Anime Character Popularity Statistics 2026: 3,964 Characters by AniList Favourites

Which anime characters do AniList users favourite most, and how unevenly are those favourites shared out? These anime character popularity statistics answer both questions from AniCodex's own dataset: the AniList favourite counts of 3,964 characters across the 97 series we track, refreshed on 19 October 2026 and pulled on 21 October 2026. Together those characters hold 3,643,832 favourites. This page is a dated snapshot with analysis: the top 20, the series and studios behind the top 100, how often supporting characters out-poll main ones, how concentrated the favourites are and what changed since our 17 September 2026 snapshot. For the current order, see the live ranking of the 100 most popular anime characters, refreshed every Monday.

Key findings

• Satoru Gojo of Jujutsu Kaisen is the most favourited of the 3,964 anime characters AniCodex tracks, with 39,426 AniList favourites on 19 October 2026, 560 more than second-placed Levi of Attack on Titan (38,866).
• Jujutsu Kaisen has 8 characters in AniCodex's top 100 by AniList favourites, more than any other series, ahead of Demon Slayer (7), Attack on Titan (6), One Piece (5) and Hunter x Hunter (5).
• Characters labelled SUPPORTING on AniList take 21 of the top 100 places by AniList favourites among the 3,964 characters AniCodex tracks, and one of them, Levi of Attack on Titan, ranks second overall.
• In 15 of the 97 anime series AniCodex tracks, the best-loved supporting character has more AniList favourites than every main character, and the largest such gap in raw favourites is in Attack on Titan, where Levi (38,866) leads Eren Yeager (32,147) by 6,719.
• The 40 most favourited characters, the top 1% of the 3,964 characters AniCodex tracks, hold 25.3% of all 3,643,832 AniList favourites in the dataset, while the median character has 31.
• Only 90 of the 3,964 anime characters AniCodex tracks have 10,000 or more AniList favourites, and 595 have at least 1,000.
• The newest series with a character in AniCodex's top 100 by AniList favourites is Solo Leveling (2024), whose lead Sung Jinwoo ranks 50th with 15,093, while two characters from 2023 series, Maomao (13th) and Frieren (14th), reach the top 20.
• Between AniCodex's 17 September 2026 snapshot and the 19 October 2026 refresh, 88 of the 98 characters in both top-100 lists had fewer recorded AniList favourites, and Satoru Gojo overtook Levi for first place even though his own count fell by 2,042, because Levi's fell by 3,917.

The top 20 anime characters by AniList favourites (19 October 2026)

Ranked by AniList favourites among the 3,964 characters AniCodex tracks. The role column is AniList's own label for the character in that series.

Rank	Character	Series	AniList favourites	AniList role
1	Satoru Gojo	Jujutsu Kaisen	39,426	Main
2	Levi	Attack on Titan	38,866	Supporting
3	Monkey D. Luffy	One Piece	35,999	Main
4	Killua Zoldyck	Hunter x Hunter	35,117	Main
5	Eren Yeager	Attack on Titan	32,147	Main
6	Roronoa Zoro	One Piece	28,840	Main
7	Lelouch Lamperouge	Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion	28,291	Main
8	Emilia	Re:Zero	27,720	Main
9	L Lawliet	Death Note	26,972	Main
10	Ken Kaneki	Tokyo Ghoul	26,292	Main
11	Mikasa Ackerman	Attack on Titan	25,929	Main
12	Arataka Reigen	Mob Psycho 100	24,478	Main
13	Maomao	The Apothecary Diaries	22,754	Main
14	Frieren	Frieren: Beyond Journey's End	22,547	Main
15	Kurisu Makise	Steins;Gate	22,380	Main
16	Thorfinn	Vinland Saga	22,293	Main
17	Makima	Chainsaw Man	22,210	Main
18	Itachi Uchiha	Naruto	22,090	Supporting
19	Kakashi Hatake	Naruto	21,422	Main
20	Yuji Itadori	Jujutsu Kaisen	21,297	Main

The top 20 spans 15 series. Attack on Titan is the only one with three entries (Levi, Eren Yeager and Mikasa Ackerman), and the drop from first to twentieth is steep: Yuji Itadori, in 20th place, has 21,297 favourites, a little over half of Gojo's total. The middle of the top 20 is tight, though. Places 13 to 18, from Maomao (22,754) to Itachi Uchiha (22,090), are separated by 664 favourites, close enough that small changes can reorder them. Popularity is not the same as power, either: our strongest anime characters ranking orders characters by in-story strength instead.

