The Characters Living in the Margins Who Deserve Their Own Whole Story

Here's a question worth sitting with: when was the last time a side character made you feel something the main character didn't?

Maybe it was a throwaway scene that hit harder than anything in the actual arc. Maybe it was a friendship that got like four minutes of screentime but somehow felt more real than the central relationship the show spent fifty episodes building. Whatever it was, you probably thought — even briefly — this person deserves more.

They always do. And studios almost never give it to them.

The Supporting Cast Problem

Anime and manga have a long tradition of building out enormous ensemble casts — and then systematically underusing most of them. The logic makes sense from a production standpoint: you follow the protagonist, you serve the main plot, you save the budget for the fights that matter. Side characters exist to illuminate the lead, not to take up narrative real estate.

But fans have never really accepted that deal. The comment sections, the fan wikis, the AO3 archives — they're overflowing with stories that ask the question the source material refuses to: what's going on with everyone else?

This isn't a fringe thing. It's one of the most consistent patterns in anime fandom, and it says something real about what audiences actually want from these stories.

Mitsuri Kanroji Had Friends and We Barely Met Them

Let's start with Demon Slayer, because it's one of the most visually generous, lore-rich franchises in recent anime history — and it still leaves an enormous amount of Hashira backstory sitting on the table.

Mitsuri Kanroji, the Love Hashira, is a fan favorite by almost every metric. Her design is iconic, her personality is warm and chaotic in the best way, and her fighting style is legitimately unlike anything else in the series. But her actual relationships — the people she trained with, the connections she built before the events of the main story — are almost entirely absent from the anime.

The manga gives slightly more, but even there, the Pillars mostly exist in relation to Tanjiro's journey. The idea of a spinoff that followed Mitsuri through her early days as a Hashira, building the kind of found-family dynamic that Demon Slayer does so well in its main cast? That's not a fan fantasy — that's a viable, compelling story that already has a built-in audience.

Same goes for Tengen Uzui, whose wives are fascinating and wildly underdeveloped, and Rengoku, whose death hit so hard partly because we never got enough of him while he was alive.

Deku's Friend Group Deserves Better From Him (And From the Show)

My Hero Academia is, at its core, a story about a boy who wants to be a hero. It's also, theoretically, a story about the friendships that shape him. But if you step back and look at how Deku actually treats his relationships across the series — especially in the later arcs — there's a real argument that his crew gets consistently shortchanged.

Uraraka is the obvious one. Her arc in the later manga chapters is genuinely strong, but for a huge stretch of the story, she exists primarily in relation to Deku's growth rather than her own. Iida, who had one of the most emotionally compelling arcs in the entire series with the Stain storyline, basically disappears from meaningful development after that. Todoroki gets more attention, but even his story is filtered heavily through his connection to Deku and Endeavor.

The side of Class 1-A that doesn't directly orbit the main plot? Mineta aside (we don't have to talk about Mineta), there are genuinely interesting characters — Tokoyami, Jirou, Koda — who have compelling Quirks and implied depth that the series never has time to chase.

A spinoff following Class 1-A through a year of hero internships, without Deku as the focal point, would be a completely different show. It might also be a better one for the characters who've been waiting their turn.

Manga Has an Even Bigger Side Character Problem

Here's where it gets interesting: manga, by its nature, has more room to breathe than anime. But the side character problem is often worse in source material, because mangaka are working fast, under deadline pressure, with limited pages per chapter.

Take Chainsaw Man. Himeno is on-panel for a relatively short window, but the fandom's attachment to her is enormous — because the hints of who she was, the relationships she had, the history she carried, were compelling enough to make her absence feel like a loss. The story around her edges was more interesting than what we got to see directly.

Or consider Haikyu!!, which is arguably the gold standard for ensemble sports manga. Even there, teams like Nekoma and Fukurodani — who have passionate fan followings — exist primarily as foils to Karasuno. Kozume Kenma is fascinating. Bokuto Koutarou is beloved. They got some expansion in later chapters and the film era, but the appetite for more never went away.

Fans fill that gap constantly. The Haikyu!! fandom's output of Nekoma-centric fanfic alone could fill a small library.

Why Studios Keep Missing This

The frustrating part isn't that spinoffs never happen — they do. Spin-off and gaiden stories are a real part of anime culture. It's that studios tend to greenlight the ones with the lowest creative risk: prequel stories for already-popular characters, or side stories that essentially retread the main plot from a different angle.

What fans are hungry for is something different — stories that use supporting characters as genuine protagonists, with their own thematic arcs that don't revolve around the main cast. That requires trusting that the audience is attached enough to those characters to follow them somewhere new.

Based on fandom behavior? They absolutely are. The attachment is already there. The fanfic exists. The fan art exists. The demand exists.

The Friendship That Didn't Get to Breathe

Ultimately, what makes side character stories so compelling isn't just the characters themselves — it's the relationships between them. The friendships that form in the background of a bigger story, that we only glimpse in two-page spreads or brief anime cuts, often feel more real precisely because they're not carrying the weight of the main plot.

They're just people who found each other. Who trained together, or survived something together, or just happen to eat lunch at the same table. The story didn't need them to be important. But they are, to us.

That's worth following. More studios should try.