Most Violent Shonen Anime Protagonists

Summary

• Violence in shōnen anime involves protagonists willing to hurt to achieve their goals without necessarily aiming to kill.
• Violent leads like Kenshiro, Giorno Giovanna, and Eren Yeager don’t shy away from using brutal force to enforce justice.
• Protagonists like Akira Fudo, Light Yagami, and Denji resort to violent means to tackle challenges and overcome obstacles.

They say violence doesn’t solve anything, but in shōnen anime, it does tend to help. Many of its most iconic shows have involved throwing hands, whether it’s part of a sporting competition or a life-or-death struggle. Some shows and their source material got so bloody that it’s hard to believe it was aimed at younger audiences than the older seinen crowd.

As a result, it’s produced some protagonists who don’t hesitate to get violent. Some are heroes who use their bloody retribution to right wrongs, while others make villains in other series look like Mr. Rogers by comparison. Either way, people would be better off staying out of the way of these shōnen anime leads.

10

Taro Sakamoto

Ex-Assassin Trades In Killing For Non-Lethal Maiming

Violence doesn’t necessarily mean someone with a kill count. It just means someone willing to hurt someone else for one reason or another. Taro Sakamoto used to kill during his days as an assassin. But that all changed when she met Aoi, who proved to him that all life was precious by flinging herself off a balcony.

He saved her, then retired from the hitman business to become a convenience store clerk. Even in his middle age, with assassins old and new still coming for his head, he sticks to his no-kill rule. He just takes them out non-lethally, like an elderly mid-income Batman, knocking them out, smashing their faces, and giving them other nasty injuries to recover painfully from.

9

Tanjiro Kamado

Boy Kills Demons To Avenge His Dead Parents And Twisted Sister

Violent protagonists don’t have to enjoy their work either. Tanjiro Kamado certainly doesn’t. If his fate was up to him, he’d likely still be working the family trade as a coal burner. But after his family was killed by demons, his kindly persona gave way to a need for vengeance, leading to him becoming a demon slayer.

If it weren’t for his sister, Nezuko, being turned into a demon, he’d probably be less discerning about how many demons he had to kill to get retribution. But on being shown that ordinary people can become demons, and that there might be a way to turn them back, his rage gets tempered. He’ll offer mercy to the repentant, and may even help them. But to the unrepentant, like the demon king Muzan, all he has for them is the edge of his sword.

8

Goku

Monkey Man Uses His Innate Rage To Gain New Power-Ups

Compared to some entries on this list, Goku is a saint. He’s arguably not even the most violent good guy in Dragon Ball. Yet Akira Toriyama never meant his monkey man to be as much of a pure-hearted bumpkin as he seems. He may move fights to non-populated areas to avoid harming others, but he always had a brutal side to him that was filled with rage, and not just via his old Oozaru form.

For example, his first Super Saiyan transformation wasn’t just a power-up. It was meant to be him losing his last nerve with Frieza, and why he ultimately blew the guy away after he ignored his last sign of mercy. Even before then, he was able to destroy the whole of the Red Ribbon Army on his own as a child. If anything, his happy-go-lucky attitude and combat smarts are his way of taking control of that angry Saiyan side instead of letting it control him.

7

Giorno Giovanna

One of the Most Understated Jojos Has a Ruthless Streak

Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure never shied away from violence, though it can be tricky to determine who the most violent lead in its 6 shōnen parts (7 & 8 are seinen) is. They’ve certainly been up for a scrap and have given out some harsh beatings (e.g. Part 6’s Jolyne showing off her ball-chucking skills). But they’ve rarely aimed to murder their foes to achieve their goals.

Part 5’s Giorno Giovanna is a different story. He tricked Polpo into chewing on the business end of a gun, made sure Melone died from a snake bite, gave Cioccolata the mother of all beatings (7 pages long in the original manga), and sentenced Diavolo to an eternity of being mauled, maimed, and murdered. Out of all the shōnen Jojos, he’s the one most likely to kill others to get ahead.

6

Akame & Tatsumi

Guy Joins A Guild Of Assassins And Gets Used To Killing

Akame is the title character, but Tatsumi is essentially the protagonist of Akame ga Kill! Its story starts with him seeking a way to make a living from his fighting skills, where he ends up in the Night Raid with the titular assassin. They come from different backgrounds but can get quite vicious when they need to be.

Akame was trained from childhood to be an effective killer. So she never hesitates to swing her Teigu blade Murasame at her foes, since it can kill with one stroke. Tatsumi is less keen on killing, unless provoked. For example, when he discovered his friends were tortured to death by Aria, Tatsumi stopped Akame from killing her…just so he could do it himself.

