Lagoon is a villain already. However, Rock, who is ostensibly the main character of this series, doesn’t start off as such. He is an average salaryman who, after learning how disposable he was to his company, decides to join the mercenary group that kidnapped him. While he remains good-hearted and optimistic for awhile, tempering the more hardcore malicious Revy with it, he begins to definitely transform into more of a morally gray mercenary as the series goes on.
Destiny of the Shrine Maiden
Yuri anime does have the bad habit of turning tragic and this is the most notorious of them all. The series starts with two girls, inseparable best friends with feelings of being more, who awaken powers to dispel evil. While they are great heroes at first, things end up taking a turn and it corrupts one so that she does some pretty evil things. Of course, as you learn, her motives may not have been as motivated by evil as they seem at first glance.
Elfen Lied
Technically, you could say the Lucy/Nyu was evil right from the beginning, but she forgot about it with some timely amnesia. Regardless, over the course of the series you watch her go from a brain damaged sweetling to a hardcore murder who kills to overcome even the slightest obstacle as she recovers her memories.
Overlord
In the beginning, Ainz was a guy that got isekai’d into his favorite MMO and accidnetally suggested to the NPCs-now-living-beings that he created that they should conquer the world. So they start to. In the beginning, he is successful, but you see some comical flaws to his personality as evil overlord and he does show some mercies. However, as things go on, you watch those morals slip away, slowly at first, then go into rapid decline. It is jarring when you are enjoying the series only to realize that you really are watching the villain of it.
Do you have more anime recommendations that show the moral decline of their main characters as they go from the protagonist to the antagonist of their series? Let fans know in the comments section below.