Which series dominate the top 100

Characters from 44 of the 97 series AniCodex tracks reach the top 100, but the places are far from evenly spread. The five best-represented series hold 31 of the 100 places, and 21 series place exactly one character.

Jujutsu Kaisen leads with 8: Satoru Gojo (1st), Yuji Itadori (20th), Megumi Fushiguro (33rd), and Kento Nanami, Nobara Kugisaki, Maki Zenin, Sukuna and Toge Inumaki between 67th and 92nd. Demon Slayer is second with 7, and its strength is depth rather than peak: none of its characters is in the top 30, and its highest, Tanjiro Kamado, is 31st with 18,209. Attack on Titan places 6, and its three in the top 20 are the most of any series. One Piece (Luffy 3rd, Zoro 6th) and Hunter x Hunter (Killua 4th) have 5 each, followed on 4 by Haikyu!!, Chainsaw Man, Naruto and Kaguya-sama: Love is War.

Series totals tell a different story and need a warning. One Piece has the largest combined total of any series AniCodex tracks, 190,595 favourites, but that is spread across 153 tracked characters, while Attack on Titan's 180,960 comes from 80 and Jujutsu Kaisen's 180,056 from 44. A series total grows with every character AniCodex adds, so it measures our coverage as much as fan interest, and we do not rank series by it. For who is who in the leading series, see the Jujutsu Kaisen characters guide.

The supporting-character effect

AniList labels each character in a series MAIN, SUPPORTING or BACKGROUND, and AniCodex does not track BACKGROUND characters, so every character here is one of the other two. Main characters still dominate the top of the list: they take 79 of the top 100 places and 9 of the top 10. Levi, in second place, is the only supporting character in the top 10, and Itachi Uchiha, 18th, is the only other one in the top 20.

The sharper test is series by series. In 15 of the 97 series AniCodex tracks, the most favourited supporting character beats every main character in the same series. The strongest examples:

• Attack on Titan: Levi (38,866) against Eren Yeager (32,147), a ratio of 1.21 and the largest gap in absolute terms, 6,719 favourites.
• Fate/stay night: Sakura Matou (17,759) against Rin Tohsaka (12,800), a ratio of 1.39.
• Rent-a-Girlfriend: Mami Nanami (9,722) against Chizuru Ichinose (6,721), a ratio of 1.45, the highest of the 14 cases where the leading main character has at least 1,000 favourites.
• Naruto: Itachi Uchiha (22,090) against Kakashi Hatake (21,422), a ratio of 1.03, with the title character, Naruto Uzumaki, on 18,920.
• My Hero Academia: Shoto Todoroki (17,098) against Katsuki Bakugo (16,549), a ratio of 1.03, with Izuku Midoriya on 14,215.

The other ten are Black Clover (Yami Sukehiro over Asta), Assassination Classroom (Karma Akabane over Koro-sensei), Fire Force, Overlord, Kuroko's Basketball, Arifureta, Kaiju No. 8, Sakamoto Days, Wistoria: Wand and Sword and Code Geass: Rozé of the Recapture. That last case has the highest ratio, 9.53, but on small numbers: Cornelia li Britannia's 562 favourites against 59 for the lead, Rozé. At the other extreme, one main character can tower over the rest: in Bleach, Ichigo Kurosaki's 14,660 favourites are more than eight times those of the series' only other main character in AniCodex's data, Uryu Ishida (1,814).

How concentrated the favourites are

Favourites pile up at the very top. The 10 most favourited characters, 0.25% of the 3,964 AniCodex tracks, hold 8.8% of all 3,643,832 favourites. The top 40, which is the top 1%, hold 25.3%, and the top 100 hold 46.4% (1,689,860), leaving 53.6% for the other 3,864 characters.

