In general I have only read manga that have been rated 7.50 or higher on mangaupdates, and in doing so I have of course found many good manga to read.

However, I have also found many manga that do not (imo) deserve the high score that they have, and a few manga skirting around 7.50 that I feel have been unjustly rated.

Because of this, I have a nagging feeling that there may be a few jewels lying in lower ratings that I have ignored. Is this suspicion justified, or are badly rated manga (to throw out a number, let's just say below 6.0) always bad?

Last edited by may2fritz at 6:27 am, May 30 2014

Indeed, there are probably some.

This may be the case of obscure series with very few votes, or of series with some highly controversial aspect that may mask a unique reading experience in other aspects.

For example, the Umineko series has pretty low ratings here. Though there are some prominent points which readers can easily dislike, this series is also a unique reading experience to those who care to challenge its mystery.

Well, they are still the exceptions though. Probably.

Good is a subjective word ...
A manga may have a score lower than "6.0", and you may find is "good" but others would still think it has the appropriate rating.


Take for example this thread. Everyone has there own view of when a manga is no longer considered good. (For me it's at a 4).
(Is that link working? ... if not here you can manually copy and paste https://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?page=1&tid =5225)
Edit - test ... https://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=5225&hl =rate


Something that I gave a 9.1 has an average rating of 6.4. but that's due to everyone's personal taste.


Are manga rated below 6.0 always bad? Depends on who you ask, heh.
To me, no, they aren't always bad.

Last edited by kitty1826x at 11:14 am, May 29 2014

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they are generally not good, but there are certain gems here and there, but only because your specific taste is jarring to other people. for example, i give Iwa and Izaemon 8 while the average rating is 5.86. why? because this manga is ero guro and go against lots of others sensibilities, but if its your particular niche, you will like it.

I'm surprised that people actually use the ratings to such degree. I think that you should be more flexible when finding a read. I have tried to see ratings and read comments but most of the time it only discourage me to actually read the manga(s), so that it takes me so long to finally read it.

Take ratings as reference, but not as exact parameter.

probably.. to say that all manga below a certain score are bad is being fairly exclusive.

and like the person above me said, ratings should be used as a reference instead making the final call in whether you should read it or not. i've read plenty of manga with bad ratings/reviews and still liked them, and vice versa.

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Yes, I do.
Taste is subjective, but I've noticed that "shocking" or "uncommon" manga without the "correct sentiment" and art, especially when it comes to sexual material, tend to have low ratings.
I think there are people who choose to drop said titles and give them low scores because they feel offended in some way.

A few examples that come to mind:
Papaya Army - doesn't stick to only straight/gay sex, and some of the relationships are pretty dysfunctional. Has an average rating of 6.1 with 17% (six people) voting 1.
I personally think it's a great manga, but not according to ratings.

Some examples:

Anything by Kago Shintaro seems to have universally low ratings. Sure, his humor is rather...scatological, but a lot of it is light, odd and sometimes rather fun to read. I've read quite a lot of his stories, and even though scat is a big turn off for me, I still managed to enjoy and have a laugh along with his characters. Again, there's lots of sex and fetishes. One story is solely about a guy experimenting with how it feels for different things to suck him off.
Some of his scat free stories are really bizarre, which I like.
The oneshot where a scene is literally dissected from random angles and panels until it is no longer recognizable (or the same at all), and yet it is, for example.
Heh, that was a ramble.

Children Can't Choose Their Parents - bestiality with a chicken. I thought the story was handled well. Others - not so much. Average rating of 5.4

Dirty Work - obsessive love and nonchalance regarding awful deeds. I think it was really good, but the average is 6.7 (not that low, but lower than you 7.5)

I Know You're in South Country - I thought it was hilarious, but there were few redeeming qualities to the character, so I think that's why people didn't especially like it, along with the fuglies and sex. Average score is 6.4,

Vampire (KUSUNOKI Kei) - nothing sexual that I can remember, and I thought it was pretty light and fun, but average score is 5.8.

Poison Cherry Drive has lots of rough sex and is pretty pointless, but quite fun.
I think the bad translation had something to do with ratings. Average score of 6.
But it's not that good, either. Haha.

Install - rape rape rape. I know a bunch of people who cherish this oneshot, and I see their point (even though I don't share their sentiment). Average rating of 6.2.

Well, that became longer than I expected. I guess I have a passion for defending "bad" manga? XD


@Kitty
Did you mean this thread?
Your links aren't typed correctly, for some reason.

And I think there's enough here to justify a separate discussion.

Last edited by NightSwan at 11:55 am, May 29 2014

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Thank you everyone for your input. It seems that there have been two types of responses to the question, "Are manga below a certain score worth trying?":

Answer #1 Yes, because the rating system is subjective; don't get stuck on numbers that are only vague reference points
Answer #2 Generally no, but there are a few gems that simply fit a "particular niche" or "personal taste" or are "obscure" or "highly controversial"


Combining these two views, I will definitely give series with lower scores a shot, but I'll have to use some sort of search strategy to save myself time (because like answer #2 I believe that many series are rated poorly for a reason. Additionally, I don't read manga with explicit material as a personal choice. And, like anyone else, I have particular quirks that I like in manga, esp. when it comes to humor) My ideas for search strategies:

#1 Find other users with similar tastes and look at manga that are rated low on their lists
#2 Search certain tags/categories that I tend to like and look through ratings between 5 and 7.50

Any other suggestions?



