The 2024 Crunchyroll Anime Awards were under a storm of criticism after the showcase last Saturday and it comes with valid arguments from the fans. Crunchyroll may have showcased a vibrant extravaganza of an event but it feels out of touch with the anime community itself. In this article, I’ll go over everything that has led the Crunchyroll Anime Awards to become the joke of the community in the past few years and how the system can be better suited for the fans and the ceremony itself going forward.
When the number one takeaway from the biggest fan award ceremony in the anime industry is that nobody can take it seriously, it’s time for Crunchyroll as a whole to look inward if they want to be the standard. Studio Orange and Trigun Stampede producer Yoshihiro Watanabe even took to X (Twitter) to voice his critical opinion during the ceremony:
The first problem with the 2024 Crunchyroll Anime Awards was a lack of diversity among its nominees. The “Shonen Awards” is a title that has stuck with the awards for quite some time now that fans have been vocal about and it became even worse this year. Of the 32 awards given out, here is the breakdown:
So from a year in which there were over 750 different anime, only 12 took home awards in 23 categories (excluding voice acting). Just for a quick comparison, of the 15 award categories fans could vote on for the 2023 Anime Corner Yearly Awards (excluding character awards), only Dangers in My Heart (2), Frieren (3), and Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 (3) won multiple awards. The rest? Completely different series thanks to having a much higher diverse pool to vote from. This also prevented one or two series from outright dominating the polls. And even if they did, it’s the almost 70,000 fans that voted for it, not 100 judges with a small weight of fan votes.
Fans took to social media to voice their outrage over the lack of diverse nominees and the overflooding of the same “shonen” series winning multiple categories, specifically Jujutsu Kaisen. While Vinland Saga Season 2, Trigun Stampede. Tenkgoku Daimakyo, Skip and Loafer, and Insomniacs After School did represent “seinen anime” and received over 20 nominations, not a single one of them won an award—Bocchi the Rock, Suzume, and Buddy Dadies were the only non-shonen anime with a single award. Vinland Saga Season 2, which disrespectfully received only five total nominations, didn’t win a single one.
Most of the fan’s frustrations are primarily due to Vinland Saga Season 2 not winning a single award this year despite its high-quality production, phenomenal character development and story development, and some of the best voice acting of the entire year. The series won the public vote for the Reddit Anime of the Year and came in 5th for the Anime Corner Anime of the Year awards (also the same place for the Winter 2023 seasonal awards). Vinland Saga Season 2 was also the highest-rated anime for the Winter 2023 season on both fan rating sites MyAnimeList (8.81) and Anilist (88%). When you take all that into account and it didn’t win a single award, it raises quite a few eyebrows.
Crunchyroll doesn’t require the judges to have watched all the anime in the specific category they are voting for. In other words, it was recommended judges “familiarize” themselves with all the nominees after they’re selected but it isn’t a requirement. What’s even worse is that the judge-fan vote ratio has been 70:30, so the judge’s votes have much more weight than the actual fans.
They claim the ratio is to avoid a “popularity contest” style of awards—oh, the irony. Jujutsu Kaisen, Chainsaw Man, Demon Slayer, One Piece, Spy x Family, and Dr. Stone are the most popular “shonen anime” out right now outside of My Hero Academia and they took home 29 of the 32 awards. Even Oshi no Ko, another “shonen”, rose to be one of the most popular anime of the year. So not only do judges not have to watch all the anime nominated, but they can have outstanding bias and it’ll heavily outweigh fan votes—that’s not a system set up for success.
Not only do judge votes heavily outweigh fan votes, but judges are the ones who pick the nominees in the first place. According to the official website, judges in the past sent in a ballot of five nominees per category. Crunchyroll then decides the six most popular anime for each category that the collective judges send in. In short, judges are given way too much power and heavily sway the awards. So why would fans care about awards that don’t care about them in the first place?
Over 34 million votes were accounted for this year. And you mean to tell me that those 34 million votes are still outweighed by the votes of 100 judges? And those fans that vote have to choose based on what the judges decide in the first place? How in any way is that fair? The simple answer—it’s not.
The Anime Corner Awards, as an example, shows the total of votes and the percentage of the votes each series or voice actor receives. Anime Trending has started to do this as well. Every nominee that fans can vote on took place in 2023—that’s it. And whoever has the most votes wins. It’s that simple. If Crunchyroll wants to continue to use judges, they need to release their ballots publicly, especially if their votes hold that much more weight than fan votes.
Otherwise, giving the judges most of the power further proves an unreliable system set up by Crunchyroll. Adding more nominees and switching to a strictly fan-vote poll has proven to work to keep the awards diverse and it creates better transparency. If the fans don’t like the outcome then they have nowhere to point the fingers at other than at themselves.
Crunchyroll’s fall rollover rule still confuses fans to this day and it frankly makes little sense in the first place. If an anime airs in 2023, it should be up for the 2023 awards. Chainsaw Man and Bocchi The Rock, which aired during the Fall 2022 season, suffered mightily come awards time due to this rule. The two anime aired back during the Fall 2022 season and lost a lot of the momentum they had at the time they aired.
