You were rooting for characters before? That's kind of weird.
In this story? No.
But it's sort of the point of most writing. You want your readers to care about the characters. Bad guys should be evil enough to be hated, or at least interestingly ambiguous. The hero should be a
hero, someone strong enough that they subconsciously seem like a decent ally, and decent enough that they wouldn't scare you off. You can trade these off against each other, to a degree, but a pathetic protagonist is as bad as an evil one.
(Why, yes, I'm explicitly arguing that people can't tell the difference between reality and fiction, there.
At this level that's true; the ally-recognising parts of us don't care, but higher-order components do.)
Or you can write a story like this, which is interesting in much the same sense as reading about the Black Death is interesting. It
works; it doesn't make the story pointless. Neither, however, does it inspire the same depth of emotion.
This is why villain protagonists tend to have a strong code of honor, by the way. At some level, they have to be seen as someone you can
deal with. We automatically attach to the most powerful leaders around, but only if that doesn't seem suicidal.
It's also why, despite
my own characters generally tending towards
cute, they
also tend to be potential personified. "Potential ally" doesn't need to mean "right now", and what you're reallly going for here is emotion, of
any kind. Children work well enough... but pathetic children don't, I'm afraid. Sorry, Shinji. Not sure what he was thinking.