The middle of the list is far quieter. The median character has 31 favourites, against a mean of about 919, and the gap between those two numbers shows how strongly the total is skewed towards the top. Gojo alone has 39,426, more than 1,270 times the median and 1.08% of every favourite in the dataset. Only 90 characters reach 10,000 favourites and 595 reach 1,000; the remaining 3,369 have fewer than 1,000 each.

Studios and genres behind the top 100

By studio, MAPPA leads with 20 of the top 100 characters, followed by Wit Studio (11), Madhouse (9), Studio Pierrot and Bones (8 each) and ufotable (7). These counts overlap: a co-produced series credits every named studio, so the 100 characters carry 116 studio credits between them. Attack on Titan and Vinland Saga are credited to both Wit Studio and MAPPA in AniCodex's data, which means 8 of MAPPA's 20 are shared with Wit Studio; the other 12 come from Jujutsu Kaisen and Chainsaw Man. All 7 of ufotable's come from one series, Demon Slayer.

By genre, the top 100 leans on action: 76 come from series tagged Action, 63 Drama, 46 Fantasy, 45 Adventure, 43 Supernatural and 41 Comedy, against 4 Sports and 2 Mecha. Series carry several genre tags, so these figures overlap too.

Debut decades and the newest series to break in

Grouped by the start year of the series entry AniCodex tracks, 55 of the top 100 come from 2010s series, 25 from the 2020s, 15 from the 2000s and 5 from the 1990s. All five 1990s entries are One Piece characters, since that series dates from 1999. The year belongs to the series entry, not the character: Goku is counted under Dragon Ball Super (2015), and Killua under the 2011 Hunter x Hunter series.

Twelve top-100 characters come from series that began between 2022 and 2024, and no series from 2025 or 2026 has a character in the top 100.

• 2024: Sung Jinwoo of Solo Leveling, 50th with 15,093, from the newest series in the top 100.
• 2023: Maomao (The Apothecary Diaries), 13th with 22,754; Frieren (Frieren: Beyond Journey's End), 14th with 22,547; and Kana Arima (Oshi no Ko), 79th with 11,807.
• 2022: four Chainsaw Man characters, Makima (17th), Denji (22nd), Power (27th) and Aki Hayakawa (56th); Marin Kitagawa of My Dress-Up Darling (34th); and three from Spy x Family, Yor Forger (61st), Anya Forger (70th) and Loid Forger (90th).

Five of the top 20 come from 2020s series: Gojo, Maomao, Frieren, Makima and Yuji Itadori.

What moved since 17 September 2026

The number one changed hands. In our 17 September 2026 snapshot Levi led with 42,783 favourites to Gojo's 41,468, a margin of 1,315. At the 19 October refresh both had fewer: Gojo 39,426 (down 2,042) and Levi 38,866 (down 3,917). Gojo is first because Levi's count fell further, not because Gojo's rose.

That pattern runs through the list. Of the 98 characters in both top-100 lists, 88 have fewer favourites than in September and 10 have more. Favourite counts can fall as well as rise, and this study records the change without assigning a cause. The combined total of the top 100 fell from 1,770,947 to 1,689,860, and the count needed for 100th place fell from 9,867 to 9,426.

• Biggest climbers: Subaru Natsuki of Re:Zero rose 15 places (59th to 44th, up 538 favourites); Sanji (60th to 48th) and Nico Robin (63rd to 51st) rose 12 each.
• Biggest gains in favourites: Maomao (up 595, 19th to 13th), Subaru Natsuki (up 538) and Frieren (up 404, 20th to 14th).
• A climb without a gain: Nami rose 8 places (95th to 87th) while her count slipped by 1, from 10,195 to 10,194, because eight characters who were above her in September are now below her.
• Biggest fallers: Armin Arlert dropped 12 places (50th to 62nd, down 1,676) and Izuku Midoriya 10 (53rd to 63rd, down 1,635). The largest losses in favourites were Levi's 3,917, Mikasa Ackerman's 2,515 and Shoto Todoroki's 2,498; Todoroki's is also the largest percentage fall of the 98, at 12.75%.
• Top 10: Ken Kaneki moved up to 10th and Mikasa Ackerman dropped to 11th.
• In and out: Goku (Dragon Ball Super, 94th, 9,725) and Mami Nanami (95th, 9,722) entered the top 100; Toru Oikawa of Haikyu!! (91st in September with 10,530) and Shota Aizawa of My Hero Academia (99th with 9,889) left it.

