Thank you everybody for taking the time to submit nominations for these awards. It took some work to sort through all of them, but it was also a lot of fun to know that so many people took the time to contribute to a community-run event like this.

I thought I would take the opportunity to share the final nominees with you now that I have done the tally and have the final list put together. The final nominees are the ones that received the most nominations from you, the community. I capped the number of nominees in each category at 5. In cases where there were multiple nominees that were tied at the cutoff, then I did my best to act as a kind of jury to decide which were included and which didn’t make it.

Just a reminder that voting opens up next week. So start thinking about your votes now! We will be using STAR voting to determine winners. So, that means you will be able to give each nominee a score from 0-5 (giving the same score means no preference). For more on STAR voting, see wikipedia.

Without further ado, here are the nominees. Note that the order I list them within each category has been randomized.

2024 Anime of the Year
  • Frieren
  • Dan Da Dan
  • Delicious in Dungeon
  • Bravern
  • Oshi no Ko Season 2
Best Comedy
  • My Deer Friend Nokotan
  • Dan Da Dan
  • Konosuba Season 3
  • Bravern
  • Delicious in Dungeon
Best Action
  • Shangri-La Frontier (both season 1 and season 2 have aired this year, so I didn’t differentiate)
  • Nier:Automata Season 2
  • Dan Da Dan
  • Kaiju No. 8
  • Solo Leveling
Best Fantasy
  • Konosuba Season 3
  • Delicious in Dungeon
  • Frieren
  • Re:ZERO Season 3
  • Mushoku Tensei Season 2 Part 2
Best Romance
  • Spice and Wolf: Merchant Meets the Wise Wolf
  • Pseudo Harem
  • Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!
  • Cherry Magic!
  • The Dangers in My Heart Season 2
Best Slice of Life
  • Laid-Back Camp Season 3
  • 'Tis Time for “Torture,” Princess
  • Tonari no Yokai-san
  • Frieren
  • Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night
Best Drama
  • Monogatari Series: Off & Monster Season
  • Look Back
  • Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night
  • The Apothecary Diaries
  • Oshi no Ko Season 2
Best Suspense
  • Shoshimin: How to Become Ordinary
  • Blue Lock Season 2
  • Orb: On the Movements of the Earth
  • Apothecary Diaries
  • Oshi no Ko Season 2
Best Animation
  • Oshi no Ko Season 2
  • Dan Da Dan
  • Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!
  • Delicious in Dungeon
  • Frieren
Best Soundtrack
  • Oshi no Ko Season 2
  • MF Ghost
  • Nier:Automata Season 2
  • Frieren
  • Kaiju No. 8
Best Opening or Ending Sequence (OP/ED)
  • “Otonoke” by Creepy Nuts as the Dan Da Dan OP
  • “Shika-iro Days” as the Nokotan OP
  • “Abyss” by YUNGBLUD as the Kaiju No. 8 OP
  • “Rouge” by YU-KA as the Metallic Rouge OP
  • “Baban to Suisan! Bang Bravern” as the Bravern OP
Best Voice Acting
  • Aleks Le as Sung Jinwoo from Solo Leveling (English dub)
  • Saori Hayami as Rin Nanakura from Pseudo Harem
  • Fuuka Izumi as Utena Hiiragi from Gushing Over Magical Girls
  • Fairouz Ai as Yumiella Dolkness from Villainess Level 99
  • Atsumi Tanezaki as Frieren from Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End
Best Character
  • Bravern (Bravern)
  • Maomao (Apothecary Diaries)
  • Frieren (Frieren)
  • Anna Yanami (Makeine)
  • Utena Hiiragi (Gushing)
Best Duo: Romantic or Otherwise
  • Holo & Lawrence (Spice and Wolf)
  • Fujino & Kyomoto (Look Back)
  • Momo Ayase & Ken Takakura Okarun (Dan Da Dan)
  • Bravern & Isami (Bravern)
  • 2B & 9S (Nier)
  • EndmakerEnglish
    2•12 days ago

    I capped the number of nominees in each category at 5.

    I was under the impression that anything that have been nominated is fair game for voting.

    I understand if the number of nominees have to be cut down to make voting easier. IMO this could have been avoided by having a better form / frontend.

    Can you please share the number of nominations that each anime receive within each category after the voting round is over? I’m surprised at the nomination result for some categories (e.g. Apothecary Diaries not being in top 5 for Anime of the Year)

    Same thing applies to the manga nominees.

