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[Cruxador]

Yeah, so a big part of it is in fact the fan scene in the USA who highly distort what's out there. Much of the "creepy" shit almost every western Otaku at least seem to know about is basically unknown to almost all Japanese - EVEN ones you meet who like anime. I've met Japanese anime fans and they don't know a fraction of the weird fringe shit from Japan we seem to all know about. It's basically as if the Japanese picked through all the weirdest fringe media in America - and there is weird shit out there, pile it all up along with all the Michael Bay and Adam Sandler movies, ignored everything else, then said "WTF America?"

So sure, it doesn't have to be so, but the American anime scene has painted itself into a corner. I'm reminded of this quote from the people who localized Akira. At the time it was a big hit, and the company head said in an interview (paraphrasing) "Yeah, there's all this other cool stuff too - romance, sports, drama, etc et. stuff for adult men and women, we can localize all that too!". And while it's sort of happened since simulcasts became a thing, that basically never happened. The way anime was marketed, in the USA specifically, painted itself into this corner we are in.

BTW: How many of those people who scoff at anime eagerly tune into reality shows btw? Your hobby just appears childish in relation to the best possible media in the best possible world. If you look at the volume of content objectively, almost all people are watching stuff that's much deeper on the trash pile.

To clarify, are you calling this a manga-specific problem, or would you say it applies to anime as well? In the latter case, do you have examples from the last season that are adult and mainstream?

And this may be a stereotype kind of thing rather than reality (and you probably know more about this than me anyway) but the image I always get is that for the typical successful adult, manga isn't really a major hobby; reading on the train is more likely to be books or newspapers. Then again, if I go by some portrayals, the typical salaryman's diversion on the train is groping schoolgirls so...

[Reelya]

I'll give an example from the most recent week of manga sales:

https://myanimelist.net/news/52480193

In the top 10 this week you had #8: Hoozuki no Reitetsu, and it's hardly a series aimed at kids. Basically it interprets the underworld as a japanese corporation complete with all the drama and politics that entails, and plays on a lot of obscure traditional mythology. Young people with "pop sensibilities" would tend to be bored silly by all this.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And at #3 was Kinou Nani Tabeta?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Shirou Kakei, a straitlaced lawyer, cooks gourmet dinners for himself and his longtime gay lover, Kenji Yabuki, a carefree, hippie-ish hairdresser. The story is told through the lens of dinner preparation.

Basically nothing about this is designed to appeal to typical teen otaku sensibilities. And it outsold every harem thing in existence.

Meanwhile, #2 best-seller was Saint Onii-san, a daily-life comedy about Buddha and Jesus sharing a small flat in Tokyo. It's observational humor about Japanese life and about their problems fitting in. Also not really something that's geared towards the typical otaku type.

So you have three seinen manga in the top 10 this week that deal with complex issues or taboo subjects. Plus, two of them got made into animes already. The main point there, is that when more "adult" animes do get made from top-selling mangas, the whole franchise is treated in the USA as some sort of obscure niche, and not "mainstream". Conversely, when some perverted fringe manga which hasn't even dented the "top 50" on the sales charts manages to get made into an anime for a niche audience, we often label that "mainstream anime" in the West.

EDIT: I'll give some examples of the difference in Japanese anime tastes to American, though I haven't looked into this as much as the manga

Here you have a Japanese fan poll of the top animes they were looking forward to in Spring 2017, which is the most recent I could find. The top three were

#3 Natsume's Book of Friends (shoujo, sort of like a lighter and more emotional "Mushishi")
#2 Wararau Salesman (seinen, psychological drama)
#1 Attack on Titan

While Attack on Titan isn't a surprise, since it's season 2 of a popular series, the other two would be considered extremely "niche" in America.

However ... Natsume's Book of Friends is a best-selling manga that's been adapted to a long-running anime with 6 seasons. Yet - how many Western fans even know about it? I like Natsume and have mentioned it before, yet western fans will only ever grudgingly even give it a look, and consider it some "weird fringe thing" while Monster Musume, which doesn't even dent the manga sales charts in Japan, and got adapted into a single season of anime, is literally a #1 chart-topping manga in the USA which is considered "mainstream anime" which tons of people watched or at least were talking about.

