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15 Mentally Unstable Anime Characters Who Are Crazy But Fans Love Anyways
Vote up the anime characters who are certifiable and certifiably captivating.
- 16,618 VOTES
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Future Diary's Yuno Gasai is one of the most notorious crazy yandere in all of anime. On the outside, she seems sweet, albeit a little clingy. The protagonist Yukiteru quickly realizes that her clinging is actually closer stalking and that her love looks more like violence.
Why is Yuno like this? Most people think it's due to her childhood, which involved being severely abused by her parents.
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- 24,947 VOTES
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Midari Ikishima is a third-year student at Hyakkaou Private Academy, Kakegurui's gambling school. There, her mental issues are on full display. She's a compulsive gambler who doesn't keep track of her earnings.
Plunging herself into financial ruin would be bad enough, but Midari isn't satisfied with that. No, she needs her own life to be in peril, even if she gets nothing out of it. For example, her masochistic desire to "feel alive" leads to masturbating while holding a gun to her own head.
- 33,260 VOTES
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Higurashi: When They Cry is a show about a town besieged by a contagious mental illness that drives its sufferers to commit acts of unspeakable violence. With a premise like that, it's hard to choose just one character for this list – but Shion Sonozaki's dramatic mental breakdown really makes her stand out.
Shion is in love with a boy named Satoshi. When Satoshi disappears, Shion blames the powerful families who control their town. Her rage combined with a demonic personality that she develops to deal with her grief results in an explosive mental breakdown where she goes on a killing spree.
- 44,089 VOTES
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Death Note has a lot of characters that could be interpreted as mentally ill, but Teru Mikami is perhaps the clearest example. Mikami lives a life of obsessive rigidity and isolation. While this serves him well in his career as a defense lawyer, it leaves him exquisitely vulnerable to being as Light Yagami's right hand.
When Mikami gets his hands on the killer notebook, he goes full tilt crazy and starts not only killing criminals but literally orgasming during the process. When he realizes that Light isn't God and is, in fact, a deeply flawed human, he responds by committing suicide.
More Teru Mikami - 54,764 VOTES
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Hisoka Morow of Hunter x Hunter is a character who could have anti-social personality disorder. He sees other people as fodder for his own sadistic amusement. He'll help and protect you as long as you're useful to him, but once that usefulness stops, he'll slaughter you with glee. He also lies constantly and enjoys playing violent pranks. Basically, this dude is a pleasure addict who finds joy in the suffering of others.
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- 63,400 VOTES
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Akame ga Kill! features the unstable Seryu Ubiquitous, who works for a crime-stopping squad on behalf of the emperor. Caring about crime comes with the territory, and it isn't necessarily a pathology – but in Seryu's case, it totally is.
Seryu's unshakable sense of black-and-white morality leads her to believe that the corrupt Empire she serves is flawless, and its enemies are pure evil. And in Seryu's mind, pure evil deserves to die, and she should get to enjoy herself destroying it. Her worldview doesn't allow for compassion or even access to reality.
- 71,644 VOTES
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Monster's main villain, Johan Liebert, is a morally bankrupt man who kills with a striking lack of passion. He doesn't enjoy killing, but he doesn't dislike it either. Little is known about his motives. A traumatic childhood could be to blame, but then viewers have to wonder why his sister, who experienced the same trauma, turned out to be a productive member of society.
Whatever the reason, Liebert wants to be the last man standing at the end of the world, and he is utterly incapable of feeling empathy or remorse.
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- 82,255 VOTES
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Being a murderer doesn't automatically imply mental instability or illness, but in Gaku Yashiro's case, it sure seems to. The main villain of ERASED appears to be suffering from antisocial personality disorder, the official term for the colloquial one, psychopathy. Yashiro is an elementary school teacher who has dedicated his life to killing children.
His motivations don't involve personal gain of any kind – they stem from a childhood experience where he murdered a bunch of hamsters and admired the efforts of the sole surviving animal.
