YOUR ANIME SCORES MAKE NO SENSE, & NEITHER DO MINE

NICK WONOSAPUTRA - Writer, 4th Year, Neurobiology and Psychology

Jesse, wtf are you talking about?

When one begins to watch greater quantities of anime series on a regular basis, they become far more likely to want to track the media that they’ve consumed through services like MyAnimeList or AniList. This could be for a variety of reasons: having a quick way to give recommendations, being able to participate in third party services like Anime Music Quiz, or just to have a way to go down memory lane and enjoy the blissful taste of nostalgia. Whatever the reason, those who use anime list services also have the opportunity to document their thoughts and feelings about a show through a scoring and review system.

My experience with scoring has been a tumultuous one. For the longest time, I didn’t score because I wasn’t sure how to weigh what I perceived to be the show’s objective value over my subjective experience of the work. I found myself bouncing between the opinions of various anime gurus in an attempt to decipher the meaning of one word: “good.” Years passed, and I still hadn’t put a single (serious) score on my list. However, a passing remark from a friend brought the need to match consensus values into question, and everything clicked into place.

A common question that professors like to ask at the start of every intro to psychology course is if the human mind can ever be fully understood, or at least partially. Regardless of your answer, it is clear that science has yet to find common ground on many of the basic aspects of the human mind, let alone what specific parts of anime it likes. And yet, I’ve heard a slew of reasons for liking a show framed within the thinly veiled threat of objectivity that has been unknowingly and arbitrarily mixed with personal experience.

Then there’s the scoring process in and of itself, which is absolutely butchered by the cultural influence of the educational grading system. Thus, a scale of 1-10 is reduced to a scale of 1, 7-10, with the space between 1 and 7 representing a vague, evidently nonlinear, secondary scoring system. The reasoning for this would make sense in the context of your average product and service rating, which is further reduced to a 10 being exactly what you expected, 7 being mid, and 1 being abhorrent. However, western (and honestly most of eastern) anime scoring systems have no influence on a Japanese industry’s decision-making and values, even if we wish they would.

In light of these factors and confounds, I think that this is actually a great opportunity to learn something about how we each perceive art, which is why I’d like to suggest my own personal scoring system. In order to comply with MAL’s 10 unit scale, let’s use a scoring system of 3-10 to linearly evaluate our emotional attachment to a property, where a higher score represents a higher likelihood that that the show elicits positively coded emotions like joy, excitement, and satisfaction from the self-reporting viewer. A score of 1 is of the same magnitude as a 10 but negatively coded. A score of 2 represents completely forgotten data, which are the shows that you can’t remember having watched at all or have little to no impact on emotional state.

Now, you might ask, “why not make the scale fully linear and use a 2-10 scale while taking into account negative effects?” In which case I would simply say that giving things I don’t like a 1 is more satisfying… which thereby invalidates my measure. My goal here isn’t to convince you to use my system–far from it–I just want to help break your preconceived notions of scores and nudge you into developing a better one.