21 Most Depressed Anime Characters (2023)

depressed anime characters

cheered upcan bedepressing🇧🇷 Not all the time, but when it comes to expressing your angst, there's no medium like Japanese cartoons. Join us for a roundup of 21 of the most downbeat anime characters, from sad-boy favorites like Shinji to the postmodern misery of Homura. Depressed anime characters are as diverse as any group.

Before we begin, as an article on depression, the expected content caveats are worth it: mentions of suicide, self-destruction, and suffering are yet to come. Here are 21 of the most depressedanime characters.

Shinji Ikari (Neon Genesis Gospel)

Let's start with the obvious. Shinji gets a lot of crap for being miserable and whiny, and some of it is justified, but the kid is also dealing with one of the worst fathers ever and a pseudo-incestuous crush on his mother's clone. And driving a giant robot. It's a tough time for a teenager, so he might be alone in this, but I hope the upcoming final reboot movie gives him something to smile about.

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Psyduck (Pokémon)

Oh, the existential angst of Psyduck. He suffers from a permanent headache and occasionally unleashes massive psychic storms like those normally only found in X-Men comics. It is a duck that contains multitudes, and they are all sad.

Legoshi (Beasts)

Yes, it's a 3D furry anime and it's pretty good. Protagonist Legoshi is a wolf who has a lot on his plate: homoerotic tension with his sarcastic deer nemesis, family secrets, a doomed romance with a rabbit, along with self-loathing for wanting to eat most of his classmates. class.

Al Elric (Fullmetal Alchemist)

So you're a boy and your father leaves. This sucks. Then your mother dies. This is also bad. So you and your older brother decide to bring her back from the dead. This inevitably goes wrong and you end up an armored disembodied soul. Al has a lot of things to do and it's all very bad! What makes it worse is how hard the boy tries to be happy with his brother, which sometimes works, except when it doesn't. Which is why he is not the only Elric on this list.

Ed Elric (Fullmetal Alchemist)

So you're a boy and your father is gone, your mother is dead, and you manage to lose your brother's body when you try to bring her back. Now you are fourteen years old and you carry the burden of saving the world and, what is most important to you, saving your brother. And you are also totally without the support of a decent adult. Also, you're so short thateveryone assumes that his little brother is the main character🇧🇷 Ed turns off his anguish and spends a lot of time yelling, but the boy isn't happy.

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Clara (Claymore)

I mean, I say Clare, but all Claymores are miserable. These girls are basically walking weapons, doomed to become monsters that are routinely torn apart by fighting and hated by all the normal humans around them. Clare gets the spot because she's the lead, so her depression comes into more focus, but the rest of this article can be Claymores all the way.

Lain Iwakura (serie del experimento final)

She is a computer program that thinks she is a person and spends an entire anime slowly drifting away from humanity. Very sad moments! And honestly, since her separation from her personality involves slowly surrounding herself with computers and refusing to leave her bedroom, she's very relatable.

Homura Akemi (Magic Madoka)

In Madoka, the Magical Girls are batteries of souls who rule the world with their depression, so just like the Claymores, they could all fit here. Homura gets her job because after the death of the girl she is in love with her, she is so unhappy that he destroys the world multiple times to save her. And the main way for her to save her from her is to take her away from her so they can't even be together. This girl needs a new hobby.

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Asuka Langley Soryu (Neon Genesis Gospel)

I bet you thought we were done with Eva, but we weren't. No one on this show is mentally healthy, but we'd be here all day if we listed them all. Instead, I'll focus on the opposite end of the spectrum from Shinji: depression takes many forms, and while Asuka can be talkative and nasty, she's also so self-destructive thatLikesget into robot fights. Also, she, she found her mother's post-suicide corpse when she was a child! This is something dark.

Kiki (Kiki's delivery service)

We went from finding your mother's dead body to a beloved children's movie. Sometimes it is like that. Kiki's Delivery Service is a charming and amazing movie about a little witch who fights alone and triumphs over adversity. And that adversary is burnout-related depression. After trying too hard and dealing with the isolation of moving to a new place, Kiki can barely get out of bed and is too unhappy to use magic. Anyone who has dealt with real depression knows what it's like, even if you're not a witch.

Nozomu Itoshiki (Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei)

This guy lives on a razor's edge; he swings like a miserable pendulum over his constant depression. Nozomu is a master, and everything he encounters makes him scream in despair at him and curl up in a fetal position. He shows up to us and his student in the middle of a suicide attempt, and things don't get better from there. For someone so unhappy and not sure how to find a psychiatrist this is the best there is.

Czeslaw Meyer (¡Bacano!)

Guy! it's a very funny show. Gangsters, trains with silly names, immortality and golems collide in 1920s America and everyone has a great time. Everyone except Czeslaw. He looks ten years old, but he's a few hundred, and while that's enough to make most people feel isolated, Czeslaw goes one step further.