5

Denji

Unlucky Guy Becomes a Chainsaw-Headed Devil

Considering he’s the title character in Chainsaw Man, Denji was either going to be a pretty violent guy, or a very keen lumberjack. Forced by the yakuza to pay off his late dad’s debts, Denji worked with a dog-like Chainsaw devil called Pochita to hunt devils. Betrayed by them, Pochita forms a contract with him to save his life, bonding the two and turning him into a devil-human hybrid.

By pulling a cord in his chest, he can become a chainsaw-headed monster and rip his way through the devils infesting Tokyo. He has tried to live a normal life and give up his chainsaw-revving days. But he’s been used as a violent enforcer by other people for one reason or another since his youth. With devils, Public Safety, and more after his head, all he can do is fight back as best he can.

4

Kenshiro

Protects The Weak By Murdering Evil In Creatively Bloody Ways

Kenshiro from Fist of the North Star is perhaps the most classic example of an overly violent shōnen anime protagonist. Left for dead after his fiancée, Yuria, was kidnapped by his former best friend, Shin, the formerly gentle successor to the Hokuto Shinken style found a reason to get brutal in brutal times. By pressing one of the 708 different acupressure points, he can make the human body heal from conditions, or cause it to tear itself apart.

Good, honest folk don’t have to worry about suffering at his hands. But anyone who preys on the weak will suffer a fate worse than death if he touches them. After a gang killed an orphanage owner, he stalked them like a kung fu Jason Voorhees until they were all dead. Then, he made up for sparing Jagi, his evil foster brother, by turning him into the bloodiest human fountain since Nightmare on Elm Street. Needless to say, he’s happy to give evildoers a taste of their own sadistic medicine tenfold.

3

Akira Fudo

Mild-Mannered Boy Becomes A Bloody Avenger In Two Different Lifetimes

If Kenshiro is the granddaddy of hyper-violent shōnen heroes, Akira Fudo is the great granddaddy, inspiring Kenshiro, Berserk‘s Guts, and many more anime antiheroes. His kindly and meek human personality mingled with that of the demon Amon to produce Devilman. In this guise, he became a vigilante who ripped other demons apart brutally, but had enough humanity left over to keep him on the (relatively) straight and narrow. Yet it wasn’t enough to save him from death, as humans and demons alike both ended up wiped out in the end.

Yet Akira managed to reincarnate (partially) in the post-apocalyptic world as Violence Jack, a giant man who couldn’t recall his past. But he still knew how to give murderers, abusers, and more the business end of his giant jackknife. Both strips were considered shōnen despite their bloody content, but only Violence Jack got reclassified as seinen halfway through its run. Anyone who’s seen its notorious OVA series would know why, as its scenes could churn even the most iron of stomachs.

2

Light Yagami

High Schooler Kills Off Thousands With Just A Notebook

When people think of violent protagonists, they think of someone willing to kill directly, be it with weapons or even their bare hands. They rarely think of the penpushers who press for conflict, letting others fight and die while they sit comfortably at their desk eating potato chips. Put Light Yagami in a fistfight, and he’d likely fold as he’s no combat expert. Give him the Death Note and access to Wikipedia, and things change.

Once he gained power over life and death through Ryuk’s special notebook, he began using it to decide who’d live to see his “new world” or not. Taking on the pseudonym “Kira,” he gained admirers as he killed off the worst criminals held behind bars. But he soon expanded his list of deaths to include those who got too close to figuring him out and stopping his megalomania in its tracks.

1

Eren Yeager

Committed Global Genocide To Save Paradis Island

It’s hard to come up with set body counts for some of the violent leads on this list. For some, it’s in the tens. With the likes of Kenshiro, it’s likely in the hundreds, and Light likely killed off at least 1,000 on his first day as “Kira.” But there’s only one protagonist who’s managed to pull off a near-global extinction of humanity, and that’s Eren Yeager from Attack on Titan. It’s always been suggested that he’d take the bloodier, more violent options, from murdering sex traffickers as a child, to taking down the Titans in the Scout Regiment.

It just kept escalating from there as he grew in power, learning of his powers as a Titan Shifter. Then it all culminated in the Rumbling, where he used the Colossal Titans to kill off 80% of the human population to save Paradis Island. It was meant to stop any more Titans from being made, but it’s suggested the Titan Curse survived his genocide. All that blood was spilled just to give the island a reprieve.