Move Over, Main Characters: The Supporting Cast Members Who Are Carrying Their Whole Shows

Opinion: The protagonist problem in anime is real, and we need to talk about it.

Not that protagonists are bad — some of them are genuinely great. But there's a particular kind of frustration that builds when you're watching a show with a massive, richly developed world and a supporting cast that's fascinating, only to keep cutting back to the main character doing their main character thing. You know the feeling. You're watching My Hero Academia and you're like, "Cool, Deku is crying again, but can we please check in on what Hawks is up to?"

This isn't a niche complaint. Spend five minutes in any anime fan community — Reddit, Discord, Twitter, wherever your people are — and you'll find passionate, essay-length arguments for why Character B deserves more screen time than Character A. And increasingly, the anime industry is listening. Spinoffs are happening. Spotlight episodes are getting greenlit. Side characters are getting their due.

But let's make the case properly. Here are some of the most compelling supporting characters in contemporary anime, and why their arcs hit harder than the leads they're technically there to support.

Nanami Kento (Jujutsu Kaisen): The Adult in the Room

If you watched Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 and you're still emotionally okay, respect — but also, are you sure? Because what happened to Nanami Kento during the Shibuya Incident arc was one of the most affecting character send-offs in recent anime memory, and the guy was technically a supporting character.

What makes Nanami work so well is that he represents something genuinely rare in shonen anime: a fully realized adult perspective. He's not a mentor who exists to die for the protagonist's growth. He has his own relationship with the sorcerer world, his own moral framework, his own exhaustion. His famous "overtime" speech — where he explains that after a certain hour, he fights with a little extra intensity just for himself — is a tiny window into a whole person. A person with boundaries, preferences, a sense of self.

Fans didn't just like Nanami. They grieved Nanami. His death generated the kind of community response usually reserved for main characters, which tells you everything about how effectively Gege Akutami built him out. A Nanami prequel series or spinoff manga would have an audience ready and waiting yesterday.

Anya Forger (Spy x Family): The Accidental Heart of the Show

Here's a fun argument: Anya Forger is technically a supporting character in Spy x Family, and she is unambiguously the reason most people watch it.

Loid Forger is the protagonist — the spy, the mission driver, the narrative engine. And he's great! But Anya, the telepathic child at the center of the show's fake-family premise, operates on a completely different level of audience connection. Her reactions, her schemes, her absolute chaos energy — these are what people GIF, what people put on merchandise, what people use as their avatars.

What's interesting from a craft perspective is that Anya's emotional arc is actually quite sophisticated underneath the comedy. She's a child who desperately wants a real family after a life of isolation and experimentation. Every goofy face she makes is underlaid by that genuine need. The show is smart enough to let both layers coexist, which is why she lands so effectively.

Could Anya carry her own series? Absolutely. A show told entirely from her perspective — navigating Eden Academy with her secret telepathy, trying to protect her fake family's fake cover — would be incredible. Someone at Wit Studio, please make this happen.

Momo Yaoyorozu (My Hero Academia): The Character Who Got Shortchanged

This one requires a slight shift in tone, because Momo Yaoyorozu's situation is less "look how great this character is" and more "look at how much potential this character has that hasn't been fully realized."

Momo starts My Hero Academia with one of the most interesting Quirks in the show — the ability to create any non-living object from her body, requiring a deep understanding of molecular chemistry and physics. She's established as academically brilliant, strategically gifted, and genuinely humble despite coming from a prestigious hero family. Her arc in the Sports Festival, where she has to rebuild her confidence after a difficult loss, is one of Season 2's best character moments.

And then... the show kind of leaves her there. She gets moments, sure. But she never gets the sustained focus her setup promises. Fan communities have been making this argument for years, and it's hard to disagree. A Momo-centered story — maybe something that follows her through UA's support track, or explores what being a creation-based hero looks like in practice — would fill a real gap.

This is actually a broader issue with ensemble shonen: the larger the cast gets, the more certain characters get squeezed out. Streaming platforms offering standalone spotlight episodes for characters like Momo could be a genuine solution.

The Spinoff Era Is Here

Here's the good news: the industry is increasingly aware that great supporting characters are a resource, not a byproduct. We've already seen Tokyo Ghoul expand through supplementary manga. My Hero Academia has a whole spinoff universe. Demon Slayer gives us the Entertainment District and Swordsmith Village arcs, which are really about expanding the world beyond Tanjiro's immediate journey.

Streaming has accelerated this. Platforms like Crunchyroll and Netflix have the infrastructure to support shorter-run spinoffs and OVA series that would have been commercially risky in an earlier era. If the fan demand is there — and for characters like Nanami, Anya, and dozens of others, it clearly is — the economics increasingly make sense.

Why Side Characters Hit Harder

There's a psychological reason supporting characters often resonate more deeply than protagonists, and it comes down to constraint. Main characters need to be somewhat universal — they're the vessel through which audiences enter the story. That universality can flatten them.

Supporting characters don't carry that weight. They get to be specific. Specific in their flaws, their motivations, their relationships. That specificity is what creates genuine attachment. When Nanami talks about overtime, it's not a speech designed to resonate with everyone — it's designed to feel like him. And paradoxically, that makes it resonate with everyone.

The best anime understand this and build casts accordingly. The shows that endure — the ones that build real, lasting communities — are almost always the ones where you can have a legitimate argument about who the actual best character is.

And nine times out of ten? It's not the protagonist.

Sorry, Deku.