July 31, 2026
McDrama at McRonald’s
Anime Professions
Anime counted every job it names — and fans instantly yelled, “What about fast food?”
TLDR: A fan project scanned almost 22,000 anime and found which jobs get named most, but its claim that anime never names fast-food workers sparked instant backlash. Commenters said that’s obviously wrong, pointing to The Devil Is a Part-Timer and roasting the project’s accuracy.
A quirky data project set out to answer a gloriously random question: what jobs does anime actually say out loud? After scanning nearly 22,000 shows, it found teachers dominate overall, shopkeepers are suddenly booming in the 2020s, and fantasy royalty somehow beats every normal career. But the real fireworks started when the project claimed anime never names 17 plausible jobs — including fast-food workers. That’s when the comments stopped being polite and started being very online.
Fans immediately pounced on the supposed blind spot, with multiple people bringing up The Devil Is a Part-Timer!, aka the anime most likely to make this claim explode on impact. One commenter basically said “trivially false,” while another went full scorched earth, calling the whole thing “Ai slop” and accusing the creator of not watching anime at all. Ouch. A shorter jab, “Vibecoded lie,” may be the most brutal three-word review of the week.
Not everyone came with pitchforks, though. One helpful commenter dropped the live explorer link, and another said the idea was cool enough that it should become a proper video search tool. So the mood is split: half fascinated by the nerdy anime census, half ready to throw a McRonald’s uniform at the methodology. The big lesson? You can scan millions of subtitle lines, but if you tell anime fans nobody flips burgers in anime, they will absolutely flip out.
Key Points
- •The project analyzes 21,988 anime to measure explicitly named occupations using an ISCO-08-based taxonomy.
- •Teachers are reported as the most-named real-world profession overall at about 1,370 anime, while shopkeepers lead in the 2020s.
- •Fantasy roles are tracked separately from real occupations; under that separate layer, royalty appears in 1,792 titles.
- •From 436 ISCO-08 job codes, the project narrows analysis to about 150 plausibly nameable occupations and reports 17 of those as never named.
- •The detection pipeline combines AniList summaries and character bios, about 128,000 Japanese subtitle files, a keyword lexicon, and LLM review with Claude Haiku and Claude Opus.