Here are the viewership numbers for the West, according to MAL scores.
https://myanimelist.net/anime/season/2017/spring
Natsume's Book of Friends, one of the most-anticipated series in Japan, was also one of the lowest watched series by Western fans. Even though it's one of the highest-scored shows of the season (8.78), more Western people watched the boob-fest Sin: Nanatsu no Taizai, even though everyone agreed that that was really, really awful (5.66). So, we just ignore the shows Japan considers good and watch the utter schlock instead, even while griping about how bad that shit is ...

Also note that Uchouten Kazoku is supposed to be a brilliant show (I have it here gonna watch it soon), but Uchouten Kazoku S2 got around half the viewers Natsume's Book of Friends did, despite also being one of the most highly-scored shows of the season, by those who did watch it. So you have these awesome series which are popular in Japan, yet virtually nobody in the West is actually watching them, instead we watch smut-fests galor, stuff that most of the Japanese fans don't even touch, then we wonder why it all sucks.

[Parsely]

To reiterate though, Thunderbolt Fantasy is the coolest puppet show ever devised. I'd never thought I'd fall in love with puppets this much, but it's happened, and I can't wait for the sequel.

Holy shit this show is amazing.

[Cruxador]

WELP

On the topic of things that don't make the western mainstream, I tried out Omiai Aite wa Oshiego Tsuyoki na Mondaiji, largely because there's all of two things in the new season with episodes out yet, and... There's a graphic sex scene beginning at the three minute mark. Not what I was expecting "romance" to mean. It's a five minute short and two minutes are sex.

Which if you think about it, five minutes isn't enough for the kind of thing that you'd want a show with that much sex in it for anyway. Is this what josei romance is always like? Holy shit.

[Reelya]

Josei adaptations are super rare so any generalizations about them as anime at least are almost impossible to make, purely because they don't make many. And when I mean rare I really mean that.

https://myanimelist.net/anime/genre/43/Josei
^ 69 Josei animes made ever and that includes sequels, OVAs, specials, and movies. It doesn't even manage to get a second page of search results. And for an example ... Saiyuki Reload Blast was published in a Josei magazine, so the adaptation of that is included in the 69 "Josei anime". So it's a real mixed bag and you can't extrapolate a whole lot, except to say that, in general, Josei animes are "classy": stuff like Rakugo, Chihayafuru, and Nodame Cantabile.

As for sex scenes, some shoujo mangas do have sex scenes, unlike e.g. shonen/seinen romcoms which won't quite go there, so I'd imagine some Josei ones top the shoujo ones. And apparently they made that one you watched to appeal to the ladyporn market. But I haven't heard of anything else in the Josei category quite like that (and like I said, the list of Josei animes is super-short so easy to check), so they're probably testing the waters there to see if there's a market for that, with a safe 5 minute format.

[Cruxador]

Huh. I knew Josei was rare, but I didn't realize it was that rare. Maybe my perception is thrown off because of Japan/west demographic differences discussed earlier. For example, Mahou Tsukai no Yome is popular, in the west, with the josei demographic (or at least, the josei subset of manga readers) and its classified as shounen. Which is actually weird to me and I had to look it up; gender aside it definitely feels more sei than shou to me – do teens really get the mythological and literary references? But that kind of difference in western market may have played into perceptions of anime as more female-friendly than it really is.

Speaking of perceptions, I've said this before, but using something like MAL biases you towards the more plebish markets. I've heard your arguments that there isn't another good widely used and citable source, but I still have to pull out my scotsman fallacy here. A lot of the people who rate things on MAL have no real knowledge of anime as a medium in the first place, what you see on MAL is all there is to their knowledge. Conversely, a lot of people who watch a lot of anime don't use or need it, because its services are very much catered to a casual audience. And aside from people that are missed, I'd more heavily weight the people who do watch things besides whatever gets talked about the most as "real" anime fans. Of course, neither of these things can really be quantified. To get real numbers of what's being watched, you've have to pool data from torrent trackers (or tracker download sites), IRC bots, streaming services, and probably something else that I'm not thinking of. It's not remotely feasible. But just looking at what happens to get talked about and therefore gets high MAL viewership isn't really a fair dipstick for western anime in general; the only point it makes is "most anime viewers in the west don't watch all that much"; beyond that, conclusions become a lot more rocky.

