The Anime Order Research
The anime people ask about most
Some franchises are so tangled that people have to ask a stranger where to start. We counted how often each one comes up in public threads asking exactly that — 37 discussions across r/anime, r/AnimeReccomendations and r/Animesuggest — and ranked them. The result is a reasonable map of which franchises are genuinely confusing, as opposed to merely long.
Counts only. We store the thread's title and a link, and none of its text — the numbers below come from matching franchise names against public discussion, and every row links back to the threads it counted.
Ranked by how often people ask
Where we have not written a recommended order yet
11 franchises on this list still show release order rather than a recommended one. They are the ones we are working through next, heaviest demand first.
How this was counted
We search public threads in a handful of anime subreddits for the phrasings people use when they are lost — "what order should I watch", "where should I start", "chronological order" — and match the franchise names in each one against our catalogue of every series we track. Matching is done on titles and the abbreviations people actually type, so FMAB counts towards Fullmetal Alchemist and AoT towards Attack on Titan.
None of this is a popularity ranking of the shows themselves. A franchise can be beloved and perfectly easy to start, and it will not appear here at all.
Using these numbers
The counts on this page are released under CC BY 4.0: take them, cite them, build on them, as long as you credit The Anime Order. That covers our measurements only — the threads themselves belong to the people who wrote them, which is why we store a link and a score and never a copy of the text.
Last refreshed September 26, 2026