The rule became even more confusing this year as many fans voted for Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 not knowing that the Hidden Inventory arc (five episodes) at the beginning of the season is what was being voted on since it aired during the Summer 2023 season. Even though the Shibuya arc also “technically” started at the end of the Summer 2023 season after a month-long break, the majority of it took place during the Fall 2023 season. Granted, it’s not the fans’ fault for the confusion. It’s Crunchyroll’s fault for lack of transparency on the matter.
The fear of recency bias can’t be an excuse for the Crunchyroll Anime Awards when it comes to the fall season anymore when they blatantly just showcased favoritism to Jujutsu Kaisen. If that series was able to be part of the awards, then so should every other anime from the fall season. Only three anime from the Fall 2023 season made it into the top 10 for Anime of the Year at the Anime Corner Awards so you can’t scream recency bias when the fan votes have clearly shown to defer it.
While the Anime Awards did a splendid job of booking musical guests such as LiSA, YAOSOBI, Hiroyuki Sawano, and Kohta Yamamoto, only eight of the 29 guest stars were actually from Japan. If you’re going to hold it in Japan, fill the talent card with industry guests that anime fans want to see, not streamers and influencers from North America and Europe who can’t even pronounce their favorite anime titles correctly. However, guests such as Megan Thee Stallion, who even cosplayed as Bruno Bucciarati from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure, and NFL player DeMarcus Lawrence, who collaborated with Crunchyroll last season for the “My Cause, My Cleats” initiative, are great talents to have.
The fifth problem is the timing. Crunchyroll singlehandedly outed 31% of its audience that is based in the United States alone due to the move to Japan for the awards. For those on the east coast, the awards started at 4:00 am (1:00 am on the west coast). Millions of people voted but the stream peaked at 90,000 viewers, according to Stream Charts, 34,000 of which only came from Crunchyroll’s official YouTube channel.
If I saw Kenjiro Tsuda or Junichi Suwabe as a guest star, I might be obliged to stay up to watch and so would many others. I understand you can’t easily book every big star and director from the anime industry because their schedules are probably busy. But having more of them there shows how serious the awards are towards those who bring us our favorite anime—it’s a sign of respect. So the lack of such guests is disappointing, to say the least. Having Jujutsu Kaisen Season 2 Director Shota Goshozono there to accept the award was nice to see, though.
That all being said, if you want to isolate a giant certain percentage of your viewers due to a timezone, then stop failing at giving them reasons to stay up late or wake up early to watch it. Perhaps the big musical acts are why the viewership for this year’s awards blew out last year’s numbers. or maybe it’s just the anime industry growing entirely. But with the monopoly that Crunchyroll has on the viewership side of the industry, especially in North America and Europe, it could be way higher if they implement a solid structure or find ways to compensate for the ceremony’s shortcomings.
The Crunchyroll Anime Awards change their categories here and there every year but I think it’s time to come up with a set amount of categories every year. For one, not having a sci-fi category despite having series like Dr. Stone, Trigun Stampede, and Tenkgoku Daimakyo airing this past year is a disservice to itself as an anime awards ceremony that wants to make itself the industry standard. The bedrock of anime comes from both fantasy and sci-fi, so to not even have the latter as a category during the awards is a joke.
Including a “Must Protect at All Cost” character award but not an entire genre like sci-fi makes the awards out to be more laughable than they already have become, even worse if that pointless category is just used for Crunchyroll to sell more merchandise for whatever character wins. Sub-categories for “Best Female Character” and “Best Male Character” are fine, but keep them in every year if that’s the plan. Don’t diverge into even deeper sub-category awards every other year that feel more meaningless than the fan vote itself.
Instead, have legacy awards that directly support the creators of the series we love and title certain category winners with the actual names of the people in the first place. The awards also have the staff names for the “Best Character Design” category, but not “Best Art Direction”. And even in the categories they do have the names of staff members, some don’t display them as the actual award winner as they did for “Best Director”, rather they just display the series itself. It’s an inconsistent nightmare. Don’t let the awards remain a tool to simply judge which type of series fans like more so production committees can pump out more of those anime to make more money.
Perhaps most of these revamp ideas can even be left to a vote. Should judges be part of the decision process or should it be strictly the fans? Should the awards have more nominees for each category? If yes, how many at least? Etc. If that takes place, then share the results of that vote as well. Just give the fans complete transparency with absolutely everything with these awards.
All in all, the Crunchyroll Anime Awards are going to continue to receive a lot of criticism every year. And while it’s rightfully deserved, it’s also the stage they’ve set for themselves. It will never be perfected but they have the means to make it close and it has never felt like they’ve taken it as seriously as they should other than making it flashy in recent years and moving it to Japan.
Fans couldn’t care less if people at the awards wear dresses and tuxedos or t-shirts and jeans because that’s not what it’s about. The awards don’t have to be fancy like the Oscars. To be the leading industry standard for awards within the anime community they need to level with what the community wants in the first place, not just filling out a survey and maybe changing things here and there. To honor those who deserve the awards they receive and not for the sake of production companies simply studying what fans enjoy.
These awards should aim to be honorable, not shameless. Blood, sweat, and tears go into producing anime for our amusement and those people should be properly recognized for their hard work. For next year’s Crunchyroll Anime Awards, I hope they take a different approach to the awards going forward because the results this year were disappointing.
Featured image: © Makoto Yukimura, Kodansha/VINLAND SAGA SEASON 2 Project