I have left MyAnimeList. You can find me at AniList now.
Why I left MAL:
1. The biggest reason I chose to leave MAL - and have wanted to for a while - is their continued use of the "shoujo ai" tag. It is inaccurate and borderline offensive. If you're unaware, shoujo ai is not "light yuri" or "non-sexual lesbianism" or anything like that which you may have been told, it's pedophilia; not "love between girls," but rather "love of (young) girls." Yuri fans - of which I am one - as well as publishers, both in Japan and the west haven't used the term in over a decade, but MAL refuses to get rid of it. It baffles me that a series can literally have "yuri" in the title, like Yuru Yuri and Yuri Kuma Arashi, yet be listed as "shoujo ai." And since MAL continues to use it, uneducated people see it, think it's the right term, and spread it more. I gag every time I see the tag. AniList, on the other hand, just uses yuri.
I'm not as well-versed on the yaoi side of things, so don't quote me on this, but to my knowledge, "shounen ai" is in the same situation, with fans preferring BL/Boys' Love. AniList uses Boys' Love.
Related: I'm pretty sure MAL has never updated their genre tags. If they have it's been over a decade since. They don't even have tags for idols or isekai despite how prevalent those are today.
2. MAL's age rating system is a relic of the site's early days. It is 100% made-up, but this is not made clear, and users often end up thinking it's official. It's also total bullshit: Heavy violence and gore receive an R rating, and what gets even higher than that at R+? Female nipples. A natural part of half the world's population making an appearance on screen is apparently more explicit than human dismemberment, horror imagery, psychological trauma, you name it. This whole system should go, but if they want to hold onto it, they need to revamp it.
3. Romaji titles. Yeah, I can still search English titles and find what I want, but I can't display anything with them, and it's really frustrating to go down my list and not even recognize the titles of stuff I've seen because it's all in Japanese and not the title I actually know it by. AniList lets you display the site like it is on MAL or with official English titles - or even with native Japanese.
4. The community, though there's more to this than the community just being trash. Yes, the community is trash, but that goes for a lot of anime fandom wherever you go. Thing is, MAL is probably the worst, and I think I figured out why: its age. MAL has been around longer than almost any other site like it. It got really big in the golden era of fansubs and even had a full-fledged fansub database for a long time. This itself is not the problem. The problem is the community that formed around such a site. This was a community that got into anime through piracy and overly-literal fansubs from a website that actively promoted such things, resulting in a userbase that is elitist and entitled. That initial userbase spread their attitude to the next generation, who absorbed it and spread it to the next, and so on.
For an example, look no further than the debacle around Interspecies Reviewers and what happened when MAL changed their scoring system (a change I approve of wholeheartedly). Fans literally tried to rig the system in their favor, and when MAL said "no," they threw a tantrum and accused MAL of rigging the system just because they didn't like one show (apparently), even though if you think for 10 seconds you'll realize that there's no way such a system can be implemented so fast; it had been in the works for a long time because Interspecies Reviewers was far from the first entry to be vote brigaded. This debacle made MAL users look like the hardcore Trump supporters. Any ranking database with any sort of respect for itself has a system like what MAL implemented to prevent the same kind of thing from happening.
There's more I can say about the ridiculousness of that situation, but it's a tangent not very relevant to why I left this site, so I'll end it there.
5. AniList is just a better site. I won't go over the details, but it has better, less-restrictive functionality. It's easy to export your lists from MAL and import them there, so I welcome you to come on over.
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Incidentally, one thing that people always shit on MAL for that I actually do not have any issue with is its series rankings. This isn't to say I agree with them; there are plenty of rankings I disagree with, but the rankings aren't there to reflect my opinions, they exist to show what the fanbase in general thinks of something. This...isn't really relevant to me leaving MAL, but it's something I always wanted to say.
oh wow I tried to explain the shoujo ai thing to people in mal discord, got told that "we adapted the term to english language and changed it's meaning, just like japanese adapted many english words to theirs!"
One is a group of famous seiyuu doing comedy with each other based on the personalities of each girl. The other is an anime by the author of AnoHana that revolves around female adolescence as they discover their sexual urges.
All Comments (4538) Comments
shinsekai yori has some of the most beautiful display of affection animations ^w^
Would you say romance is your favorite genre? I've been on a kick and wondering if you had anything to recommend.
Thoroughly enjoyed the anime but hesitant to get into the manga.