Updated December 19, 2019 12.8k votes 4.5k voters 112k views
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Vote up the terrible anime friends who need to go live in the woods by themselves.
Friendship is a powerful theme in the world of anime - but that doesn't mean that every anime character is actually good at the whole friendship thing. In fact, there is an abundance of abysmally bad anime friends who deserve to be taken to task for their terrible behavior.
Who are the worst anime friends? Some of them have done such dramatically awful things that there's no possible way they can ever make up for them. Griffith from Berserk is a great example - he dramatically betrayed his friends by sacrificing most of them in exchange for god-like power. Other terrible anime friends may not have committed crimes against humanity, but are still guilty of interpersonal cruelty. Eriri Spencer Sawamura of Saekano: How To Raise A Boring Girlfriend might not have taken Tomoya Aki's life, but she sure did betray him by abandoning their friendship to preserve her reputation, then blamed him for causing her pain.
No matter what precisely they're guilty of, these anime friends are truly the worst.
Griffith is arguably one of the worst friends in anime history - in fact, he's a top contender for the worst friend in any piece of media ever. Griffith was a member of the Band of the Hawk before betraying them in a spectacular power grab. He got the opportunity to join the God Hand, and gain godlike power by transforming into Femto. To do this, he had to sacrifice his comrades' lives during the Fifth Eclipse. Not only does he do away with almost every single member of his former team, but he also assaults the band's only female member Casca, while mocking her lover Guts with his treatment of her. Both Casca and Guts were his friends. It is actually impossible to be a worse friend - or person than this.
Kyouji Shinkawa is one of the main villains of Sword Art Online II, so it stands to reason that he's not going to be particularly good at the whole friendship thing. He and his brother Shouichi are the forces behind Death Gun, a serial slayer who targets players in Gun Gale Online both inside and outside of the game. While this is obviously egregious behavior, what's just as bad is his relationship with Sinon.
At first, Kyouji acts like a typically concerned friend. He's a little more protective of her than is strictly necessary but since Sinon is still emotionally fragile from a traumatic event, this is understandable. Unfortunately, Kyouji becomes romantically obsessed with Sinon. Eventually, he breaks into her house with the intention of ending both of their lives and is only subdued with the help of Kirito.
In the end, he's arrested along with his brother - a well-deserved fate for a terrible friend and person.
Light Yagami cultivates relationships not for the sake of genuine human connection, but for strategic reasons. He forges romantic relationships with Misa and Takada so that he can use them to gain information or use them as bait. He does the same thing with his friendships, few though they are. One of the only people he actually considers a friend is L, the detective who is trying to nail him for being Kira. Though he does respect L, and actually appears to enjoy some of his interactions with him, his ultimate goal is ending his life. Essentially, Light will always prioritize his activities as Kira over anything resembling friendship, which makes him a pretty terrible friend.
Good friends don't usually try to end their friends' lives, and since Sasuke definitely does that, he earns himself a spot on this list. He does this to both Naruto and Sakura, two people who love him deeply, because they stood in the way of his getting revenge on his brother for slaying their family, then to the Konoha government for forcing him to do it. He's also quite cruel to the people trying to help him achieve his vengeance, Suigetsu, Jugo, and Karin. He treats them like annoyances and orders them around without even considering what their opinions might be.
Sasuke's behavior is understandable to a degree - after all, he's endured extreme trauma and has never received any help in processing it - but that doesn't mean that he's actually nice to people. He needs to do some serious work on himself before he can be a halfway decent friend to anyone.
Just because you're the ultimate in evil doesn't mean that you don't deserve to get dragged for making other people's lives into waking nightmares. After being reunited with his best friend Akira Fudou, Ryo Asuka drags his friend to an extremely dangerous party filled with rampant vices. This goes far beyond just trying to to get the kid out of his comfort zone - this is actively putting him in a potentially lethal situation, as lots of people perish at this party. What's more, Akira ends up being fused with a demon and becoming Devilman, a being with the body of a demon and the heart of a human.
This basically ruins Akira's life and causes just about everyone he knows to suffer dramatically. Ryo is actually the Devil in human form, so this kind of callous cruelty is to be expected, but that doesn't make it any less terrible.
Sae Kashiwagi ruins other peoples' lives like it's her job. Sae has made it her personal mission to ruin her "friend" Momo's reputation and take her boyfriend. Sae uses Momo's tanned skin - which she obtained through swimming outdoors - as a reason to spread nasty and completely imaginary rumors about her personal life. This is apparently due to her personal insecurities. Later in the series, Sae changes her ways and becomes a true friend to Momo, but that doesn't change the fact that she was irredeemably sadistic and cruel.