- 9507 VOTES
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- My Hero Academia
- Bones
Himiko Toga only appears briefly in the My Hero Academia anime, but it doesn't take long for viewers to deduce that she's super unbalanced. When first introduced to the League of Villains as a potential new recruit, Himiko claims that she wants to kill Stain, that she wants to become Stain, and that she loves Stain.
Why? Because according to Himiko, life is "hard to live" and she wants to make it "easier to be alive." These are not the words of a mentally stable person.
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- 101,746 VOTES
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Life in the world of School-Live! is nothing short of nightmarish. The main characters are the last remaining survivors of a zombie apocalypse, and they're barricading themselves inside their school to stay safe. While most of the kids can accept their grim reality, Yuki Takeya cannot.
To protect herself emotionally, Yuki exists inside an elaborate delusion of normal school life. Her mental instability forces her friends to feign normalcy for her sake, and also to protect her from dangers that she can't acknowledge.
- 111,802 VOTES
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To be fair to Sekai Saionji of School Days, she does have basically the world's shittiest boyfriend, Makoto Itou, and she doesn't go nuts until he drives her to it. Who wouldn't get upset when their boyfriend freezes them out so he can hook up with other girls, trashes a meal they spent hours lovingly crafting, and demands that they get an abortion instead of considering supporting their own child?
The fact that Sekai gets upset isn't what earns her a spot on this list – it's the fact that she chooses to get even with Makoto by stabbing him to death. Yeah, Makoto deserved to be punished somehow, but that's taking it way too far.
- 121,355 VOTES
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Moeka Kiryū of Steins;Gate has severe difficulty with face-to-face communication and does all of her talking through her phone – even with people standing right in front of her. If her phone is taken away, she gets extremely agitated.
In response to the neglect and abuse heaped on her by nearly everyone she meets, Moeka becomes depressed, physically ill, and paranoid. When a less than scrupulous person does show her kindness, she's willing to do anything for him, including taking lives on his behalf.
- 131,793 VOTES
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Mentally unstable doesn't always mean murderous. In reality, most mentally ill people are a lot more like Watamote's Tomoko Kuroki than they are like, say, Johan Liebert. Tomoko is a high school student who desperately wants to make friends and be popular. Unfortunately, her anxiety and lack of social skills keep her from even starting a conversation. She tries to find workarounds that will make her instantly popular, but these tend to be harebrained schemes that involve things like going so long without bathing that she attracts bugs.
Her failure to connect with others worsens her depression, which leads to more outlandish behavior. Her mental instability is actually relatable to a lot of viewers, which is what makes it painful to watch.
- 141,053 VOTES
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Tatsuhiro Satou of Welcome to the NHK is so mentally unstable, he has an entire anime dedicated to it. Satou is a shut-in who spends most of his time playing video games, masturbating, and otherwise avoiding the world. While the same could be said of a lot of anime characters, Satou takes it a step further.
As the series progresses, it becomes clear that Satou isn't living the NEET lifestyle out of laziness or incompetence. He's profoundly depressed to the point of being suicidal, and he's constantly hallucinating. In the original light novels, this was thanks to drugs, but because drugs are absent from the anime, one has to assume that it's a form of psychosis. That said, drug addiction is still a mental illness, so either way, Satou's mental stability is basically nonexistent, and he needs a lot more help than he gets from the manipulative Misaki.
- 153,524 VOTES
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Naruto has a plethora of disturbed characters to choose from, but one of the most memorable has to be Gaara. Like Naruto, Gaara had a tailed beast sealed inside him at birth. Unlike Naruto, Gaara's develops a taste for murder. After a childhood filled with attempts on his life by his father and his uncle, Gaara went on the defense. Not only did he kill to protect himself, he also killed to mask his own loneliness and feel alive.
However, Gaara eventually calms down, stops killing people, and ends up becoming the political leader of his entire nation.
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