Last edited by may2fritz at 12:06 pm, May 29 2014

The thread I was trying to link is titled How do you rate manga?. I'm not sure why the link isn't working. Even the one you linked is giving me a DNS error. (Not sure if you linked the same one either, or if others are not able to see the link either).

Okay. (To the separate discussion comment).


Last edited by kitty1826x at 11:18 am, May 29 2014

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Ah, that's too bad. Please let me know if you get it working. And I would appreciate both links as they both contribute to the discussion.

Yeah, I don't know what's up with that.
https://www.mangaupdates.com/showtopic.php?tid=5225
Something seems to be wrong with linking.

________________
Hrodulf and Bjornolfr, you will not be forgotten.

And if the world were black and white,
you would be my rainbow in shades of grey.

Click 'n Play!

If I had a fantasy self, it'd be a tentacle monster.

Yay, the linked worked; thanks. I wonder what the problem was...

Anyway, I feel like that thread reinforced Answer #2 (from my post above).

Most people in the thread said that they rated manga with 7.0 being average/okay/a 'C'/passable/"it had its moments"/decent and that anything lower was basically downhill from there.



Last edited by may2fritz at 12:34 pm, May 29 2014

Just to add to Nightswan's post a bit - in addition to certain kinds of content automatically reducing a manga's score, it's also true that older manga tend to receive lower ratings than more recently published series. This is largely due to people preferring modern manga art over the older styles, as well as certain themes not resonating as well with modern readers.

Moreover, I also believe that older scanlations tend to receive lower ratings than more recent ones - that is, if you took a random pair of 1 volume series published in 2006, one of them scanlated in 2006, the other scanlated in 2013, the one scanlated in 2013 would generally have a higher rating. (This belief is based on my own personal browsing of this site, rather than any statistical analysis...) I'm not really sure why this would be the case, it's just something I've encountered while sorting through my lists. (It may also play a role in a couple of Nightswan's examples, such as Dirty Work.)

Anyway, I don't pay any attention to the MU ratings when deciding whether or not to read a series. I seek out series that are: recommended by people whose judgment I trust, scanlated by a group that tends to work on quality series, written by a mangaka whose work I like, or anything short with a summary/description that seems interesting (this last one applies mostly to licensed series, which are less likely to be discussed among scanlation sites).

Also, just a side note - using the Bayesian average, if a series doesn't receive enough ratings, it can't actually reach 7.5. Some series that have been licensed but never scanned or scanlated don't have enough ratings on mu to reach your previous threshold (a couple of examples). So you might want to consider searching through licensed, never scanlated series.

For me, I usually don't pay attention to ratings before reading manga, though I tend to check them out after I read them to see if they fall in line with my own opinions.

Generally? They're fairly accurate. On average, I tend to be harsher than the ratings, but if I scale accordingly, they usually coincide.

I have found, however, that ratings are not all that accurate for less well-known manga such as oneshots and the like. Because not many people read and rate these manga, the ratings can easily be skewed by someone either really liking it or really hating it. So I generally take these ratings with a grain of salt.

Also, ratings tend to reflect the demographic rating it. So for instance The World God Only Knows which I find a dull, typical harem manga (and, yes, I have read to the end) has a high rating of 8.8 because the people who rate it enjoy harem manga--manga which I am most certainly not the target for. And while I rated it significantly lower, I don't have a problem with this rating because it reflects exactly what it is supposed to: the opinions of the demographic it targets.

For genres I do enjoy (fantasy, adventure, etc.), I also do tend to be more lenient in ratings in comparison to genres I don't (harem, ecchi, etc.), so, yeah, I do think, on average, genres and demographics have a lot to do with ratings as well.

Of course, as others have mentioned, age makes a difference too, since the older a manga is, the more people will rate it, so I think, generally, older manga have ratings more accurate (and consequently lower) than newer manga, because they have more all-around ratings. (Statistically, this would be a case of "the bigger the sample size, the more normal the distribution" kind of deal.)

Well, in the end, I guess this all boils down to: be more lenient about ratings towards manga that fall in your preferred genre/demographic, and less lenient towards manga that don't.

When I find some manga with a low score (let's say under 7.0, since many manga are overrated), before deciding if I should read it or not, I try to find some comments that explain the reasons of the low rating, or I skim through the categories to see if there's something not of my taste. Then again, as it was already said, you should look at the average more than the Bayesian average, because manga with few votes won't have a high rating.
Even so, i still found a manhwa that i liked even though it had an average of 6.8 (Remnant), it's not a set rule. And I'm quite picky with ratings, only three of the manga I've read so far received from me a higher score than the average one.

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