Like, you've called out Saint Young Men as something that's minor in the US, my background perception of it was the opposite. Even though I don't care for the series I've always thought of it as a fairly well-known comedy, so even if westerners aren't reading it like the Japanese are, western fans of the medium at least have heard of it.

Of course, these days LNs are the new hotness, but that's a whole different matter.


Also, this is a bit off topic but I'd just like to say that I appreciate you, Reelya. Whenever anyone has a question or anything, you're always there with a thought out and knowledgeable response, and seem to put in more effort than the question asker. In this case you came in with solid information I didn't know in response to my much more visceral drunken reactions, and it was the second time in as many posts that you gave good answers to my decidedly less good questions.

[Reelya]

Do discerning fans turn their nose up at using an online database to keep track of their shows? It doesn't seem to be a warranted assertion. MAL has a bad rep because of some trolls on their open forums, but hardly anyone chats on there anyway. And for an estimate of how many people use the site to log shows, the number of people who listed that they wathed Attack on Titan Season 1 on MAL was almost 1.2 million. So we're talking an active userbase in the millions who use this to track their viewing.

I'd argue that total number of people who list a show on MAL is probably about as good a metric as you're ever going to get as to the relative proportions of non-Japanese people who are watching a show. Likewise you might think a rating is "unearned" but that's a misunderstanding of what ratings are. A rating is the aggregate amount people are enjoying a show, it's not "how great is this show in the annals of literature" because that's not what it's measuring.

The combination of how many people watch something and how much those people liked it is in fact a good barometer of how much some random person who's never seen anime before will probably like it, because when you say "plebs" ... how do average Americans who like reality tv fit into that? Are they more pleb or connoseuir?

[Cruxador]

Do discerning fans turn their nose up at using an online database to keep track of their shows? It doesn't seem to be a warranted assertion.

I don't know that it's a categorical truth, but I know it's at least anecdotally something that happens. And it makes intuitive sense that there's a trend there; if you spend a lot of time on anime, you don't need an external service to take care of things like that because your brain and your file system have got the job covered. Presumably if you spend a lot of time talking and thinking about anime, you don't need to keep track of which episode you're on, and you hear recommendations and descriptions that are much deeper than just an average number, so you value that kind of thing much less.

MAL has a bad rep because of some trolls on their open forums, but hardly anyone chats on there anyway. And for an estimate of how many people use the site to log shows, the number of people who listed that they wathed Attack on Titan Season 1 on MAL was almost 1.2 million. So we're talking an active userbase in the millions who use this to track their viewing.

Maybe, but how many anime watchers are there total?Considering that we're talking about the international community, and "uses English-language websites" still includes probably something like a billion people, I wouldn't be surprised if that number under-represents the general population by at least two orders of magnitude.

As an aside, the negative things I've heard about MAL forums are less to do with trolling and more to do with just general puerility. I've never cared enough to investigate that in depth, though.

I'd argue that total number of people who list a show on MAL is probably about as good a metric as you're ever going to get as to the relative proportions of non-Japanese people who are watching a show. Likewise you might think a rating is "unearned" but that's a misunderstanding of what ratings are. A rating is the aggregate amount people are enjoying a show, it's not "how great is this show in the annals of literature" because that's not what it's measuring.

I agree that it's the best available, but I don't think that necessarily means it's good. I also don't think it's necessarily the best we could ever have; with online streaming sites such as Netflix breaking into the market, it's likely that more market research is being done, and with more being done, the chance that public research will be done also goes up.

