brainiac1530

Overview List Reviews Favorites Stats Journey Year in review

About

I came to this site while MAL was still broken. It took so long to fix that I got settled in here. I get an aneurysm even thinking about synchronizing my lists at this point. You can see my MAL account here, but it's perpetually out of date.

My favorites are ordered alphabetically, by English titles, for the most part. There's a lot going on in the staff section, so they're subdivided with anime directors first, voice actors last, and everything else in-between. I generally select favorite characters rather arbitrarily.

I emptied my manga "paused" list. Now I use it for publishing manga that I stopped reading because I don't have any more of it to read for now. In particular, I like reading digital manga editions, but they release very slowly, leading to this. I'd like to do something similar for my anime paused list at some point.

I started reading VNs recently. I had dabbled in it previously, but it's become a proper hobby. You can see my VNDB list here.

My rating scheme

Spoiler, click to view

I tried from the beginning to conform to the descriptions of ratings given by MAL. I've been mostly successful at this, though I do some rescoring from time to time. I try to be mostly objective, in that I try to use the same standards when rating things. That being said, enjoyment is part of that standard, and at times small things which had a disproportionate impact on my enjoyment can cause a rating to be rather different from what a show might have otherwise received.

10 -- This is reserved for the best of what I've seen. These will not merely be technically excellent, but generally have some unique aspect and/or personal appeal.
9 -- These are the cream of the crop which didn't quite merit a 10. They're probably just as technically sound as the 10s. This is the level at which I start to expect things like directorial voice and significant thematic content. Unique art or animation can also push an anime to this level on its own at times.
8 -- These are the best of the rest. They exceed expectations to some extent.
7 -- To be good, an anime has to do a lot of things right. These are the anime that met expectations.
6 -- This show is average. It's a mix of good and bad things. For whatever reason, this is the rating I use most. I assume this is because of selection bias.
5 -- This show is average. It's a mix of good and bad things, but I liked it less than the ones I rated 6. I'm starting to drop shows at this level.
4 -- This show is below average. It's mostly bad things, or there is some glaring flaw that conceals the good things. I drop most shows like this these days.
3 -- This show is unambiguously bad. It's probably a mess technically, and there's nothing to redeem those technical flaws. Alternatively, there's no entertainment value and thus no reason to watch it at all.
2 -- This show's mere existence is regrettable. It's similar to the 3s, but inspires more anger or hate, but not necessarily as much as the 1s. It's usually more interesting to discuss the 1s, though.
1 -- These shows are memorably awful. Perhaps professional critics have spent hours tearing it apart to show just how terrible it really is, or maybe it's just laughably bad on casual inspection, even by an untrained eye. It's likely these were horribly flawed even at the conceptual level.

There are some problems with my current rating scale. There's a noticeable gradient in quality among my 1s, and there are a few too many of them. There should be a "0th tier" for shows which are so poor they shouldn't have been published in the first place. I'm unsure how I'd adjust my system to make space for them, and it'd probably take a long time, so I'd be reluctant to do it anyway.

My manga rating scale is somewhat under construction. There's been a big shift since Summer 2018, when I went on a concerted push to read backlogged manga. I read a lot of stuff I really liked that forced me to reassign scores. As it stands right now, a manga 7/8 is not very equivalent to the same score for an anime. If I ever get to the point where I have thousands of manga in my list, some of these may move back up again as the median shifts.