Nobody has any agency in Dear Anemone, they characters are little more than talking objects getting dragged along by the plot. And then most of them look the same on top of it which makes me wonder why they're even there, the manga so far is Anemone vs various monsters and beyond that everything's skippable.
I wouldn't say no one has any agency... The goal was to reach the lab and find out what happened and that's exactly what they did. It's just that, for five weeks now, we've been at the lab and we don't actually know what happened. Somehow, we got TWO backstories for Lobelia in that time period. There is a startling lack of progression. There... still isn't a clue as to what happened which is what the characters came here to find out.
The truth is that the MC does have agency. He came here to find out what happened to his friend. He hasn't been acting on it, but that's his reason for being here. But there's a flaw to it that I don't think anyone here's said out loud. Maybe it's out of fear of coming off shallow. Well, I'm shallow so I will.
It's hard to bring oneself to care about MC's goal because his friend's ugly. There, that's why. If it was a cute girl, people would resonate with it better. If it was a handsome bishie, fujos would be willing to play along with it. I'm sorry to all chubby brocolli-haired fellas out there, but there isn't anyone out there who sees a guy like that and thinks, "I hope he's okay." People really are that inherently shallow. When I watch a Doraemon movie, and Giant and Suneo get kidnapped by cavemen, I just think, "Oh no, anyway." But if it's Shizuka, I'd think, "Oh crap she's in danger!" You barely have any time to work your magic storytelling in a weekly magazine, so the least you could do is make your characters conventionally attractive if they were to be a focal point for sympathy. Ugly faces can work in gag manga since those aren't trying to tug at your emotional center. Only Nobuyuki Fukumoto gets away with drawing ugly ass characters weekly, guy got away with it for 20 years.