    • @wjs018@ani.socialOPMEnglish
      6•12 days ago

      Allowing all the nominations to be finalists eligible for voting would have been a lot. Not just asking people to read through ~20-40 nominees for each category, but taking the time on my end of creating a survey with that many entries. I simply do not have the time to do that. I apologize if I was misleading during the nomination round. Like I mentioned elsewhere, this came together pretty quickly, and I am absolutely open to feedback like this for if/when we do something like this again.

      As for sharing nomination data, I don’t want to be completely transparent to that degree. It’s not that I rigged the system or anything, but I just think it invites people to argue over every case of where I made any kind of judgement call and I don’t think that will be productive. In the specific case of Apothecary Diaries, this was surprising to me too. I can share a bit about this category specifically.

      Here is a graph of the number of nominations for the top 10 most-nominated titles. I marked generally on the graph where Frieren and Apothecary fall to offer a comparison due to the two shows straddling the 2023/2024 seasons in the same way.

      In future iterations of this process, I think I (or somebody) might have to take a more active role in adjudicating nominees. I do worry now that people know I made these calls based on number of nominations that they could simply fill out the form a bunch of times. There are some steps I can take on my end to prevent or filter that, but it would also mean doing things like attaching browser cookies to the form or recording ip addresses, which I haven’t wanted to do out of respect for the users.

      • @I2jgwh0hYtxrCZQEnglish
        3•11 days ago

        I am absolutely open to feedback like this for if/when we do something like this again.

        Just some ideas -

        1. Limiting the options - you could pull the anime’s that have aired in the time frame from one of the Anime databases and limit the users to searchable drop downs.

        I do worry now that people know I made these calls based on number of nominations that they could simply fill out the form a bunch of times. There are some steps I can take on my end to prevent or filter that, but it would also mean doing things like attaching browser cookies to the form or recording ip addresses, which I haven’t wanted to do out of respect for the users.

        1. I feel it would be less intrusive than cookies or IP addresses to have a confirmation like you do with email signups. You could have an optional input for Lemmy Username and have a script to send the user a message via Lemmy to confirm they made a submission (… reply ‘YES’ to confirm…). Blank or unconfirmed submission could be treated with less importance when taking nominations due to the possibility of multiple submissions.

        If you do decide to do it again in the future I am happy to help when possible.

        And Thanks again for doing this.

        • @wjs018@ani.socialOPMEnglish
          4•11 days ago

          I like these ideas, but it would mean basically creating a custom web app to do this. I only know python and R and I work in the sciences instead of being an actual dev, so my experience in web frameworks is limited (basically just R shiny). Perhaps this is my sign that I can no longer avoid learning Flask though.

          Some back of the napkin spitballing on these:

          Idea 1:

          This could be something like a textbox entry that lets somebody search for a show/movie/etc. using the AniList api. It has a text search endpoint and I am already familiar with AniList’s api (graphql) since that is what rikka uses. I think there might be a way to query the api to get a local list of everything for a given year, but I don’t think it would include carry-overs from the previous year that stretched into it (like Frieren or Apothecary did this past year). There aren’t too many of those though, so it should be manageable to handle those on an ad hoc basis.

          Idea 2:

          I like the idea of vote confirmations through lemmy pm’s. It would still be possible to just create alts to manipulate things, but that is a hell of a lot more work than just opening a private window to evade cookies or something like that. I also am already used to reading and sending pm’s with rikka, so that feels like a tractable problem.

          Thanks for the feedback! I have a whole year to figure this out, should be plenty of time, right? I am sure that future me from early December 2025 will look back at this moment and thank myself for all the work I did on this over 2025 instead of looking back on this for ideas because I haven’t started yet.

          • @NineSwords@ani.socialEnglish
            4•11 days ago

            Thanks for the feedback! I have a whole year to figure this out, should be plenty of time, right?

            !RemindMe 11 months

          • @I2jgwh0hYtxrCZQEnglish
            4•11 days ago

            Idea 1:

            I was thinking of web scraping the data before hand, then having it hardcoded in an array or DB to be used in the drop-down. I have seen a few of the anime sites have pages for each season it could be pulled from. I saw some plugins for searchable drop downs for lime survey, So you might be able to make it work with the same software.

            I think Manga would be the most difficult to limit, I am not aware of a single point where all the data is available. Light Novels have a CSV someone is scraping and hosting on GitHub, Anime have clearly defined seasons, But manga doesn’t seem to have a release system.

            Idea 2:

            You could check the account age. If anyone starts creating accounts now for a poll which may never happen then they deserve an extra vote.

    • @ReluctantZen@feddit.nlEnglish
      5•12 days ago

      e.g. Apothecary Diaries not being in top 5 for Anime of the Year

      This in particular I was surprised about