Jobko
About
17/01/2026: Abandoned 10 point decimal rating + advanced scoring system. It was too complicated and doing my head in. It also unnaturally inflated my list and unfairly rated some shows I think are ultimately 5/5 due to advanced scoring including animation/art. My new scoring is a 5 star system. Since Anilist doesn't allow half stars like Letterboxd, I have to treat the stars like this:
__5 - perfect/masterpiece/amazing
4 - great
3 - good
2 - decent/mid
1 - bad
__
At first I thought this might be bad, but when I think about it, my head naturally thinks that 1-5 is bad, 6 is decent, 7 is good, 8 is great, 9 is amazing, 10 is masterpiece... So having 1 star cover half of my original ratings is actually way better. It is so much easier to rate stuff now, and my final ratings are closer indications to my feelings rather than a system where I'm trying to be objective and subjective at the same time - which doesn't work.
It sucks having left my old system with how much work I put into it (genuinely 10s of hours - maybe even more), but after going from IMDb to Letterboxd and being forced to use a 5 star rating system vs. 10, I ultimately think it's for the better. The simplicity of 5 stars - even 5 stars with half star ratings - just makes every rating feel right, without my brain feeling burdened with unneeded complexity. Another bonus is not falling into the 7 star psychological trap that seems to be common with 10 star/decimal systems (I've noticed the average rating of every site that defaults 10 star/decimal always has 7 as the average instead of 5).
Objectivity:
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Reviews are highly subjective, this is something we all know, as beauty, attraction, love, taste, and many other qualities of experience, empiricism, biology, culture, habitat, etcetera, vary person to person. Though I believe that truth, maths, scalability, writing, and many other factors hold objective standards, and our subjective view is built on an objective layer.For example: Art is built on lines, colour theory, shapes, perspective, reality, as objective mathematical qualities - as maths is objective. Music is built on tone, maths, reality, frequency, as objective mathematical qualities as well. Animation is a subsect of art. Writing itself is objective, as to try to refute language/words you refute your argument in the process/contradict yourself.
I could go on, but it is obvious that art and media have objective qualities. I could dig deeper into the philosophy of it, but that would take all day.
The reason I even write this is because I believe that anime, like all media, has an objective basis to it, and you review based on your subjective enjoyment alongside objective empirical standards. Though I do think that sample size and experience plays a huge part in your perception of the objectives within anime, as someone who's watched 10 anime, and someone who's watched 100 anime, obviously have different standards and juxtaposed/comparative experiences. You can watch a show and think the animation/art is good, but then you watch "Kimi no Nawa" (for example), and you realize that it wasn't as good as you thought it was.".
I wanted to share this as I feel that people often sum of ratings/reviews as not a good metric, but I think that with a big sample size of people that it is. That doesn't mean that it will be accurate for your personal experience, but I think that watching media based on review scores is probably your best bet to find quality, instead of consuming quantity to find what you enjoy.
