At this point, I’ve watched around 200 anime, and for a long time my ratings were kind of a mess. For a long time, if I liked something, it was a 9. If I loved it, it was a 10. Looking back at my favorites list, I can see the pattern pretty clearly. A lot of emotional shows I watched during a rough period of my life, rom coms primarily (that were filling a gap), but there was some genuinely good stuff mixed in that probably deserved more thought than I gave it.
Towards the middle half of last year, I even changed to smiley faces as my rating system. Which muddied the water even more.
So, I’m starting fresh with a cleaner system.
The scale
I’m using 1-5 as it forces more honest placements. A 3 means it was solid and enjoyable, not that it was bad. Most things are probably a 3, and that’s fine.
If I drop something, it gets its own category outside the scale with a note on why. Dropped because it was bad is different from dropped because it wasn’t for me.
What I’m looking at in anime
Five things, roughly in how much they tend to mattter to me:
- Characters: Are they likable, or at least believable and purposeful?
- Conflict: Does it feel earned, or is it manufactured drama to delay the plot?
- Pacing: Was I engaged throughout?
- Payoff: Did the ending or emotional moments actually land?
- Memorability: What’s left after its done?
This isn’t necessarily a checklist, but more of a reflection on what I realized mattered to me when going through the list of anime I had previously considered my favorite at one point in the past.
One last thing
In the past, how I felt about some of what I’ve watched was skewed by the context of my life at the time. This I do genuinely believe is normal, but I wanted to make this rating system so I could actually stand behind my opinions on things, and have clear indicators on why a certain show or movie didn’t hit for me in the way others do.