How does one rate anime? That discussion flares up every once in a while. Most of the time it revolves around the fineness of the scale, with everything from two-valued good or bad to a sliding scale of percents proposed. However, those never satisfied me, so I’ve been thinking about that. An earlier idea I had was a triangle between good, annoying and boring. That was an improvement, but I wasn’t satisfied. Then I realized that my excitement of shows has no real connection to how much I enjoy them. Therefore I’d like to propose a two-scale evaluation of excitement and enjoyability:

The enjoyability scale how much you like something, very simple. The excitement scale is different. It’s NOT how much you’re looking forward to watching something, how much it makes you squee, or something like that. It’s how much it makes your jaw drop, be it out of audacity of a character, surprising plot developments, breathtaking animation or arrogance and pretentiousness of the creators. It should be glaringly obvious that those two scales are purely subjective.

Similarly to that, I use ‘awesome’ for the shows that leave you in awe, either through quality, audacity or wondering how that even got approved. My current favourite examples for these three aspects are Madoka Magica, Aquarion Evol and Black Rock Shooter. In contrast, good shows can go from the excitement-fest that is Aquarion Evol to the mellow and toned down Bunny Drop. As for the other end of the scales, Hidamari Sketch fits perfectly into boring (at least the first two seasons, the third seems to slide into okay, judging from one episode).

Now why do I prefer this way of rating? Firstly, despite ordering shows into only five values, to me it’s more differentiated to me than a scale with tenths of percents. What’s the difference of rating a show 73.4% or 73.5%? I don’t know, and it’s so small that it’s practically irrelevant. This plane however also allows you to say how you like or don’t like a show. Secondly, the overlap with the ‘awesome’ area. Some descriptives are not mutually exclusive. Thirdly, your placement of shows in the plane kind of represents what you like. Some have a diagonal from top right to bottom left, some from top left to bottom right, some have a triangle. I find that kind of stuff to be interesting.