This season’s dark psychological anime, Happy Sugar Life, stands out not only due to its disturbing content but also because of its main character, Satō. A psychopath, she perfectly fits the mold of a “yandere” character. But there is a reason so few yandere are protagonists in any medium–anime included. Namely, their very nature.
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In anime, there are specific character archetypes when it comes to romance. The most well known of these is “tsundere.” The word itself is a portmanteau of “tsun tsun” (to be aloof) and “dere dere” (to be lovey-dovey). What it means is that, on the outside, the character appears stuck-up but on the inside longs for romance. Thus, tsunderes often talk down to or bully the objects of their affections because they have trouble expressing their inner feelings.
Other “dere” types also exist. There is the “kuudere” (“cool” to the point of emotionless on the outside) and dandere (quiet and shy to the extreme on the outside). And then there is “yandere”–which is a different beast altogether.
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Unlike the other “dere” types, yandere seem perfectly normal on the outside. They are friendly, kind, and often quite popular. The problem is the unbridled crazy that lies within. You see, yandere is a portmanteau of “yanderu” (to be sick) and the aforementioned “dere dere.” Put together and you get “sick love.” Yanderes are obsessed to the point of madness with those they love. They will do literally anything to be with that person.
There are largely two types of “yandere” in anime: the possessive and the obsessive. The possessives seek to keep the object of their obsession to themselves. When pressed, they will even kill the one they love to prevent them from falling in love with another. Obsessives go the other route: they will simply kill everyone else.
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Yandere are, by and large, psychopaths. They have no sense of empathy for others–up to, and often including, their romantic partners. Other people are simply things, no different than an inanimate object or a bug.
They are unburdened by morality. They have no innate sense of right and wrong–only what they want and do not want. They care nothing for the rules of society and only follow them when it is the easiest and most expedient route to their goals. And when they kill, it doesn’t even factor in if their victim is innocent or evil; the only important thing is that he or she is in the way.
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What truly matters to yanderes are their own feelings; they simply want to eternally experience the feeling they receive from being in love with their love interests. They both fear and hate the idea of having this taken away from them which is the direct cause of many of their more extreme actions.
And to make it worse, they also can’t fully grasp the consequences of said actions–often seeing murder as the easiest way to achieve their goals despite the problems such an act will cause them down the line.
Because of the very nature of being a yandere character, they’re almost always cast as villains opposing the protagonist. After all, it’s tough to write a story where the “hero” is an amoral, apathetic, psychopath who only cares about controlling the person he or she purports to love.
However, it’s not impossible.
One way to make a yandere character into a sympathetic protagonist is to build a carefully constructed setting. Within this setting, the yandere’s usually abominable actions manage to fit within the average viewer’s moral code–despite the insanity behind those actions.
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A major example of this is 2011’s Future Diary. In it, our yandere heroine, Yuno, and the object of her affection, Yuki, are thrown into a death game where the last person alive becomes God. As people are quite literally out to kill Yuki and Yuno, Yuno killing people to keep herself and the innocent Yuki alive falls well within a normal person’s moral code. After all, she is killing in the defense of herself and her loved ones. Of course, the way she sees it is different: she is simply killing the people who are trying to get in the way of her and Yuki’s love.
The other way to make a yandere appear to be the hero of a story is to simply make every antagonist more objectively evil than the yandere.
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This is how it works in Happy Sugar Life. Satō, our yandere protagonist, has kidnapped a young child, Shio, and imprisoned her in an apartment. The twist is that Shio comes from a dangerously abusive family. Her life in Satō’s apartment appears to be far better than the environment she came from. Even Satō’s worst crime from before the start of the series, a murder, is revealed to have been to defend Shio from imminent harm.
Likewise, in Satō’s quest to provide for Shio, she blackmails, manipulates, and otherwise threatens numerous people–nearly all of which turn out to be just as crazy as Satō, if not more so. Thus, while we find her motivations disturbing, we can root for her because she is a monster battling other monsters to protect an innocent.
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However, even in these situations, a yandere is always a ticking time bomb. It is a matter of chance or circumstance that they find themselves on the side of the angels in our eyes. There is always the danger that they will cross the “moral event horizon”–do something so evil that it makes them irredeemable. This adds a whole extra layer of drama to any story with a yandere protagonist. We want to like characters like Yuno and Satō but we also fear they will make this impossible.
And from a story perspective, this is the final challenge with having a yandere protagonist. When they inevitably cross the threshold into pure evil, will viewers be invested enough to see where the story goes? Will they care enough to follow characters they have come to hate just to see if they get their comeuppance? Or will they simply drop the story and move on?
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There’s no question that the difficulty of writing a yandere protagonist is why we see so few of them–even in anime. However, the simple fact remains: once you go yandere, you never go back.
…which is kind of expected when you’re tied to a bed with your kneecaps shattered, but there you go.
Happy Sugar Life can be seen with English subtitles on Amazon Prime Video. Future Diary can be seen in English on Hulu, Funimation, and Crunchyroll.
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You, first aired on Lifetime and now streaming on Netflix, is a perfect example of a yandere protagonist, and the story doesn’t necessarily rely on the “tricks” you listed here. It’s simply told from his POV, with Joe narrating as though he’s telling a story to his Beloved- Beck. It gives him a chance to explain indirectly to the audience his actions, and it makes you root for him even if you don’t agree with what he’s doing.