Last year I saw most of the Monogatari series, and some of its arcs blew me away with their insight into and careful probing of the characters. Hanekawa, Hitagi, Sodachi, Shinobu, and Sengoku are fascinating, and in seeing their stories you begin to understand them completely. Dostoevsky does this in almost every book he writes (Aglaya and Myshkin in Idiot, Alyosha and Ivan in Brothers), and so does Jane Austen. Monogatari's writing isn't on their level, but its characters might be.
Curiously absent on this list, I realized, was the male lead, Araragi. Contrasted to the layered, careful revelations of the girls he encountered, he himself received no such treatment (and his sisters don't really either, so they're also not very interesting) and always seemed rather flat, even bland. Kaiki, on the other hand? The con man steals almost every scene he's in, so it's not as if Monogatari is simply incapable of writing a good male character. Araragi is just boring. I began to think about other examples of compelling male leads and found something intriguing. Maybe I'm not giving him enough credit, so when I finish and rewatch Monogatari maybe I'll revisit this opinion.
Most of all I love tautly written, intense character explorations - where the drama of a series comes from the characters themselves more so than the events (Oregairu is a perfect example of this). That means I've seen a lot of romance anime, and while a significant minority of it has been terrible, when I turned my attention to the male protagonists vs the female, I often found that the female leads were better fleshed out, more layered, and more complex - in short, more interesting, more compelling, than the main (male) character. A great example is Nisekoi, where both lead girls, Onodera and Chitoge, as the series progresses, are both unfolded and revealed in interesting ways. Raku, on the other hand, mostly exists so that girls can adore him, and most of his screen time is spent reacting to the spunky antics of said girls.
This pattern kept cropping up, especially in what I'd call mid-tier anime: the reasonably entertaining, worth-a-watch type of series. Amagami, Seiren, Eromanga Sensei, Konbini Kareshi, Gamers, Just Because, Hidan no Aria, Nisekoi, Radukai Kishi no Calvary, Guilty Crown, Oda Nobuna, Ore no Kanojo, Saekano, Golden Time, and so on. Miyazaki's films are almost always focusing on a female protagonist (Princess Mononoke is an outlier, and of course Ashitaka is an incredible hero, on the level of Nausicaa and Sophie), so for a bit I wondered where the great male protagonists were.
Two things happened after that. I saw a lot of top-tier animation (Makoto Senkai's work, for one), and a little reflection on it found that there were plenty of well-written heroes - Shinji, Hachiman, Okazaki, Subaru, Takao, Taki, and Willem all come to mind here. Second, I played a psychological horror game called Doki Doki Literature Club - a twisted, demented version of something called a dating simulation (meditate on what a dating sim is and you will experience something called 'fridge horror'), where a number of heroines are present, each with their own route through the game. As it progresses, more about the girls is revealed, but the main character (i.e. you) is static. No change.
Click. The lights came on. In the dating sim, you simply place yourself in the position of the main character, so it's actually intended that the main character there be flat and empty. And hence in a lot of romance/drama (especially harems), the same principle often applies. The male lead is just a self-insert for the audience. For instance, compare Raku from Nisekoi to Hachiman from Oregairu, or Eita in Just Because! to Re:Zero's Subaru. In the former, the main character reacts to hijinks around him; in the latter, he is fully alive, furthers the drama, and fundamentally changes. The reason I was seeing a preponderant number of compelling female leads was because the genres that attracted me the most were character-driven slice of life dramas/love stories, just like (you guessed it) Jane Austen and Dostoevsky, and those genres simply tended to follow the trope of bland main (male) characters as viewer stand-ins. And similarly in shoujo anime; the female lead is dull, bland, and the perennial object of a much more interesting male character, so that girls can place themselves in her position and enjoy the fantasy.
That's not very good or very interesting art, and it vanishes with the greatest anime, but at least now I understand it. It's why dramas like White Album 2, Evangelion, and Oregairu are so much better than Saekano, Golden Time, and Konbini Kareshi. Getting beyond wish fulfillment fantasies is in some measure impossible, but that they be woven into great art is not. And in fact, the best anime (and film and literature) are usually some form of both.
