Thank you everybody for participating in the awards process! NineSwords and I simply wanted this to be a fun thing to wrap up the year with, and I hope that you all had fun with this. We certainly learned a lot about ways we might want to run things differently if we ever do this again, so thank you for all the feedback you have given us through this process.
If you are interested in analyzing the vote data, I have created a github repo here where I have uploaded both the voting data and the code I used to process the data and calculate the election results. Feel free to use this data in any way you see fit!
Without further ado, here are the winners and runner-ups for each of the categories:
2024 Anime of the Year
Winner - Frieren: Beyond Journey's End / Sousou no Frieren
Runner-up - Delicious in Dungeon / Dungeon Meshi
Best Comedy
Winner - Delicious in Dungeon / Dungeon Meshi
Runner-up - Dan Da Dan
Best Drama
Winner - The Apothecary Diaries / Kusuriya no Hitorigoto
Runner-up - Oshi no Ko Season 2
Best Animation
Winner - Frieren: Beyond Journey's End / Sousou no Frieren
Runner-up - Dan Da Dan
Best Fantasy
Winner - Frieren: Beyond Journey's End / Sousou no Frieren
Runner-up - Delicious in Dungeon / Dungeon Meshi
Best Soundtrack
Winner - Frieren: Beyond Journey's End / Sousou no Frieren
Runner-up - Oshi no Ko Season 2
Best Duo: Romantic or Otherwise
Winner - Momo Ayase & Ken Takakura (Okarun) from Dan Da Dan
Runner-up - Holo & Kraft Lawrence from Spice and Wolf: MERCHANT MEETS THE WISE WOLF
Best Voice Acting
Winner - Atsumi Tanezaki as Frieren in Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (Japanese)
Runner-up - Saori Hayami as Rin Nanakura in Pseudo Harem (Japanese)
Best Romance
Winner - Spice and Wolf: MERCHANT MEETS THE WISE WOLF / Ookami to Koushinryou: MERCHANT MEETS THE WISE WOLF
Runner-up - Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines! / Make Heroine ga Oosugiru!
Best Opening or Ending Sequence (OP/ED)
Winner - "Otonoke" by Creepy Nuts for the Dan Da Dan OP
Runner-up - "Shika-iro Days" as the My Deer Friend Nokotan OP
Best Action
Winner - Dan Da Dan
Runner-up - Solo Levling / Ore dake Level Up na Ken
Best Slice of Life
Winner - Frieren: Beyond Journey's End / Sousou no Frieren
Runner-up - Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night / Yoru no Kurage wa Oyogenai
Best Suspense
Winner - The Apothecary Diaries / Kusuriya no Hitorigoto
Runner-up - Oshi no Ko Season 2
Best Character
Winner - Frieren from Frieren: Beyond Journey's End / Sousou no Frieren
Runner-up - Maomao from The Apothecary Diaries / Kusuriya no Hitorigoto
I mostly watch shows when they're finished. It's nice to be able to watch an episode every day, but the downside is I lag behind everyone else and can't really participate in polls like this since the only two shows I watched from this year is Frieren and Dungeon Meshi. So I decided not to vote at all. Overall I watched 25 shows this year, most from 201x, some from 200x and a few from 202x.
Tbf, I think there's a pretty big dip from the super popular anime to everything else that was nominated this year. I ended up giving up on voting, just because there was category after category where I'd only seen one or two of the shows listed.
I dropped Frieren one episode in because it was too slice-of-life-y for my tastes. Maybe I'll give it another chance someday, since it seems to be so universally adored. 🤷
Dungeon Meshi got a hard pass because it was a comedy that didn't look like it would have enough non-comedic substance to keep me entertained. (To me, roughly half of all "comedy" is outright cringeworthy and most of the rest is somewhat less funny than your average dad joke . . . and "funny" isn't a quality that I tend to look for in my entertainment anyway.) Most people seem to like comedies, so I find their ratings tend to be inflated.
Why would someone spent their time on something else? Rewatching Frieren a couple times is better than watching anything running this (currently ending) season for example.