Hey all! Welcome to my meta comment about the year-end awards. I am going to try to pre-emptively answer some questions you may have:

This is a cool idea. I pinned the thread to local so hopefully more people see it!

I spent WAAAAAY too much time on MyAnimeList narrowing down my choices. I felt like there wasn't a whole lot of suspense anime to pick from, and Adventure wasn't a category. I also thought Isekai/Reincarnation would get its own category but I guess we can just lump that in with Fantasy for the most part.

Seriously though, in some categories I had a really hard time narrowing it down to just 3, and in others I left spots blank simply because there wasn't much I had seen in that category at all. I guess that's normal though.

This survey made me realize how little anime I actually watched this year. I can't even fill in all the categories! The few shows I did watch were really damn good. At least it makes it easy to pick my favorites!

Thanks for the patience and for answering all my questions @wjs@ani.social

I have submitted my nominations. Unfortunately, you may see a few duplicate submissions from me because I wasn't sure if I have submitted some of them previously.

Anyway, I'm predicting that these anime would take the top spots:

• Frieren
• Apothecary Diaries
• Dan Da Dan

Now, gotta go nominate some manga 😭

Weekly ranking roundup:

1. Anime Corner - Full Results - Weekly Winner: Bleach: TYBW
2. Reddit Karma - Weekly Winner: Dan Da Dan
3. Anime Trending - Weekly Winner: Blue Box

Credit to /u/Abysswatcherbel for making the chart for reddit karma and /u/Nooble5 for the Anime Trending chart.

Three different winners this week. Blue Box made a small jump up the AT chart this week to claim the top spot. I saw a lot of hype for Blue Box at the beginning of the season, but it seems to have died down a lot as the season has gone. It has fallen out of the top 10 this week in the reddit karma chart for instance.

What is considered a 2024 anime?

If the series started in 2023 but ends in 2024, does it count?

What if it starts in 2024 but is going to end in 2025?

I love the idea of awards, but with only a few notable exceptions, I don't watch currently airing anime, so...

And on that note, the first thing I watched this past week was the rest of Katanagatari, which I started last week. And I loved almost everything about it. The artstyle and character design particularly stood out, but it was all notably high quality. Though I still have to say I loved almost everything about it, because there was one part I really did not like at all:

So... I needed to decompress a bit from that, and I already had an obvious choice lined up - a series that I knew I wanted to watch, but hadn't gotten around to because I hadn't quite been in the mood for the particular sort of stupidity I knew it was going to offer - KonoSuba. And it was pretty much just what I expected - shallow, goofy, egregiously ecchi mindless fun. The only thing I didn't like about it is that Kazuma is, not to put too fine a point on it, a petulant, bitchy, self-absorbed asshole, and I really wanted to punch him in the face. Repeatedly.

And now I'm in the middle of something completely different - Boogiepop wa Warawanai. I watched the original version - Boogiepop Phantom - years ago and mostly enjoyed it, though I also mostly had no clue what was going on. The story is strange and complex and mysterious, and it's told non-linearly through multiple viewpoints, so it's opaque at best. The biggest problem with the original though is that it came in the wake of the success of things like Evangelion and Serial Experiments Lain, so it took what was already a complex and mysterious story and buried it in surreal symbolism. This one is still complex and non-linear, but at least it sheds a bit of the surreal symbolism in favor of more straightforward storytelling, and to its benefit. I have a lot of episodes left, but it's shaping up well.

This was a lot easier than the manga awards.

The nominations have been mostly Frieren, Apothecary Diaries, Euphonium, Monogatari, Makeine and Nier Automata for me. With 1 curve ball: Metallic Rouge for best OP. Anime sucks, but OP is fire

Done totally not biased ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° ).

This past week was going to be my attempt to catch up a bit on my backlog of shows. I was actually making progress until...well, all the awards stuff took up a ton of my anime-watching time. So, what I managed to make it through:

• Dan Da Dan - This show's craziness continues to deliver. What other show can somehow tie together a mantis shrimp, crippling poverty, kappa, aliens, and milk into a coherent storyline.
• Villainess in History - A lot of fun. Alicia is one of my favorite non-Dan Da Dan characters of the season. Episode 10 was an out of character down episode, but I am sure that we will get back to fun Villainess-y hijinx.
• Loner Life Isekai - The dungeon crawl parts of these past few episodes have been painfully slow. Thankfully, we have made it past that going forward.
• Appraisal Isekai - Overall, I have been happy with this. Yes, the warfare strategy doesn't make sense and the animation is pretty barebones at times, but the characters are really the important part of this show.
• Negative Positive Angler - Episode 10 was incredible. It was what I was hoping all these happy slice of life episodes was leading up to. An incredible payoff that I expect will keep delivering through to the end of the season.

I have started catching up on some other shows, but am not current yet. Working on it!

I guess it's a little late to be saying this, but do you think it might make sense to delay this a bit so that recency bias doesn't hit quite as hard? I'm not too worried about it for manga, but the way anime gets published makes it really easy to just say "Dandadan" without even thinking back to other excellent shows like Bravern that aired earlier this year.

Edit:

Not a huge deal but I also think it would make sense to have separate OP and ED categories.

Hope you don't have too much trouble grouping up the answers, I mainly stuck to the first title on MAL but got tired of using full names half way through cuz it's a PITA on mobile 🥲

Regarding the Best Voice Acting category, do we nominate voice actors or anime (i.e. take all voice acting into account)?

If it's voice actors, do we nominate the voice actor for all of their roles in 2024, or only for their role in one particular anime?

When we nominate something for the Best Soundtrack category, do we nominate the soundtrack itself (e.g. Zoltraak from Frieren) or the anime (e.g. Frieren)?

If it is the former and we want to nominate an insert song, does the song belong under the Best Soundtrack category or Best OP/ED?