Two cautions apply. AniCodex added 555 characters between the snapshots (3,409 tracked in September, 3,964 now), so a new entry can be a newly tracked character rather than a rising one. And the September counts were captured from AniList when each character was imported, before the weekly refresh began, so the comparison is between those two readings, and some September figures may predate 17 September.

Methodology

What is counted. An AniList favourite is counted when a logged-in AniList user adds a character to their favourites. AniList's public API reports each character's favourites as the number of users who have favourited that character, and that number is the only measure used here.

When. The counts come from AniCodex's weekly refresh on Monday 19 October 2026, which checked all 3,964 tracked characters against AniList and changed 1,672 counts. The data was pulled from AniCodex's production database on 21 October 2026. The comparison snapshot was pulled on 17 September 2026.

Scope. The ranking covers the 3,964 characters across the 97 series AniCodex tracks, not every character on AniList. A character missing from our database cannot appear, so "most popular" here always means most popular among the characters we track.

Calculation. Characters are sorted by favourites, highest first, and there are no ties in the top 100. The top 1% is the top 40 (3,964 divided by 100, rounded up), and the median is the 1,983rd of the 3,964 counts in descending order. The concentration shares (8.8%, 25.3% and 46.4%) are rounded to one decimal place. Series, studio, genre and year groupings use the series each character is attached to in our database.

Limitations.

• Series totals depend on how many characters we track for each series, so they are not a fair ranking of series.
• MAIN and SUPPORTING are AniList's role labels, not our judgement of who the protagonist is.
• Favourites measure engaged AniList users, not everyone who watches anime, and this data says nothing about the age, gender or location of those users.
• A favourite count is a single current total and does not show when users added it.

How to cite this data

AniCodex, "Anime Character Popularity Statistics 2026", data from the 19 October 2026 AniList refresh, published October 2026, https://anicodex.com/explainers/anime-character-popularity-statistics

You are welcome to reuse any figure or table on this page in articles, videos or research, as long as you credit AniCodex and link to this page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is the most popular anime character in 2026?

By AniList favourites, Satoru Gojo from Jujutsu Kaisen, with 39,426 at the 19 October 2026 refresh, the most of the 3,964 characters AniCodex tracks. Levi from Attack on Titan is second with 38,866, and he led our previous snapshot on 17 September 2026. The live leaderboard shows the order after each Monday refresh.

Which anime series has the most popular characters?

Jujutsu Kaisen places the most characters in AniCodex's top 100, with 8, followed by Demon Slayer (7), Attack on Titan (6), One Piece (5) and Hunter x Hunter (5). In the top 20, Attack on Titan leads with 3.

Are supporting characters more popular than main characters?

Not overall: characters AniList labels MAIN take 79 of the top 100 places. But in 15 of the 97 series we track, the best-loved supporting character out-polls every main one, most strikingly Levi, whose 38,866 favourites beat Eren Yeager's 32,147.

How often do these numbers change?

AniCodex re-reads every character's favourite count from AniList each Monday, and the 19 October 2026 refresh changed 1,672 of the 3,964 counts. This study is a fixed snapshot of that refresh; the live leaderboard updates weekly. Counts can fall as well as rise: 88 of the 98 characters in both our September and October top 100s had fewer recorded favourites in October.

How is anime character popularity measured here?

By AniList favourites, the number of AniList users who have added a character to their favourites. It reflects engaged AniList users rather than all viewers, and it covers only the characters AniCodex tracks.

Can I use this data?

Yes. Quote any figure or reuse the tables with credit to AniCodex and a link to this page; the citation line above shows the format.