Scores…what’s the point?

You get it, because points and scores are almost the same thing.  It’s almost like humor, but the kind that makes your head hurt and throw things at the person who said it? *cough* Anyway, I know I made a post about MAL scores, but scores in general have always been irritating. Especially with those annoying internet comments of “this anime is this score, but it really should be this score (up, down, blah)”. It’s gotten worse recently, because I’ve seen people predict scores for shows that will appear later on this year. Who does that? A couple years ago, I would say something completely different and say how I love scoring things and how I would score everything. You could have looked at my MAL profile and see score all over the place. I’ve taken off all of my MAL scores a while ago and I have never scored anything on any of my reviews that I’ve written. Scores have just become too much of a point of contention recently.

I know that wiser people like Plain Pasta, Leth, and many other people have mentioned that they use scores as a point of reference and comparison, but that doesn’t seem like what happens ninety percent of the time. Whenever a reviewer posts a score online, there are always those people that agree with the score, but most of the comments section are about people who completely disagree and argue with their opinions that they think are objective. Thus begins the comment section that travels the down sewer of endless arguments people that are upset at each other for no reason other than a score on the internet. Now, like I said before, this doesn’t happen all the time. Those arguments usually happen on youtube videos. I haven’t seen too many score arguments on blog posts. Are blog people just more relaxed and cool?

Then there comes the time when the scores that are put out into the wild by a certain reviewer are automatically compared to other scores the reviewer has made. I know that Glass Reflection topped putting scores on his youtube videos because of a situation like that. Even when he uses a special stamp for what level he thinks a show is at, people were more upset about how his Attack on Titan review had a higher score then Cowboy Bebop and an endless amount of other complaints similar to that. Seriously, people were arguing about pointless scores that were put on the internet. Arkada never put any value on the scores he gave shows, especially since he had his stamp ranking system. I wonder why he did those in the first place. And no, Arkada isn’t the only person I’ve seen this happen to, he’s just the biggest example.

Compared to my last point, this one is a bit bigger and seems more relevant. When it comes to putting a score in a review/post/thing, some people just skip reading or watching a review all together and just want to see the score that the said person gave the show? Why? I’m not completely sure because I’ve never done it. Still, that’s rather annoying. A person works so hard on their review to give all their points of view about a certain piece of media just to have other people skip it just to read the end is depressing. There are no positives here, don’t read/watch the thing if you don’t have the time.

I know that this is the biggest subjective opinion in the world, but I think that scores are something that people eventually grow out of. In the beginning, it felt like giving a score an anime or other things really made me feel more important, because I was putting scores on the internet. Scores on the internet are still big things. People still use scores for a reference, like Rotten Tomatoes for movies. Internet scores are never going to completely disappear, because they attract audiences which results in money for that particular website/person/thing. I think (and/or hope) that people are moving away from these. What people say and how they like an anime series or movie is what matters the most and I am seeing more anime youtubers either avoid writing a review or don’t score a show when they write one because they understand this concept. In writing this, I know that this post is just one thing on the internet that has a subjective opinion on it and I know it’s not going to change anything, but I wanted to write it anyway because this has been something that has been bothering me for a while. Thank you for reading.