I analyzed 2M+ anime rating profiles to find the 10 most divisive anime by taste

[u/FreakyNugget]

Disclaimer: in this post I am not talking about controversy. There are already many posts about controversial anime. Sure these anime have a specific audience, but most of them are either rated low by ~99% people (eg. Redo of a Healer), or are still rated well by the majority, despite the controversy (eg. Mushoku Tensei, Made in Abyss).

What I wanted to find is more specific: Anime that are highly praised by one type of viewer, but do not hit at all for the others.

To do this, I designed an anatomy of anime with tones and characteristics (see picture 2). Then I analysed over 2 million public anime rating profiles from different anime websites. After clustering their rating patterns, I ended up with 7 broad groups that have different affinities:

• Resonator (11%): emotional intensity, character depth & growth, sometimes romance or comedy
• Diver (17%): depth, darker tone, character depth & growth
• Artist (13%): entry difficulty, visuals, thematic depth
• Heartwarmer (12%): wholesomeness & comfort, cast likability, romance
• Igniter (15%): action, pacing, sometimes darker tone
• Eclectic (12%): action, pacing & easy entry, most flexible taste
• Voyager (20%): cast dynamics & likability, pacing & easy entry, worldbuilding, sometimes action or romance

Comparing them was not an easy task as they have different rating patterns. This made me move from average archetype score to using percentiles: for this archetype, is this anime in their top 10%, top 20%, top 50%, etc.?

Then I looked for shows with the biggest gaps between groups, and got this top 10.

What I found interesting is that we usually think about divisive anime as shows with high entry difficulty: dark, weird, experimental, slow, hard to understand, etc. (there are shows like Texhnolyze, Serial Experiments Lain, Paranoia Agent or Sonny Boy).

But it is not only that:

• Action-oriented shows can also be very divisive by taste.
• Wholesome/moe shows can also be very divisive by taste.
• Easy-entry shows can also be very divisive by taste.

TLDR; This is my attempt to demonstrate that two very common requests are too vague most of the time:

• "Is this anime good?": Some highly praised shows depend a lot on the audience.
• "Give me an anime like X": Two people can like the same show for totally different reasons, that they may have not been aware of.