Elfgore said:I tired my best to let go hating Kirito, but I just have to say this in his defense. Almost EVERY shounen protagonist is like this. OP, always pulls a victory out of his ass, has multiple attractive women loving him for no real reason. He just embodies it perfectly.
Rito from the Love-Ru. He is the most pathetic excuse of a person ever. How he ever got multiple women to fall in love with him is beyond me. He is completely useless in any situation and just lets his many girlfriends take care of him.
My most hated protagonist of all time. Ichika from Infinite Stratos. He is the most dense person, no. The most dense thing that exists on earth. Seven girls have feelings for him, and at several times making it painfully obvious. Every time he just goes "huh?" and gets a dumb look on his face. This picture describes the show perfectly.
Edit: Picture should be fixed.
Well, Anime has it's own set of really obvious tropes. It was fresh when it was first becoming popular in the US because they weren't so well known, but now that Anime has been around so long they have become as painful and annoying as anything else. To be honest the tropes you mention such as the "hot blooded" prodigy hero that pulls off amazing victory after amazing victory, or the classic harem anime set up, are actually pretty cool when you first see them. Once you've seen a dozen variations on what amounts to the same exact schtick it gets old. Especially when it becomes abundantly clear that the quality of the writing varies heavily and some people just don't get what made a given trope work to begin with. I haven't seen the series you mention (I haven't followed Anime like I used to, in part because of burn out) but it sounds like "Infinite Stratos" is trying to be a Tenchi Muyo ripoff, like a lot of harem animes, without quite getting the formula right. Yes, Tenchi was dense to an extent (in all versions) but it should also be noted that the girls in question were all psychotic super-beings, every single one of them was absolutely bug nuts in their own way, and most of them seemingly tried to kill him at least once, the point kind of being that all fanboy comments aside, you'd probably wind up "friend zoning" most of them too. It's also noteworthy that in a lot of the various versions of that story he does eventually hook up with someone, and it's generally not one of the crazy
girls who follow him around, which is intentional. Then again I supposed I have a soft spot for the various incarnations of Tenchi simply because it was the first anime of it's particular sub-genere I saw.
I will also say that one of the things I do like about the somewhat arrogant "hot blood" hero that you seem to be talking about is that it seems outside of that particular sub-genere almost everyone is either totally driven by duty, or some kind of angst-ridden reluctant hero going "noes! I just want to be normal", something which applies to fiction outside of anime as well. For me at least it can be kind of refreshing to see a good guy going out and being the hero, getting into it, and having fun doing it. When it's done well (which is not always the case) there is a certain appeal to a hero you know is going to save the day, and sort of seeing him as a harbinger of justice, rather than some kind of eternal underdog who just barely scrapes by and suffers for doing the right thing.... which works too, but it gets old. But then again I'm one of those people who will also defend old school Superman, and the appeal of the comfort factor in knowing that Superman is the one thing you can always rely on, when he shows up he is going to save the day, and remain himself after doing it. Given how messed up the real world is, sometimes it's nice to have a hero who is just a plain out hero, and not himself messed up (so to speak). That's also why I've been critical of the last couple of attempts at Superman movies (and some of the comic reboot attempts) as to me they sort of missed the point of the character by trying to turn him into those other angsty guys he's the anti-thesis of. If Superman loses, or winds up grappling with angst, guilt, and wondering which way his moral compass should be pointing, your doing it wrong, he gets boring after a while and has to be taken in doses, but that's how it is with a lot of things. I see the whole "Hot Blood" shonen thing as a variation on that, sometimes it's nice to see a really vile villain just flat out getting pounded despite all of his hype and established credentials.