As for MAL itself, I think narrowing everything down to just five favorites is too forceful and hopelessly inaccurate. I can easily name ten series that deserve to be on the list almost as much as all the others. Sometimes I even add, remove and re-add series for no particular reason other than my changing perspectives or simply due to spur of the moment. Sometimes Baccano! is in, sometimes it’s out. The same thing goes for Code Geass, Gunbuster and others. The only series that’s guaranteed to be stuck there is Legend of Galactic Heroes. I try not to think about it too much.

Incidentally, while I consider myself a fan of Code Geass, both seasons included….what I find, even to this day, especially ironic and hilarious is that a lot of the bashing and complaints that are supposedly the exclusive property of the second, going by common knowledge or perhaps more accurately common convenience, were first coined to describe the original series. Taking a little walk down memory lane reveals this quite easily. Doesn’t prevent me from putting the series on my favorites from time to time though.

I still haven’t had the pleasure of finding a conclusion for myself though, probably because I can’t properly define falling in love either. There are many shows that I know I love, but which are the ones that I fell heads over heels for? I also tend to try hard to be “objective” which sometimes leads to me rating high for series I actually didn’t enjoy that much but could still appreciate the merits of (5cm/s comes to mind), and for favorites, it makes it hard to choose between several series that are technically equal and which I all love equally (as demonstrated in this post, lol).

Man, I exhaust myself with my pointless, long-windedness.

In the end, I came to the conclusion of wanting to include shows I fell in love with in my faves, perspectives which might change through time, as you either learn to love the series more, or otherwise.

The problem with lists is that they imply that there’s a systematic way to determine what should be on the list when obviously, there isn’t. There are too many factors and the weight each one carries can vary from series to series, making it impossible to determine a single, simple criteria by which to judge. What do I want most out of the list? I’m really not sure.

Sure, it’d be great for it to accurately represent me as a fan, but I would say that that’s impossible just because people assign different stereotypes and ideas based on certain shows. I can’t tell how I’ll be judged by others for having whatever show, so there’s no point in worrying about that. It’s mostly for myself — I want to know which shows I hold in higher regard than all others. And I want to know why those shows are there in the order that they’re there in. Figuring yourself out is hard.

While I agree with your assessment that it would make for the best list, I do feel you underestimate the power of having similar lists. You’d be surprised to find out how different people are in how they like a particular show (pet characters, interpretations of meaning, things that work/don’t in the show and what could be improved — just look at Macross Frontier’s shipper wars). In fact, I very much like discourse within the context of a shared favorite. It’s part of the well of possibility that is a big part of the ‘We Remember Love’ ideology.

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The bigger concern is what do you really value? It would seem that you want a perfect representation of yourself as a fan, and perhaps a list like this is too limited a tool for the purpose.

In my case I acknowledge my own list to be quite imperfect, because it under-represents the Macross franchise.