Anime Rankings

I have watched several animes.

Here I will rank them in order from best to worst, unfairly comparing across a wide range of genres, budgets, and run times.

This list isn't completely finished because it turns out this is a lot of work.

Summaries - I've tried to include summary of each show in text like this. Part of the fun of making this page is doing this from memory without researching anything. Sometimes I'm thinking back more than 20 years so it could be wildly inaccurate or incomplete.

First Dose Phenomeon - If you were le 90's kid sitting there watching a Doug re-run or whatever and your weird uncle comes in and is like "eeehhh I'll show you a real cartoon.." and pops in his bootleg VHS of Akira, your fucking brain is going to explode because you've never seen anything like it. The same thing if you go from Disney movies to Princess Mononoke. The change is startling and memorable, but that doesn't mean that these are good movies. Consider this phenomenon when you see a "classic" with a low ranking.

Plan to Watch - Every media queue - be it of books, movies, games, or anime - eventually becomes a list of things you're not interested in by the process of evaporative cooling. Things that you actually want to watch get watched and removed from the list. The only shows that remain in the list are shows you don't actually want to watch. You should not let a large backlog stop you from adding new items to your plan-to-watch list.

Isekai - "Different world". A genre of anime where someone is transported into a different world. Usually from the normal world into a video game fantasy setting. It has become very popular recently.

Hentai - Anime pornography. If you don't understand why that's a thing, I'll let Genshiken explain it.

Weeb - Someone who is overly infatuated with Japanese culture and anime. White people who adopted african american mannerisms were sometimes called 'wiggers', a portmanteu of 'white' and another word. A similar term 'wapanese' developed for westerners who were obsessed with Japanese culture and anime. The popular image board 4chan has a subsection for discussing anime, /a/. At one point the mods of /a/ thought the term wapanese was being overused or perhaps disliked the association with the more offensive term, wigger. So they added a filter to replace 'wapanese' with 'weeaboo', which comes from this Perry Bible Fellowship comic. Weeaboo was eventually shortened to weeb, and lost most of the negative connotation. Although it still refers to someone who has a surface level understanding of japanese culture mainly informed by popular media, it's not really hurled as a genuine insult very much.

In a strange twist, a controversy arose around weebs paddling each other at anime conventions, turning the PBF comic, which had nothing to do with anime, into some kind of unholy prophecy.

Waifu - "Wife" pronounced with a japanese accent. Popularized by a scene from Azumanga Daioh. Refers to a weeb's exclusive favorite female character. In an ideal world, a weeb would only have one waifu, or at least only one at a time, but the term is also used to refer to appealing female characters that elicit a particlar emotional+lewd response. The analog for female weebs is 'husbando'. There is also the offshoot 'daughteru' for characters that a weeb would want to protect but not lewd.

Girl Infestation - Weebs want girlfriends, right? So as an anime studio you figure you'll make some waifu animes for them to watch and fantasize about. The problem is, the weeb's self esteem is so low that they can't imagine themselves in a normal GF relationship. The fantasy is rejected, whole crops of waifus are lost. Enter the girl infestation scenario. The protagonist is forced to associate with the waifu, and she won't leave no matter how many times he spergs out, almost as if she has been prescribed to him for medical reasons. This is much more relatable to the average weeb, and is the prefered method of waifu deployment today.

MyAnimeList.net is a popular site for organizing and reviewing anime. Here's a graph of the MAL review score vs my personal rating for all shows. Shows I consider overrated are in the upper left, underrated in the lower right.
There is a slight correlation between the public score on MAL and my personal ratings:
There's no apparent correlation between total runtime and my rating, but the clustering is interesting:

These are the essential elements of anime.

	Studio Ghibli - An animation studio known for high quality animated feature films. Themes often include working hard, taking on responsibility, returning to nature - sort of a japanese Norman Rockwell aesthetic. All of their films are worth watching.
	Makoto Shinkai - A filmmaker known for Your Name and Weathering with You. Features include detailed background artwork and themes of star crossed relationships and missed connections.
	Angels - Lot of angel related shows out there.
	Club - In japanese high school, you are expected to belong to an after-school club. Common themes involve clubs where kids do nothing, clubs where kids do awesome stuff like fight demons with robot suits, or strange clubs that don't have enough members to be officially recognized so the wacky-yet-lovable members conscript the protagonist. Sometimes it's all 3.
	Lewd 1 - Notable fan service. Might get weird if you're watching with your mom.
	Lewd 2 - You will have a hard time convincing people that this is not a hentai.
	Lewd 3 - It basically is a hentai.
	Severe Arm Trauma - Girls getting their arms chopped off. I don't know how these shows keep finding me.
	Nukes - We wouldn't have anime without Oppenheimer.
	Pedoshit - Everyone in Japan wants to fuck kids and they're trying to infect America. Probably as revenge for the nukes. I try to avoid even downloading shows like this but it's so pervasive that you're going to run into it anyway from time to time.
	All - You can filter the list by clicking the tag images in this key. Click this one to show all items.

You can click each box to expand it.

I threw everything in here by default, so things that I have no memory of will probably stay in here.

This is sorted by MAL score.