Last year, born from the question: “How many main characters have pink hair this season?" we launched the first Crunchyroll Census! This annual feature aims to quantify a huge amount of details about the anime series, protagonists, and the creators and studios behind last year's simulcasts. We sought to cover everything from series genres and settings all the way down to granular details like protagonist ages and eye colors. I'm very excited to share the 2021 edition of our census below!

A note on methodology: the information represented in this infographic reflects every series, film, OVA, and special that was simulcast on Crunchyroll in 2021 — this excludes all catalog additions, and, for my own sanity, any series that aired episodes shorter than the typical ~20 minute length. A great deal of this data is qualitative or otherwise dependent on my interpretation as a viewer — there are plenty of characters whose hair could either be considered dark blue or black, and a lot of this was subject to what I as viewer thought was going on. When available, I did double-check with readily available canon information — official Japanese websites, mostly — but I am but a simple anime fan, and this data reflects my very human imperfection. Following the infographic, I will provide some further contextual information regarding specific categories. Without further ado, here’s the stats!

Notes on categories:

Genre: Every series on Crunchyroll has tags that determine which genre it shows up in. These tags provided the base data for this category.

Time periods: Obviously, there are plenty of series that exist in completely fictional timelines, but we tried to approximate those to a historical analog. For example: if an isekai series took place in a fantasy world but the technology was generally Medieval Europe adjacent, it counted as “Medieval Europe-ish.” This applies to most of the other eras as well, so please take these figures with a grain of salt.

Age: The "age" here refers to a character's biological age. If a character was a 45-year-old businessman who was reborn as a child, his age would be counted as the biological age of his current body, making him a child. 

Job/role word cloud: This was a subjective determination on my part based on plot relevance. Each protagonist only received one tag, so Hinata would be considered an athlete and not a high school student, but in future infographics, I will attempt to involve multiple roles per character.

Episode count: Determined by the number of episodes aired within 2021. Excludes ongoing series’ episodes that aired prior to 2021. 

And that's it! Thanks so much for reading, and here's to a better year.

Cayla Coats is the Editor-in-Chief of Crunchyroll News. She tweets at @ceicocat.