No - I understood all of that, and went into it fully aware of it. It just doesn’t matter, because who they are right now is, for me, so completely and thoroughly unpleasant that I have no more desire to sit in front of a screen and subject myself to them that I would to punch myself in the face.

I know it’s not uncommon on anime forums to treat this as some sort of personal failure, but that’s just the way it goes - I cannot tolerate asshole protagonists. I have no sympathy for them and no interest in them. They just fill me with anger and the desire to see them suffer (or as I’ve often phrased it, they make me want to somehow reach into the screen and kick the shit out of them) and that is, for me, an entirely unpleasant experience that I will not willingly subject myself to.

I can handle a character like that if their awful qualities are sufficiently balanced by good ones, and not at some tentative point in the future, but pretty much from the start. A great example of that, and particularly appropriate, is Kana in Oshi no Ko. She’s only really awful in flashback - by the time we meet her again, she’s already gone through a lot of torment and soul searching and already made significant headway towards being a decent person, and is in fact probably my favorite character in the series.

But if there was a side story about that process - following Kana from the point at which she was awful and self-absorbed and cruel and through the period during which she started to change - I wouldn’t watch it because even knowing who she becomes and liking her as much as I do, I’d have an immediate and visceral and entirely unpleasant emotional response to her then.

And that’s just the way it is. Think of it as something akin to an allergy.