Cleaning Out My Dropped Anime List

 As of the day I'm writing this (January 21, 2025), this is what the "Dropped" section of my anime list on AniList looks like.

Count them; that's 49 anime. (Well, 48 anime and 1 aeni, anyway.)

It may seem like a lot to people like my parents, but if you take into account how many anime I've watched to completion, it's really not that much at all. Still, it's enough to make one want to clean the list out. Granted, there's no guarantee that I'm going to actually get around to watching enough anime to get this list cleaned out, but I can at least envision how much I'd be willing to watch to clean the Dropped list out. Thus, I put all 49 of these series into a tier list to figure it out. Here's what that tier list ended up looking like.

Yeah, as you can see, there aren't that many anime I'm completely willing to finish. I mean, when you drop an anime, it means that you aren't willing to watch any more of it; why would you then say that you're going to finish it? I do have my reasons for saying I'd be willing to finish the four anime I put in that slot, though.

I said in a previous post that I wanted to render the even older post I made about Yuri Kuma Arashi obsolete, whether it's rewriting that post or just giving it a full-blown review. However, I can't do that if I don't watch it in its entirety. I still think that the ending I found out it had is bad, but perhaps everything that leads up to that ending isn't as bad as I perceived it to be when I was 14. Plus, it's been 10 years now since the anime started airing; when has a 10th anniversary reflection hurt anyone?

Another anime that I put in the "Willing To Finish" tier is probably the one that would take the least amount of time to finish, Pingu in the City. Back when this little CGI spin-off first aired, people raised its overall score on MyAnimeList to probably a higher score than it deserved for meme reasons, and after watching only two episodes of it, I wrote an entire blog post expressing confusion over whether or not the people who rated it so high were serious or not and fear that I would be called an idiot for not agreeing with them; if it wasn't already obvious that I'm autistic, that post should make it loud and clear. A couple of years later, MAL updated their scoring system to counteract troll voting (which may or may not have been a result of so many people giving Ishuzoku Reviewers a 10/10 that it was the highest-rated anime on MAL for a while just because two YouTubers told them to do so); as a result, while a majority of the user scores for Pingu in the City are 10s, its overall score on MAL is now 6.51, which is significantly lower than the 8.83 score that it had at the time of me writing that post. Is that the score it truly deserves? I can't say for sure, as I've come to acknowledge that due to all of my confusion, I didn't really give Pingu in the City a fair chance. Now that the Pingu memes seem to have died down, though, I'd be willing to give this series more of a fair chance.

I've talked about Yuri Kuma Arashi and Pingu in the City on this blog before, but I've never talked about True Beauty or The Dreaming Boy is a Realist. Let's start with True Beauty. I may prefer webtoons and manhwa as my source of South Korean entertainment, but True Beauty isn't the only piece of Korean animation I've seen; I watched Break Ups around when I first got my VRV subscription (R.I.P. VRV) and There She Is several years before that. Even without that in mind, I had full intentions of watching True Beauty because of how I'd read the webtoon it was based on in its entirety; sure, it wasn't exactly the most positive experience due to how much it dragged in the middle (although I liked the beginning and the end), but I read it! When I watched it, though, I felt a little disappointed, and I still can't quite figure out why. Was it the animation? Was it Jugyeong's voice? Was it the fact that the plot was quite different from how it was in the original webtoon? Whatever it was, it made me not really feel like watching more. Since the first season has since wrapped up and a second is on the way, though.... eh, I'm willing to see if the slightly different story actually goes somewhere meaningful. It sure didn't feel like the original webtoon was going anywhere in the middle of it, so it'd be a good change!

As for The Dreaming Boy is a Realist, it wasn't exactly an anime I was all that interested in watching to begin with. I wasn't really watching any seasonal anime on HIDIVE at the time, and I wanted to make sure I was making adequate use of my subscription; thus, I decided to start watching the one that was streaming on HIDIVE that I had been hearing about the most leading up to the start of the season. One half hour of boredom and confusion about character motives later, I decided that it wasn't worth it and dropped it. (I ended up catching up on Dark Gathering later on, so at least I was still able to use my HIDIVE subscription for that season in the end!) I did later keep hearing that this anime was better than I had perceived it to be, though, so maybe I was too quick to judge it. It's not like I hated that first episode, anyway. The animation was pretty nice. Or maybe not; I might just get a headache. Either way, I'm not opposed to giving it a second try!

I'm not going to go through the rest of the dropped anime because it would take too long to do so; I need to eat lunch and go to work within the next hour, and I'm sure whoever's reading this doesn't want to see me rambling on about anime I didn't even finish for too much longer, anyway. I will say a few things, though.

1. I know that there are several anime on the tier list that I put in a lower tier than other anime that I rated lower on AniList and vice versa. It's a tier list on how likely I'd be to pick them back up (ignoring the ones that haven't been fully subbed), not a tier list on how I felt about them before dropping them.

2. I only saw one episode of Yuuwaku Office Lover 2 on an app that was about to shut down, so I couldn't get access to the rest of the series; furthermore, as far as I know, none of the episodes have been uploaded onto the Internet, subbed or not. I probably would have given it a second chance if I did have access to the rest of the episodes, but I doubt that my opinion on it would have changed much.

3. I technically haven't watched the original Naruto, so I wouldn't pick Naruto Shippuden back up at all unless I watched the original Naruto in its entirety. I don't see that happening any time soon, though.

4. Yes, my top 5 anime I'll never finish are, in fact, all in the "Absolutely Not" tier. Points for consistency on my part for more than six years!

So yeah. If I picked all four anime I just mentioned back up, that will get the number of my dropped anime down to 45, which isn't a significant decrease. If I was held at gunpoint and the anime in the "Not Subbed" tier never got fully subbed, though, it would go down to 22, which would really clean up the list for other anime that I don't care to finish! I hope that no one holds me at gunpoint, though....

....Speaking of guns, after I made the tier list and while I was in the middle of writing all of this, it came to my attention that Gundou Musashi is, in fact, fully subbed. Well, maybe I'll give it a try; hopefully, the subbers for that one actually tried this time!