Confused about my rating system?
5 is my absolute neutral middle ground, where I have no positive nor negative feelings towards the anime in question, or the cons cancel out the pros. (This is a very hard score to obtain since I tend to like everything I watch). I base my ratings predominantly on my subjective feelings but I do try to take some objectivity into account as well. For instance. Sword Art Online could be ranked a fair bit lower if I were to analyze it critically, but it remains above many other objectively better written anime because I very much like the premise and the world in general despite all of its flaws. (I'd say it remains in the bottom half of my list but not by much.) It also helps that, well, it was the first non-kid-oriented anime I watched.
The content of most anime (an engaging story, good enough characters, a decent world) is good enough for me to start at 7 most of the time. Any writing flaws can bring the score down, but in order to go higher it's gotta do something to stand out, such as having a particularly captivating/thrilling plot, a very well-built world, deep characters, believable and strong motivations, profound philosophical clashes, interesting/unique power systems and fights, extremely emotional moments, or a combination of any of these (and probably some more I haven't thought of).
This is why a majority of my anime tend to be rated a 6, 7, or 8. To make the ratings a bit more interesting I provide "precision scores" which are just decimal scores really. They're mostly based on intuition, though I do attempt to assign them scores that reflect where I feel the anime stands in relation to others. I do have a top-to-bottom list but there's been a few times where I've felt conflicted about putting one anime higher than another, usually in cases where one anime is objectively better written but I like the feel or style of the other anime more. Depending on the day I may feel better about one anime than the other, so I don't try to think about the decimal score accuracy too much. Many anime share the same decimal score, especially in the lower 7s where I feel most anime fall, even if I feel there are slight differences in the quality between these shows. I feel like it's good enough to split each integer score into 20 sub-levels though, giving a maximum differential of 0.05.
If you've looked at my list you've probably noticed that I don't round the integer score I give it according to my precision scores. This is because I feel I'd have far too many 7s for shows that don't really deserve it, same with 8s. The threshold for me to round up differs slightly between integer scores:
-to round up to 7 I'd say the threshold needs to be pretty close to the top, around 6.9
-to round up to 8 it's a bit lower, between 7.7-7.8
-to round up to 9 it's even lower, 8.65 at the lowest but probably 8.7 as I gave the last part of AOT a 9 but it's actually an 8.7. I haven't watched enough anime for me to decide if the threshold can go lower or not
I don't hand out 8s very easily, and only a special few peak shows have reached 9. As I have deliberately kept myself from watching the best anime in order to not ruin my enjoyment of lesser shows (I only started watching a few years ago, but it is currently in my future list to watch the highest regarded shows such as FMAB, HXH, Steinsgate, Berserk, etc.) I have yet to give any anime a 10.
For a few shows I have precision "base" scores followed by some sort of modifier to reach a final precision score. In most anime I feel averaging out the arc scores gets me sufficiently close to how I feel about the show as a whole for me to be happy rating it accordingly but some anime are more or less than the sum of their parts, usually due to a significant external factor not contained within said arcs (how I feel about the world as a whole, exceptional characters, general subjective vibes, etc.)
In anime that lack a precision score it's either been too long since I've watched and I don't remember enough detail to give them a more accurate score (often happens with shorter series or movies especially) or the score is merely exactly the integer score I gave it.
I also have another form of scoring that's more specific than a 1-10 scale but not quite as specific as the precision scores -- on the right, in the tag field I give most anime a "grade" (if it's missing it's because I've forgotten too much detail to make an accurate judgement to anything more specific than an integer score). This may actually be the system I'm most comfortable with since it's not specific enough to cause rating conflicts between anime I'm sure about but it's still far superior to the integer scoring system.
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