Best Boys of Anime

Anime Best Boys:

In Hollywood, a “Best Boy” is the assistant to the department heads for gaffing (electronics) and the key grip (in charge of lighting and rigging). But in Anime, Best Boy means exactly what you’d expect: They are the BEST boy.

While some would argue that “best” is a subjective term, THEY haven’t been studying the art form since they saw Goku running the Snake Way to Master Kai when they were three years old. So today, I’m proposing a formula for defining THE Best Boy in every anime, starting with universal givens, and then logically working through the relationship BETWEEN those givens.

Let’s begin with the value R, which here shall stand for Radness. If a boy is not rad, how, in good conscience, may we call him “best?” There are different kinds of Radness, obviously: fighting prowess, hilarity, or emotional fortitude, but any Best Boy MUST have a high R value, which we’ll rate on a scale of 0-10 (decimals welcome), 10 being max Radness, like fighting a volcano or heroically sacrificing yourself for your friends, even at the cost of your own dreams.

Another key criteria that most fans agree on is that a Best Boy is someone you’re emotionally invested in, and feel a need to keep safe. This is part of the reason that protagonists are never best boys (besides the fact that it’s like choosing “vanilla, but not too sweet” as your favorite flavor of ice cream); their relative safety or “plot armor” makes them more likely to survive and less likely to be in serious danger. So there’s an inverse relationship between survivability, s, and how close a boy is to being Best. We’ll express that as 5/s, where s is the likelihood that character survives on a scale of 1-5 (1 means a serious chance of death before the series ends, a 5 means they’re definitely going to live.)

Let’s took at two final, quick criteria: Best Boys should be unique, u, a quality you either have or don’t. If they look, feel, and sound like their own character, they’ll have a value of 1 for u. Otherwise, it’s a zero. In the same way, Best Boys have personal stakes. To keep it simple, we won’t quantify the amount of change as a variable. Let’s stick to whether they have changed and grown or they haven’t at all. Let’s call growth g, and give it the same value as u: 1 if they’ve experienced growth, 0 if they have not. A Boy will need BOTH of these qualities to achieve Bestness.

Putting all of these together, with the knowledge that we are looking for the NUMBER ONE boy, I’ve devised the following formula:

Bb= [(5/s)R + 50ug]/100

The, Bb or Best Boy Quotient, reflects the best possible value of boy: the closer the score is to 1, the better claim they have to being best. Feel free to check my work against such indisputable Anime Best Boys as Maes Hughes from Full Metal Alchemist (Perfect Score), Kirishima from My Hero Academia (.875), and Inosuke from Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba (sitting pretty at about .74).

Don’t like my math? Come at me in the comments.