Regarding the numbers specifically, I don't think earning a rating is a concept that even makes sense. It's not that I think there's a true rating that would effectively capture show quality, I think it's a useless metric. What makes a show good is an ephemeral quality that varies from person to person; their are factors like the skill of animation, the music direction, the voice acting, that can be said to be subjectively good or bad, but ultimately, whether you'll enjoy any given anime is just a matter of how well it aligns to your particular tastes. A number being higher or lower doesn't mean much there.
It also isn't necessarily a good indicator even of how many people liked the show. The rating system doesn't say "did you like it?" it asks you to say how good the anime is, on a scale. And that's something that's easily influenced both by outside factors (hype), by trends in the fanbases of particular genres (some types of things always seem to score high for no particular inherent reason) and based on the viewer's experience (scores from those who watch less things tend to cluster more in the higher end, because there's less comparison by which to notice the flaws, but if the good parts didn't get your attention you'd not have picked the series up). Even without any better quantitative evidence, this is still a weak indicator and should be taken with a shaker of salt.

The combination of how many people watch something and how much those people liked it is in fact a good barometer of how much some random person who's never seen anime before will probably like it, because when you say "plebs" ... how do average Americans who like reality tv fit into that? Are they more pleb or connoseuir?

You're assuming that the anime pleb (and the MAL anime pleb in particular) isn't meaningfully distinct from a general population pleb. Either that or you're assuming that anime can't usefully be recommended to the general conversation. Those are each a whole other conversation, but I don't think either of them necessarily holds true.

[Reelya]

I don't think those points are really substantiated.

Let's assume "pleb" or "plebby" means "has worse taste than the typical viewer of that media".

First we'd have to work out who is the "generalized anime viewer" and how good their taste is, and see "is the general trend in myanimelist more or less plebby than that?"

How about looking at sales of anime and manga in the united states. Here is the nytimes weekly top sellers for 2016:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times_Manga_Best_Sellers_of_2016
It's like the plebbiest list you could ever assemble. You can look at the weekly top 10's but they're 80-90% the same as this list's contents.

If you look at the "most popular" manga on myanimelist, then it's no more "plebby" than the top selling mangas in the united states, in fact it's a bit less plebby because soft-porn like monster musume tops the sales charts, but doesn't have a lot of people listing it as something they read on myanimelist.
https://myanimelist.net/topmanga.php?type=bypopularity

So this shows that the typical top-sellers reported in the USA are similar to the most-read mangas in myanimelist, barring the softporn stuff, which tops sales charts, but is under-represented in myanimelist's most popular mangas. Assuming that the people who buy manga represent typical consumers then there's no evidence here that "plebby" manga readers are more attracted to using online databases than "non-plebby" manga readers. Unless by "plebby" you mean "people who buy manga". If there is an undercurrent of "classy" Western manga readers who aren't showing up in the sales figures, then they are a minority not the "silent majority" you are suggesting. myanimelist represents the majority, which was my original point. The majority is not distinguishable from the plebs.

Remember, your key argument wasn't that myanimelist users were plebs, but that they are non-representative of the general consumer of the media. If the average consumer is in fact a "pleb" then myanimelist is representative even if they are plebs.

EDIT: Similar for anime. It's hard to get Western figures, however we have Amazon's anime section and we can see what are the most-sold items, and determine how plebby or not that is:
https://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Movies-TV-Anime/zgbs/movies-tv/2959127011

First thing you notice on the Amazon sales chart is that much of it is just 80s/90s, Akira, Ghibli, DragonballZ etc, or acclaim/hyped recent films such as The Wolf Children or Your Name. They dominate the sales charts. We could call them plebs ... or we could exclude them as "casuals" who don't count as "core viewers" of anime. However, whatever sales remain must then be representative of those we did not exclude - e.g. representative of the "core viewers" you are saying are "not plebs".

So what's left after excluding the sale of things which are "really casual"? You have Drifters, Dangan Ronpa 3, and "Vampire Vixen and Fuzzy Lips" a monstergirl Hentai on page 1. Page 2 has Steins;Gate, Space Dandy, Rosario to Vampire. As you go along its the same mix, trite classics mixed with a few good-but-hyped shows, along with bad haremshit/hentais. None of it suggests that people who use Amazon to buy anime DVDs are especially "non-plebby" compared to any specific subset who use myanimelist. Unless you conclude from this sales data that Rosario to Vampire is one of the top "non--plebby" shows of the last decade.

So ... if the people who buy manga are plebby, and the people who buy anime on amazon are also kinda plebby, and the people who use myanimelist are also plebby, then who exactly is this superior demographic that rises above all that? Where's the data to suggest they even exist?

