Thread:Godzillafan93/@comment-6052796-20141004121045/@comment-397235-20141004142211

There's a few I can think of.

Sticking purely to Another Tomohiko Kazami immediately springs to mind. The guy lost someone he cared about but never got the gumption to make this clear; his best friend then attempts to kill him. He's one of the people who tries to help Daisuke at dinner (something he inherited from Manabu Maejima in the novel) which casts him in a sympathetic light...however, he later on murders at least two people for no discernible reason, and we only learn about his feelings for Yukari as he's in the process of trying to kill Kouichi. That more or less kills what sympathy we might have for him from that revelation. Up until then he's not done anything especially objectionable, but making him a cold blooded murderer destroys most of the sympathy the audience would have (in a rather ham-fisted way no less). Before this he's not done much: he's kind of a jerk to Naoya (but unintentionally, and then, so is everyone else; he and Kouichi both pick on him in the manga, a relationship I liked enough to carry it over for the Westernization).

Takeru Mizuno in the film is a lot like this as well. He absolutely despises Kouichi because he sees Kouichi's involvement of (started to say "with" but stopped myself) Sanae having caused her death. However, the relationship between these two is poorly defined, and so far as I can remember Takeru never actually comes out and says "Hey, you're the Extra;" it's more a matter of "My name is Takeru Mizuno. You keeled my seestor. Prepare to die." That doesn't really work as well because it just makes him seem spiteful (of course, the movie didn't handle anyone especially well, either).

Of course, there's poor Yumi Ogura who I think the entire fandom likes (so she's not so much a sympathetic jerk as just plain sympathetic): two of her close friends and her brother are killed within a few days of each other and nobody really tries to check up on her; that's why she died. Of everyone on this list I'm making she's by far the most sympathetic.

And because every single discussion we have about this ends up here, I might as well throw Takako Sugiura out as well. She goes through pretty much the same process as Tomohiko (except she saw the person she has a thing for die, and she also witnessed Yukari's death, versus Tomohiko, who only witnessed Kubodera's suicide with the rest of the class). Both of them are broken, but the way they're broken is different: Tomohiko keeps it all bottled up inside (until it starts to violently spill over after Naoya tries to kill him), whereas you can tell how devastated Takako is (it's hard not to feel bad for her in pictures like this one [] for instance; there's nothing comparable for Tomohiko). And there's the fact Takako showed restraint, and Tomohiko didn't (in a similar situation he wouldn't have stopped at immobilizing Mei, he'd have killed her); that's the difference between being psychotic and being a psychopath. A psychotic is someone who's mentally unwell but with the right medication can be reintegrated into society at large; a psychopath is both not as noticeable (contrast Takako's chuckling with Tomohiko's calm demeanor), and also far more calculating, and therefore dangerous. Takako doesn't do anything she can't walk away from, so as far as I'm concerned she didn't deserve to die (and outside of rapists and murderers nobody deserves to die like that); even if they'd managed to calm Tomohiko down he's still a murderer, and he would've gone away for a long, long time.