I have always liked to check the character ranking in MAL to find new anime to watch. Usually the best anime have great characters, but MAL's current character ranking is a popularity contest at the end of the day. This made me curious to see, instead, which characters were the most likeable, regardless of the popularity of their anime, and regardless of the size/length of their anime. Which characters made the most impact on watchers, and were the easiest to fall in love with?
TL;DR - The following TOP 150 is not a character quality ranking! It's simply an attempt at measuring how appreciated, or liked, characters are. I spent 3 whole days organizing this, making sure that the math was sound, and going through thousands of characters. You don't need to read the explanations if you only want to see the ranking in the image below.
— I took the # of character favorites and divided it between the # of watchers from their respective anime (using the first entry/season). This part is simple enough.
— But it doesn't let us compare short anime vs long anime. How many of Luffy's favorites come from the fact that his anime has almost 1,000 episodes? You'll obviously like a character more the more time you have to connect with them. We simply can't compare Luffy, Naruto, Gintoki, Ichigo (etc.) with any character from a movie or a 1 season anime. So I added a small multiplier, which ranged from x2.00 to x1.00 depending on the amount of episodes. After much testing, setting the multiplier at a maximum of x2.00 gave the most consistent results.
— Only characters from movies got the x2.00 multiplier, and then the multiplier slowly decreased according to the exact amount of episodes that the anime had, until the 200 episodes. So the x2.00 maximum corresponds with 200 episodes. Anime with 201 episodes or more got the x1 multiplier (no change). Of course, this method can't give us a perfect comparison between characters from short anime and long anime, but I believe it turned out to be pretty accurate. The reason why I used a maximum of 200 episodes for the multiplier was because the majority of characters in the Top 350 come from anime with 200 episodes or less. Only 11 anime (and 15 characters) are not included within this range, all from very long anime.
— Finally, I checked pretty much every possible character. I checked the 400 most popular anime, the 400 highest-rated anime, the 200 highest rated movies, and the 100 highest rated OVAs and ONAs, to make sure I didn't miss anyone. Then I checked the 1250 most popular characters using MAL's ranking.
— I didn't include secondary and minor characters, for two reasons. The first is that only some of them ranked well. The second reason is because, even if they ranked well, I don't believe you can compare the two. Naruto Uzumaki and Itachi Uchiha have a very similar amount of favorites, but Itachi accomplished that with just a handful of episodes to himself, while Naruto had several hundred episodes to himself. So who's more likeable? Obviously Itachi but there's no easy way to prove it.
— I didn't include manga-only characters either. However, if the manga had a popularity similar to the anime (Berserk, Ashita no Joe, Slam Dunk, etc.), there were some considerations. The majority of manga had anywhere between 1-20% readers as the anime had watchers. So if the anime had 100,000 watchers who gave a rating, the manga usually had 1,000 - 20,000 readers who gave a rating. However there are some special cases where the anime has a bad reputation, or is simply not as recommended as the manga. So if the manga readers exceeded 20% of the anime watchers, I added this excess of readers into the total number of watchers. For example, if the anime had 100,000 watchers and the manga had 35,000 readers, then I added the 15,000 readers, and used 115,000 for the calculation. I had to do this for 20 stories, out of which only Berserk and Ashita no Joe were extreme cases, because their anime and manga have almost the same popularity.
— If the anime had a remake and a reboot, both of similar popularity (Hellsing, FMA & Fruits Basket), then I used the popularity of the most popular version (so for FMA, I used the popularity of Brotherhood, not the original anime), but I counted the episodes of both anime, treating them as if they were different seasons of the same story, because of their similar popularity.
Without further ado, here are the Top 150 most likeable characters!
quick maths stuff
F = # of character favorites
P = # of anime watchers that gave a rating (so p is popularity)
E = # of anime episodes (~20 minutes is 1 episode)
The formula for movies is:
(F × 2) / P
The formula for anime with up to 50 episodes is:
(F × (2 - (E × 0.01))) / P
The formula for anime with 51-100 episodes is:
(F × (1.50 - (((E - 100) × 0.01) / 2))) / P
The formula for anime with 101-200 episodes is:
(F × (1.25 - (((E - 100) × 0.01) / 4))) / P
The reason why I divided it in those three groups was to not favor too much the characters from the shortest anime, so the x2 multiplier drops faster during the first 50 episodes, then it begins to drop more slowly. Like I mentioned before, the x2.00 maximum is proportional to the 200 episodes, after which the multiplier no longer applies. While the x2.00 maximum might not seem like a lot, I do believe it gave the most accurate results. Even though only 5 characters from movies ranked in the Top 350, there was generally a great mix of anime of all sizes and popularity, and no clear preference towards any. |