[Flying Dice]

The problem with using sales data is that physical media imports are notoriously expensive in the west, and even digital purchases aren't cheap. A very large chunk of the audience is going to be streaming fansubs and reading scanlations-the act of buying media on a large scale tends to indicate that a person is either a casual or really hardcore.

It also ignores that there are a lot of things that can't be bought as western localizations, or are exclusives to a specific service. Either you pay out the ass for a Japanese-language import, you buy into a service you don't want, or you get a fan translated version online.

Like, I'm a fairly involved fan, but I own one series and two films on DVD, with maybe 20-30 volumes of manga. Obviously I took in all the rest through alternative legal methods such as television and public libraries.

[Reelya]

I've been trying to find some crunchyroll viewership figures for that reason. Haven't come across one yet, but my connection is slow so googling lots of stuff is annoying (like start a search and the page takes several minutes to load or never loads).

Most of the "myanimelist sucks" stuff I've googled seems to originate on the crunchyroll forums so I'd take that all with a grain of salt. Some of the discussion quality on crunchyroll is equally appalling to anything on mal forums. If it's mostly arising on one forum vs another, when both sites have millions of users, and aren't mainly used for forum purposes, then I'd just consider that as a case of a small subset of trolls one site attacking a small subset of trolls on the other site.

See, the monthly active users on myanimelist is probably in excess of a million people (going by the fact that the most-seen show of each season has ~ half a million people logging it, not everyone watches the same shows, and not everyone watches shows while airing). However, for all that, the forums aren't especially active. If you compare levels of activity on bay12 with levels of activity on myanimelist, they don't feel like one site is 1000 times more active than the other. You're not seeing mal posts with thousands of responses unless they're megathreads which have run several years. An attack specifically on the tone of the forums then isn't readibly extendible to an attack on "typical myanimelist users" at all, because only a very small fragment of their user-base use the place for forum purposes. It would be like damning all "youtube viewers" based on "youtube comments".

[Cruxador]

Gonna agree that purchase data is indicative of nothing much aside from what gets localized.

Let's assume "pleb" or "plebby" means "has worse taste than the typical viewer of that media".

I meant it to say someone with more common/vulgar taste. Not necessarily worse. There have been a fair few good series that also got quite popular over the years. Of course, they also have to be easy to understand - there's a reason Flip Flappers flopped. But look at, say, Puella Magi Madoka Magica. It had great sound and aesthetic design as well as voice acting, which allowed it to convey emotion incredibly effectively. It was well-paced with appropriately timed twists and highlights, and a story that made enough sense to support all that. And it became incredibly popular, so much so that despite its great quality, some consider it overrated simply due to the massive fanbase. Conversely, if you need a lot of background knowledge to understand something, it doesn't do nearly as well. Flip Flappers also had excellent sound and visual design, but it was constantly referencing art, literature, and science which were too far outside of the common knowledge, and too broadly arrayed even to apply to a single clade of hobbyists. Discussion may have been filled with research of art history and speculation about streetlights in early episodes, but most viewers succumbed to fatigue early and discussion pretty much everywhere was dumbed down to typical yuri speculation. That's not to say that requiring outside knowledge is verboten for success, but if you look at Mahoutsukai no Yome, that one as much more common references like fairy mythology and literature. But that information isn't necessary to enjoy the show (whereas with Flip Flappers, it provided more information but the show could be confusing even after realizing the references) and it stays within that one fairly narrow area of human knowledge. Therefore, we could say that of those three, PMMM is the most pleb of the shows, while Flip Flappers is the least so with the Magus Bride in the middle. And yet, it would be contentious at best and erroneous at worse to suggest that there is definitely a counter-gradient in quality.

The relevance of the distinction, though, is less to do with that definition, and more to do with the fact that more casual anime viewers get their media based almost entirely on what has been most heavily promoted, with only the massive grassroots breakouts reaching that crowd, and even then it's based on where the hype is rather than looking at the shows coming out and selecting which look likely to appeal.

I've been trying to find some crunchyroll viewership figures for that reason.

