The History of MyAnimeList's #1 Anime

Gintama I love this series too since I got into in 2016

damn, a 40-minute video during 12 days of videos? huge respect for the time and effort this must have taken

I would say "The Sequel Effect" is more commonly referred to as "survivorship bias"

The sequel effect does kind of make these comparisons not worth it but I still watched the whole video anyway so...
It would be cool if someone was able to do some statistical analysis on how sequels are rated compared to their original in general and come up with a general deflater factor that could be applied to make a more fair comparison with first seasons.
I use AniList myself these days although I mirror my scores to MAL, but I wonder how MAL scores compare to the other old sites of Anime-Planet and AniDB.

Wow, this history lesson was enthralling. Time to still not watch half of the current top 20.

Great job putting this together!!! I wonder if behind all these trends, if there's been any shift in the MAL user base. Is it mostly new anime fans? Or is it mostly millennials who grew up watching Bleach/Death Note/etc.? 🤔 idk

Mal doesn't count the negative scores of anyone who doesn't complete at least 3 4ths of a show, so people like me who don't even get through the first 11 episodes of Brotherhood because how much I hate them in comparison to the original don't get to effect it's score. That's what's rigging things in Brotherhood's undeserved favor.

Fantastic video

Kinda surprised you didn't mention Spy x Family shooting up to Number 2 though. It is what some would call a slice of life despite being about a spy infiltrating a school with the help of an assassin and a telepath.

Bleach Tybw deserves number 1 it’s been insane

Yeah honestly I would probably trade the current list in for the 2006 list. Good times.

Also, I gotta say, I don't know why Pingu in the City became a meme. I never found the meme of it being the greatest anime ever as all that funny.

Great 👍🏻 video nice 👍🏻 hype!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is actually criminially underrated, really good video! It also got a few laughs out of me, seeing how many times Gintama took the number 1 spot. Thanks for putting all of this effort into this :)

If FMAB would fall for good, i would love it if subsequent Kaguya installments, AOT, or a resurging Mob would replace it. In terms of popularity, I feel like CSM's ending could cement it's spot at the permanent #1 tho.
Great overview of MAL's top list history

Got here randomly through TikTok, great video

Fantastic video!

I'm pretty sure San-Gatsu no Lion 2nd Season has the highest score recorded for a slice of life

You couldn't have predicted it ofc, but recently there's been another anime to overthrow Brotherhood fanboys, idk how long it's gonna be but still nice to see

Bleach is GOATed

Yoo bad you made this before Oshi no Ko came out

It’s weird to see Chainsaw Man at the top, because the adaptation is super divisive.

FMA is at max average

I feel like Steel Ball Run will break records and force the entire website to change their score system permanently

Fma2003 is great fight me

That was a fun video, really good production and quite interesting!

Love is war is Probably the only anime you can say is the best of its kind without any competition. It's the absolute goat

how many people do actually claim that brotherhood is thier fav anime???

also gintama having the top 2 spots at one time was insane tbh

You should do this for manga. "Berserk is number 1....then berserk takes the throne...Berserk has the highest score across both manga and anime to date..."

MAL is just a FMAB fan club and it's so annoying

Gintama really is the goat huh

Now it's Frieren

Holy shit. Criminally underrated vid

Let's gooo Frieren

I ask for a sequel for this video !!!

FMA 03 losing it’s high score due to brotherhood is kinda sad imho, people should judge it on it’s own merit instead of comparing the two

So frieren is basically the only non-sequel who held top-1 for more than a month in the last 10 years. Interesting

Gintama Vs fmab was when I started going to anime parties. It was the first time I met weebs. I didn't know people like that existed. I would love learning about drama between weebs. You'd think with so many shounen anime they would through fists but no. Those weebs thought they had superior intelligence and would doxx each other show embarrassing texts and being passive aggressive in general over the fattest chick imaginable.

Ichigos entrance is peak shounen

frieren being there for so long now must appriciated

I think MAL's ranking is getting violated lately.

This is because over the last few years a massive amount of new anime watchers started to rank the animes & 2 things happen from this:

They generally rate too high or too low, thus a 7/10 previously getting 9/10 these days or a previous 6/10 might be getting 1/10 now.
&
A lot of emphasis they put on animation quality over the entire story. This hurts the older animation or low budget production with less fps.

I read somewhere on Reddit, Gintama was purposefully downvoted by many because they didn't understand the anime!
Its probably not a great amount of people that did it to Gintama but its not uncommon for some popular anime to be targeted by some people.

Logh breifly taking the top spot overall and still sitting on top of all OVA’s is a testament to its greatness.

I'm pretty certain Clannad: After Story was the #1 anime at one point as well. It probably didn't get captured in the Wayback Machine, but there's a featured article on MAL that states: "before the powerhouse that is Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Clannad: After Story was the highest-rated TV anime on MAL for some time." Great video!

Thanks for the informative video. I didn't realize that Death Note and Gurren Lagann were so dominant in the late 2000s before FMA Brotherhood arrived.

Frieren chuds stay winning.

For that section between 2009 and 2010, old forums show that Clannad: After Story and Gintama got rank 1. Clannad's score was not recorded but the possible score was 8.98 shown in the top tv series archives. Gintama's archives shows that it was at 9.07 when it was rank 1.

2 years later (we are one month shy of that) would be neat to revisit this topic, especially after the historical run of Frieren, which has been sitting at the top uninterrupted for over a year now, able to maintain scores like we have never seen with as many people who have scored (no other show has ever held above a 9.3 with over half a million user scores).

And it also kind of did it all, early spike right after its 4-episode premiere, I believe reaching as high as number 3, then falling down below a 9, before slowly rising back up and taking number 1 around November 22nd 2023. Then it had its daily back and forth with Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood for at least a week. And then it just kind of kept going up, exploding all the way to 9.39 the weekend season 1 ended.

It's early December 2024 and Frieren is still at 9.32, having lost only 0.07 points in the past 8 months.

In that time the closest anything has gotten was One Piece: Fan Letter, a special episode that reached as high as 9.26. The 3rd cour of Bleach was also briefly above FMAB this Fall.

And before Frieren we also had Attack on Titan again taking the top spot, then Oshi no ko taking the number 1 spot and sitting there for a brief period of time back in April 2023, right after its feature length premiere.

Now that MyAnimeList has in place better features to guard against vote manipulation, it looks like Frieren will be at number 1 for a very long time, with the gap between 0.01 score drops growing each time.

Also 2024 will be the first time since 2015 (Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, of course) when an anime holds the number 1 uncontested for the full year. 2016 to 2023 has seen at least 2 different entries taking the top spot (2023 alone had the new Bleach, Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood, Attack on Titan, Oshi no ko and Frieren).