I've been wondering what the top MAL Anime would look like without sequels...

Pullman said:
Yeah because it is completely irrelevant if a second season is fantastic and stands out as being superb - as long as the first season was slightly less good it should not show up in the top anime at all.

Great logic.

I don't understand what's so hard to understand about certain seasons of a franchise being better (in some cases MUCH better) than other/previous seasons and therefore being scored highly and ranking highly in the toplist. It's completely arbitrary to only care about the reception/score of the first season and ignore any other outstanding parts of that franchise just because they came afterwards.

If anything it's unfortunate that not every entry is divided into multiple seasons because for example a huge show like One Piece would probably have a big difference in how the individual arcs/seasons would be scored, reflecting their difference in quality and popularity among the viewers. With just one combined score for 900+ episodes the score and toplist provide a lot less actual information about the reception of the show and its individual parts.

Is it really better to have less and more vague information by averaging out every franchise, ignoring difference in quality between the individual seasons, than to have to do a bit of extra scrolling past various entries belonging to the same franchise to reach certain shows?

And that's not even talking about how problematic it would be for many other reasons. For example what even counts as a franchise that should be summarized into one entry? Do remakes by completely different studios count, which sometimes have 40 years or more between them and barely anything to do with each other? Do franchises which consists of tons of standalone entries be grouped together? Like Pokemon or Precure or Gundam? Do you count every shitty little special or commercial associated with a franchise as part of its average score to equal amounts as main entries? If not how do you weigh different types of entries? Would the Dragon Ball franchise score be mainly dominated by the scores for its countless movies because those vastly outnumber the main entries? Do more popular franchises that get a lot of recap movies and small specials get punished for their popularity by having their average score dragged down by a lot of random entries?

None of those questions have easy answers. So just from a practical point of view, to me it makes no sense to even think about grouping franchises together into one aggregate score. It would be too complicated to do fairly.





And on a somewhat related note (because I saw multiple replies like this already), I also don't understand the obsession with specific rankings. People are focusing on the wrong things when it comes to scores. Whether something is #15 or #27 (arbitrary examples) is irrelevant in the big picture. Considering the rankings go from 1-15000 or beyond, that is a minuscule difference, both shows can be seen as belonging to the same tier. Both are in the top 30, both are deemed to be the best of the best by the community. The small details like the exact ranking is basically just cosmetic information.

I find it very weird to completely disregard MAL scores and say they can't be taken seriously at all, based on minor details like that. Scores and rankings gain their relevance and usefulness from the big picture so as long as, for example, the vast majority of the top 1000 are seen as being better as the vast majority of #1001-2000 by the vast majority of people - the scores are as they should be and perfectly useful the vast majority of the time. And I specifically said 'majority' because individual exceptions will always exist based on personal preferences - but it's always stupid to completely reject the scoring system because you strongly disagree with a few shows. Imo that's just a sign of not understanding how averages and statistics work. It doesn't invalidate the scoring system/rankings at all.