This isn't crunchyroll, but it's probably just as good. It took me ages to compile since I did it manually, but it's probably the best data we'll get on this sector.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

I've gone through nyaa.si and found all the final episodes that were released in the last two weeks, and summed up the successful downloads for each sub group. This gives us a ranking of anime by nyaa download. Note that this biases against casuals by requiring a series to be finished, but the big three are of course still well represented. Note also that particularly well regarded seasonal anime such as Abyss not only reach but breaking into those numbers.

Also check out this graph:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

And the full list, if you like:  https://pastebin.com/rJgdaa6M

A better set of numbers would get downloads from private trackers and from the irc bots of sub groups, as well as potentially crunchyroll (and other streaming) numbers.

I'd just consider that as a case of a small subset of trolls

Why must they be trolls? Why can't a site have an indigenous shitposter community? Also, regardless of what you've seen elsewhere, nobody but you is actually talking about the forums in this particular discussion.

[Reelya]

Uhh, Made in Abyss completely backfires as an example of "myanimelist" getting it wrong. It's currently the highest-rated show of the season. In fact it's the 24th highest-rated show on myanimelist right now. Now you'll probably attack myanimelist for rating it too high or something Also ... people who download entire shows benefit from the reviews and ratings. They highly downloaded a show (Abyss) that was also the most  highly rated on myanimelist of the season. People who were watching simulcasts don't have the benefit of hindsight, so it's not necessarily a reasonable comparison.

Also, about three times as many people logged the most-watched show so far last season on myanimelist, while the most downloads that you have there is 50,000. It seems a little counter-intuitive to say that your data source there is more representative of anime viewers as a whole than the other data. The "whole shows downloads" while also being fairly small fails to capture significant markets such as simulcast viewers, those who watch shows while airing, those who wartch on sites such as kissanime, or people who buy on DVD or watch on TV. Whereas people who use myanimelist overlap with all of those other categories.

For the season, Gamers and Youkoso Jitsuryoku, Made in Abyss all came in the top-5 most-watched shows on myanimelist, and they're all in your top-7 most downloaded shows. So there isn't any real point of difference you can argue about there.
https://myanimelist.net/anime/season/2017/summer

Meanwile, Knight's and Magic is one of your top downloads, but myanimelist viewers rated that "meh" at only 7.31. And "Ballroom" was very highly rated on myanimelist (8.14) and had almost as many viewers as "smartphone" yet hardly any of your series-downloaders want to download it. So myanimelist would appear to have more nuanced taste there than your series-downloaders.

And one of the key points isn't that "westerners only like bad shows" it was that westerners only tend to like shonen and harems (or seinen, if there is blood). Made in Abyss is a good show, but it's a kid's show, and in fact it's actually flown under the radar in Japan for that reason (it's in a kid oriented timeslot on tv). The Japanese fans aren't tuning into to Kiddie tv and saying it's the greatest thing ever, somehow.

http://goboiano.com/japans-20-most-anticipated-summer-2017-anime/
^ Here is the top 20 of what Japan was most anticipating in summer 2017. #1 was Hellgirl, #2 was monogatari, and you have to get down to 5th place before you even get an action-oriented series, whereas action-oriented series dominate your Western downloads, even if only considering the summer releases.

And notice that highschool or harem-looking things that were widely watched in the West scored very low in the Japanese ratings of shows they were looking forward to. Gamers - one of the top downloads in the West didn't even make the top 20, Smartphone was only #15 and Youkoso Jitsuryoku Shijo was #17. But they're all in the most highly-downloaded series by Western fans. It sounds like the Japanese are turned off by cliched looking haremy stuff, actually. They also didn't even rate Knights and Magic, which all the westerners are downloading.

[Cruxador]

Somewhat brief replies because I've not got a ton of time right now but,

Uhh, Made in Abyss completely backfires as an example of "myanimelist" getting it wrong. It's currently the highest-rated show of the season. In fact it's the 24th highest-rated show on myanimelist right now. Now you'll probably attack myanimelist for rating it too high or something

Nah, Abyss is a great show by any metric.

Also ... people who download entire shows benefit from the reviews and ratings.

What? Who watches a show to the end if they don't like it just because it's highly rated?

