12 Anime With Self-Insert Protagonists

In all media that tells a story, the protagonist is the character through which we see the world that is presented to us. We follow them through their story, see the world the way they see it, and learn about it as they learn about it.

The protagonist is a crucial story-telling tool. However, not all protagonists are characters of their own, strictly speaking. Some main characters – particularly in anime, a medium where the only actor is the voice actor – are meant to be blank slates.

Yes, the protagonists may have a backstory and even aspirations, but they are written to be rather bland. In literature, they’d be the everyman archetype. They have bland hair color, they are the most average good guy in everything from personality to academics, and there is nothing remarkable about them except maybe whatever fictional power makes them overpowered.

Their design is meant to be so least common denominator and relatable that the wider audience can essentially slip into their skin. It means you can feel like a protagonist of a more eventful story than your own.

Anime With Self-Insert Protagonists

What is a Self-Insert?

There is still quite some debate on what does and does not qualify as a self-insert protagonist.

In truth, usually if you have one quality in common with a protagonist, you can insert yourself into their shoes. If a character likes eating food and not murdering people, they could be you!

Despite that extreme example for comedy, this means if you see something in them that you see in yourself, you could self-insert into their story – and that does mean you can self-insert into a lot of anime protagonists.

In essence, any anime can have a self-insert protagonist, but some are more obvious than others. However, you see self-insert protagonists in certain types of anime more than others.

Often, any anime where the protagonists’ story isn’t quite as important as other aspects of the show will lean more towards self-insertion. These include anime genres such as:

• Isekai
• Harems where the entire plot is helping cute girls with their individual problems.
• Reverse harems
• Visual novel adaptations where the novel it is adapting has multiple choice dating sim roots.
• Ecchi
• Mystery
• Horror

There are fully realized, fleshed out protagonists in some anime in those genres for sure, but self-insert basic protagonists are far more common in them if you are searching for more anime to self-insert into.

Amnesia

Amnesia was based off a rather good otome game, but made a rather poor anime adaptation. Such is the fate of most otome game adaptations when you try to wedge in every boy and their complex stories that all culminate with the heroine – but can’t all culminate at the same time.

One of the bigger problems in the Amnesia anime, as you see with other otome game anime adaptations, is the passivity of the heroine. Amnesia is a story about various damaged boys, and they should be the stars. Unfortunately, it turns out that it is rather unsatisfying just having a nothing-burger heroine as a framing device for all their stories.

Ultimately, self insertion with the heroine of Amnesia is really the only thing you can do because it is just a series about ogling pretty, color-coded, yet damaged boys.

Clannad

Clannad is a visual novel anime adaptation AND a self-insert protagonist done right.

The main character in Clannad, Tomoya, has his own problems in his life, but like any good harem protagonist, he ignores them to help out a wide array of girls with their occasional over-dramatic problems.

In the visual novel, helping girls and others are chopped up as various routes while the anime melds them into a more linear story and focuses romance on just one girl. While some routes are definitely done better in the visual novel, Clannad became legendary and well-loved for how well it melded together the many individual stories of the characters.

That said, because Tomoya eventually does address his problems and grow as a character, it becomes progressively harder and harder to self-insert into him. Unless, you also have daddy issues.

The anime even “softened” Tomoya’s character so he is less of a jerk at first and more relatable to the audience. This means by the time you can no longer self-insert into him, you are still already well-invested in his story.

Redo of Healer

There is probably a portion of people who watch edgy, violent anime because they like watching fictional characters get tortured, but let’s be real with each other here.

People watch edgy anime because they fantasize about doing the things they are seeing to people they know. Powerless, picked on people project themselves into the edgier main characters as a power fantasy that hopefully they never act on.

Redo of Healer is pretty infamous, but for those uniformed, it is a series that melds brutal physical torture with sex. Keyaru, the protagonist, was frequently abused by his adventuring party – both physically and sexually – until he gained the chance to go back in time where – knowing future events – he prepares his revenge of physical and sexual torture.

Now, revenge in anime is a powerful story, but revenge in Redo of Healer is wish fulfillment for the those that suffer from bullying and maybe need better parental supervision over what they watch.

Outbreak Company

Imagine being an otaku.  I know, so hard, right?

Well, imagine all that useless knowledge of anime, manga, and games being useful as an ambassador to a fantasy land filled with fantasy women who find it fascinating. Well, that’s the dream, I guess.

Outbreak Company allows you to live that dream vicariously through the everyman otaku main character whose his only unique aspect is that his social skills somehow did not deteriorate after living as a hikikomori.

Sword Art Online

Sword Art Online is the most debated self-insert anime likely because it is so popular and people fervently hate opinions that differ from their own these days.

However, Kirito is every ounce a self-inset characters from his bland avatar in an VRMMO where he could have been anything to his bland personality that makes panties drop as he passes by.

Kirito is effortlessly good at everything, bravely shuns guilds because he doesn’t need them, and women are inexplicably are drawn to him in mass. He is a Gary Stu you want to crawl into.

As Sword Art Online goes on, it expands Kirito’s story beyond its trapped in a VRMMO origins, but even then, he remains as bland an action anime protagonist as any.

