Top 10 MyAnimeList — Most Popular Anime — May 2026

A high member count on MyAnimeList doesn't mean a show is universally loved — it means a lot of people have added it to a list in any status: watching, completed, plan to watch, or even dropped. That's why long-running, widely-recommended series with mixed reception (Sword Art Online is the clearest example on this list) can still post huge numbers: once something becomes a common "you should watch this" recommendation, it accumulates members regardless of whether viewers end up liking it. The mean score, listed separately for each entry, is the number that actually reflects how much people who finished the show enjoyed it.

Notice how much of this list is a decade or more old: Death Note (2006), Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009), Hunter x Hunter (2011), Sword Art Online (2012), Attack on Titan (2013), Tokyo Ghoul (2014), One-Punch Man (2015), and My Hero Academia (2016) all predate Demon Slayer (2019), the newest entry here by several years. That's not really a taste judgment — it's how a cumulative metric works. A show has been able to accumulate member additions for longer the older it is, so a merely good older series can still out-rank a genuinely excellent newer one simply because it's had more years to be discovered. A popularity chart like this one rewards longevity as much as quality.