People who were watching simulcasts don't have the benefit of hindsight, so it's not necessarily a reasonable comparison.

What does this even mean?

Also, about three times as many people logged the most-watched show so far last season on myanimelist, while the most downloads that you have there is 50,000. It seems a little counter-intuitive to say that your data source there is more representative of anime viewers as a whole than the other data. The "whole shows downloads" while also being fairly small fails to capture significant markets such as simulcast viewers, those who watch shows while airing, those who wartch on sites such as kissanime, or people who buy on DVD or watch on TV. Whereas people who use myanimelist overlap with all of those other categories.

Yeah, I didn't intend to assert that this set of data includes all relevant information, it's only a different subset to look at. It agrees with your numbers in many ways and disagrees in a few. It would be better to have more datasets than just these two, but I only have so much time to compile that data. If you do manage to turn up good streaming data, I'd be quite interested to compare that as well.

Meanwile, Knight's and Magic is one of your top downloads, but myanimelist viewers rated that "meh" at only 7.31. And "Ballroom" was very highly rated on myanimelist (8.14) and had almost as many viewers as "smartphone" yet hardly any of your series-downloaders want to download it. So myanimelist would appear to have more nuanced taste there than your series-downloaders.

I'm not sure how that conclusion stemmed from those data.

And one of the key points isn't that "westerners only like bad shows" it was that westerners only tend to like shonen and harems (or seinen, if there is blood). Made in Abyss is a good show, but it's a kid's show, and in fact it's actually flown under the radar in Japan for that reason (it's in a kid oriented timeslot on tv). The Japanese fans aren't tuning into to Kiddie tv and saying it's the greatest thing ever, somehow.

Kemono friends was and still is pretty popular, and symphogear is on your most anticipated list. MiAbyss had a slow start to the season but its success is picking up domestically now too.

[Reelya]

Also ... people who download entire shows benefit from the reviews and ratings.

What? Who watches a show to the end if they don't like it just
because it's highly rated?

I don't even understand what point you're making here ... the point I'm making is extremely simple to understand.

Myanimelist's viewer numbers right after a season is complete (which is the season we're talking about, which ended a few days ago), are almost entirely made up of those who watched it while airing, e.g. those who decided to go in blind and watch simulcasts without the benefit of pre-existing reviews or ratings.

However, your nyaa.si data is entirely made up of people who downloaded complete shows after they finished. So they get the benefit of hindsight - e.g. choosing shows that rated well or got good reviews. And for the record, your data only shows what torrents were downloaded, they don't tell you whether the person watched the whole show or not, just that they downloaded it.

So it's not a reasonable comparison to make. People watching simulcasts logically cannot be as picky as those waiting to see which shows were deemed to be good. And myanimelist numbers include a significant amount of people who watched simulcasts, and never more so than immediately after the season has finished.

Additionally, myanimelist is an aggregate measure, because it is used by people who watch anime by all of the different means, whether that's airing simulcasts, torrenting whole shows, kissanime, crunchyroll or TV / Netflix. People who use all these services also use myanimelist. So it's almost certain to be more representative of the "typical viewer" than data from any single one of those sources.

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Meanwile, Knight's and Magic is one of your top downloads, but myanimelist viewers rated that "meh" at only 7.31. And "Ballroom" was very highly rated on myanimelist (8.14) and had almost as many viewers as "smartphone" yet hardly any of your series-downloaders want to download it. So myanimelist would appear to have more nuanced taste there than your series-downloaders.

I'm not sure how that conclusion stemmed from those data.

My conclusion was that many more people were downloading a show with low ratings than one with high ratings. In fact more people downloaded the fairly low rated Knights and Magic than any new show except for Abyss. The point is that ballroom isn't a kiddie-ish as Knights and Magic, so if you're claiming that myanimelist users on average are noticeably more plebbish, vulgar or childish, what-have-you, then you'd need to explain that difference.

My main point however is that you seem to have no primary source for the whole "myanimelist users are plebs" thing other than your own prejudice. if it's a fact you must have sources you can point to that suggest it's a fact and not pure spite. "superior anime fans keep all the knowledge in their head" is all you've come up with, and it's frankly the stupidest thing I've heard in a long time as a rationale.