Isekai Cheat Magicians

Isekai is a formula built on self-insert protagonists and with the increasingly tantalizing offer of escapism and fulfillment. Yet, there are good isekai anime where the protagonists are more fully realized, complex characters.

Not this one, though.

Isekai Cheat Magicians was a low point for isekai – depressingly so. It was the pinnacle of generic isekai adventures. You follow a guy who is transported to another world with his female childhood friend who, as these things always go, has a crush him.

They discover they are powerful almost immediately with minimal effort, the self-insert main character seems to be a magnet for cute girls that are fine being hanger-on’s hoping for an ounce of affection, and they power through every adventure with minimal struggle.

I can’t tell you even one original aspect of his character – because there are none.

Another

It is an extremely hot take, but mystery and horror anime are rife with self-insert protagonists – you just don’t want to insert yourself into them.

The everyman character in mystery and horror is a common tool, and you see it done pretty well – and pretty obviously if you are looking for self-inserts – in the anime, Another.

In Another, the main character transfers into a new school. He is a standard kid looking to make friends until he discovers that his class is bullying this one odd eye patch-wearing gloomy girl by pretending she doesn’t exist.

Now, the main character as a character in Another is almost utterly unimportant. He is exploring the story of the eye patch girl, the curse of the class, and trying so furiously to stop hemorrhaging classmates to viciously deadly accidents.

You don’t want to self-insert into his skin because Another is a horror mystery. However, he is so average that you can – and unintentionally do! That is part of the horror, imagining these situations happening around you.

In Another World With My Smart Phone

As much as people don’t seem to like it, In Another World With My Smartphone firmly established the “isekai formula” that isekai still follows to this day. It even established the “evolution” of isekai anime where all new isekai had to have some sort of hook to make it special.

In Another World With My Smartphone is a every bit the generic isekai experience. From being exactly about what it says in the title to going off the deep end in terms of plot as it goes on.

Interestingly enough, In Another World With My Smartphone fully embraces being average. The main character is skilled in magic, but still mostly just rolls around with his harem doing nothing much. He doesn’t even use his smartphone much. He could be a god with his powers, and instead his is just a man living in a house with his many wives.

If he had any ounce of personality of his own, perhaps he would be a god.

My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU

If you meet a young man and their two favorite anime series are My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU and Classroom of the Elite, you can immediately know their personality because both of those series invite audiences of a certain type with their similar self-insert characters.

Now, Hachiman in My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU is a bit different from the usual self-insert in that he does have personality. He is pessimistic, snarky, intelligent but unmotivated, and has a good heart that beats in there despite all that.

“He’s literally me, fr fr.” As the memes say.

Hachiman is what a lot of young men imagine themselves to be, but ultimately are lonely and want desperately for someone to pull them out of their shell. Conveniently, that is also what My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU is about.

Haganai

It is a shame when a harem anime sets up a protagonist to have an interesting story that would allow for ample character growth only to ignore them because there are more marketable cute anime girls to focus on.

Haganai sets up its plot as a series about a club for making friends. It is started by the main character because he looks like a thug, but isn’t. His appearance has consistency made it hard to make friends, so he and a girl found a club specifically for people like them. However, instead of a series of lonely normal people joining the club, Haganai’s club attracts eccentric girls who are still very cute.

Haganai is often frustrating for those who hope for romance in their harem anime because the main character is such a self-insert that he is often just “there.” The girls are playing out their own plots, and he is just in room having almost nothing to do with it.

Erased

Similar to Another, Erased is another “this isn’t a self-insert character until you really think about it” sort of affair.

Erased follows a main character that is living his adult life as a failed manga artist and pizza delivery man that can occasionally turn back time. Until that last “timey-wimey” bit at the end, his middling non-starter of an adult life is fairly relatable to an older audience and accurately captures the fear of its younger one.

The story follows his jump back in time to when he was a child before a series of unsolved child murders were about to happen. If you knew a few people were about to be mysteriously murdered, what would you do? Erased follows the answer to that question.

This means, because it is such a relatable “what if,” Erased better captures the audience by making the main character an everyman that the audience roots for because they are unwillingly self-inserting through relatability.

There is even a moment near the end surrounding a certain romantic pairing that was so reviled by audiences, I theorize, because they were inadvertently self-inserting with the character.

Hyouka

There was a time when Oreki and his energy-conserving antics was widely embraced by the anime community. He was, like Hachiman from My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU, another perfect “he’s just like me, fr fr” self-insert character to mimic your whole personality after.

Through signature Kyoto Animation emphasis, Chitanda stole the show in Hyouka by being a particular brand of curious and cute. This personality crashed against the walls of the “chronically uninterested but interest in her” Oreki that got dragged into all her curious mysteries.

Hyouka is Chintanda setting up a supernatural-seeming mystery, and Oreki knocking down her paranormal hopes with stone-cold logical reality all while building up an increasingly close relationship with each other.

Oreki is living the life that teen boys can only hope to live. They want to be intelligent, mature, cool, and toying with the reality that a cute girl might like them. However, does the desire to be like a character count as self-insert? Debatable, certainly. However, I believe it is just self-insertion, in a different form.

Do you have more self-insert anime for fans bored with their own reality? Let fans know in the comments section below.