You see, he spent most of his time being tortured to death (later brought back to life) at the hands of a scientist who wanted to test the extent of his immortality. It's no wonder he's more than a little tired when we first meet him, and very surprising that Baccano! it manages to be just as delicious as it is with something like that in it.

Ai Enma (The girl from hell)

From one tortured child to another! Oh, he had a very difficult time. She went from being bullied as a child, to being chosen as a child sacrifice, to hiding from her people to avoid said sacrifice, to being found and buried alive. Her mental trauma weighed on her so much that she rose up as a vengeful spirit and burned her village to the ground, and really, who can blame her? If she had magical powers she would have done the same.thing to the endguy who would argue with me about movies.

Unfortunately, Ai has more suffering to come. Her parents were killed by the villagers when they found out they faked her sacrifice, so the Master of Hell makes her an offer. If she works for him, her mom and her dad go to heaven. As part of this, Ai needs to stop feeling anything, including her own hatred and misery. This girl can't even be depressed as depressed as she is. That is the maximum performance.

Suzaku Kururugi (Geass Code)

On the surface, Suzaku seems to have done just fine. Sure, he was orphaned as a child and surely suffers from institutionalized anti-Japanese racism in the dystopian world of Britannia, but hey, he got admitted to a fancy school and reunited with his old friend LeLouch. Except this is all an act to hide how bad it is.

Ten-year-old Suzaku killed his father, the Emperor of Japan, in an effort to end the war and save his people, but ended up causing more trouble. Guilt-ridden, Suzaku spends most of the early parts of Code Geas taking on dangerous missions in the hope of getting killed, which gets worse when his girlfriend dies.

And then things get weird when he's mentally controlled with the order to 'live'. Suzaku, the ultimate death hunter, can no longer seek death. I mean, I guess it's cheaper than therapy?

Ami Mizuno/Sailor Mercury (Sailor Moon)

Bear with me. Sailor Moon is an archetypal Magical Girl series where the princesses save the day. Unless you've watched the show, you probably don't know that it's also emotionally devastating at times. At the end of the first season, all the Sailor Scouts die! Of course, they come back to life afterwards, but Ami still kills herself on screen because she believes that she will be useless in the next battle. It's even worse because the show didn't make much of her feelings before: how much do you bottle, Mercury?

Seita Yokokawa (Túmulo dos Vaga-lumes)

This one might be cheating, as it's hard to tell if Seita is sadder than me, but Grave of the Fireflies is miserable enough to get away with it. Seita and his sister Setsuko are orphaned during World War II and decide to live alone. It doesn't go well and the two children starve. That's the movie! More accurately, Seita dies alone at a train station after unsuccessfully trying to save his sister. He is 14 years old and is holding his ashes in the tin that used to contain his favorite candy. What's worse is that the book he is based on is inspired by the author's real life experiences.

Jiro Horikoshi (The Wind Rises)

While we're on the subject of real-life tragedy surrounding World War II...

This film follows Jiro Horikoshi as his aircraft designs are taken from his hands and used to cause enormous suffering. The film functions as a metaphor for the loss of creative control, as well as making stern anti-war statements. Though the bittersweet ending sees Jiro accept his life's work and the repercussions of it, it's still a tough watch.

Wormmon (Aventura Digimon)

For starters, your name isnot fromThat is not a good start to any life. Wormmon's suffering began when he teamed up with Ken, a human boy destined to be his best friend. Unfortunately, no one told Ken that he was in a children's show, so he decided to turn evil and conquer the Digital World by killing and mind-controlling all the Digimon. Wormmon remained loyal to him, eventually saving his life in an act that finally convinced Ken that Digimon were sentient. What a pity it took so long!

Spike Spiegel (Cowboy Bebop)

Nihilistic, superficially careless, and deeply unhappy, Spike is a complicated guy in a complicated universe. Unlike most of the characters on this list, Spike slowly improves as his family of crewmates remind him that caring about other people is a good thing. It's not that he's doing well, but he can't have everything.

Korosensei (Aula de Assassinato)

Starting his life in the slums, Koro learned to kill to survive and eventually became a famous assassin. This led him to take on an apprentice, a boy whom he treated cruelly due to his own cruel upbringing, who ended up betraying him.

He ended up in an experimental lab that taught him about compassion and turned him into a yellow octopus, as expected. Koro was a bad guy created by bad circumstances, and while that doesn't excuse murder, it does explain why he spends most of the show trying to get people to kill him.

Ash Ketchum (Pokémon)

He is ten years old for more than a decade. He will never be the best. He will just go on, forever.

What did you think of these depressed anime characters?

Are any of them your favourite? Let us know in the comments below.