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anime·Animebywjs018

Announcing Winners of the 2025 Fediverse Anime Awards

To start with, I just want to thank everybody that took the time to vote in the awards for this year. For some meta discussion about the awards themselves, check out my pinned comment. Without further ado, here are your winners:

2025 Anime Series of the Year

  • Apocalypse Hotel

2025 Anime Film of the Year

  • Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc

2025 Anime Character of the Year

  • Yachiyo (Apocalypse Hotel)

Best Comedy

  • CITY the Animation

Best Drama

  • The Apothecary Diaries Season 2

Best Fantasy/Adventure

  • Clevatess

Best Romance

  • My Dress-Up Darling Season 2

Best Slice of Life

  • CITY the Animation

Best Action

  • Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc

Best Animation

  • CITY the Animation

Best Soundtrack

  • Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc

Best Voice Acting (specific role in any language)

  • Aoi Yuuki - Maomao in The Apothecary Diaries - Japanese

Best Musical Sequence (OP/ED or insert song)

View original on ani.social
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Comments23
wjs018
ani.social

Meta Comment:

Thanks again, everybody that voted! If you want to check out the anonymized ballot information and inspect the code I used to process the votes, you can find a repository I made here.

Total turnout this year (~25 votes) was down quite a bit compared to last year (~90 votes). I think there were a couple contributing factors to this:

  • The private-message voting system was new, and I don't think it seems like it was popular. Last year I had run a survey site that lets people fill out a web form for their vote. However, the software was really flaky on the backend side of things and I didn't want to run it again. Also, there was not really any way to prevent somebody from voting multiple times because I couldn't tie a vote to a user account.
  • Last year's voting period happened over the holidays, and I suspect that boosted turnout.
  • I think total overall activity is down compared to a year ago, especially so since we are in the middle of a season. The active user count always tends to tick up when a new season kicks off, but then falls back down a bit to coast until the next season sees another bit of a spike. So, doing these awards in the middle of a season probably didn't help turnout.

Please feel free to let me know if you have any ideas for improvement in the future. Whether that is about the voting process, nomination process, timing, whatever...

As for the award winners, there were a couple titles that really soaked up lots of votes in any category they were nominated for. Specifically, CITY, Apocalypse Hotel, and Chainsaw Man - Reze Arc got a huge portion of the voteshare whenever they were nominated. So, if there is any takeaway from these awards for me, it's that those are this community's standout favorites from last year.

Other interesting things I noticed:

  • I was glad to see Ninkoro doing so well in the Best Comedy category. I loved the dark humor in that series so much, and the anime really elevated the source material in lots of ways. Glad to see others agreed!
  • I was also happy to see Rock is a Lady's Modesty do well in the OST category. It's always nice when an anime about music actually has good music in it.
  • I found it interesting that Maomao absolutely ran away with the voting for best Voice Acting, but she didn't even make the nomination list for best character. In fact, Shisui received more nominations than Maomao for best character.
22
braindamagebuddyreply
lemmy.world

Yeah not going to lie the private message thing was pretty brutal. Filling out the template on mobile takes a good amount of effort. I also think ranked choice may discourage some from voting since people may not know each of the choices very well.

Thanks for hosting again this year and trying things out though.

15
wjs018reply
ani.social

Yeah...it won't be private messages next year for sure. Lesson learned!

7
Die4Everreply
retrolemmy.com

my favorite system for these kinds of votes is making 1 comment for each anime, and letting people upvote/downvote them (or only count the upvotes?)

maybe I need to start watching more anime so I can vote next time lol (and then I probably end up voting for Frieren anyways lol but at least it'd be fair!)

1
ReluctantlyZenreply
ani.social

I also think ranked choice may discourage some from voting since people may not know each of the choices very well.

Yeah I wondered about that too. I left out the ones I didn't watch from my voting list, but that feels a little unfair

3
Endmakerreply
ani.social

May I trouble you to update this post to show the top 3 nominees for each category, along with their final vote count?

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wjs018reply
ani.social

Ranked choice voting doesn't allow a simple top X candidates due to the way votes can transfer between rounds. If you want to see how each category's voting rounds went, you can see them all here.

In the list below, I have listed the second-highest receiver(s) of votes in the final voting round:

  • 2025 Anime Series of the Year - CITY the Animation
  • 2025 Anime Film of the Year - 100 Meters
  • 2025 Anime Character of the Year - Izumi Wako (CITY the Animation)
  • Best Comedy - Ninkoro and 100 Girlfriends (tie)
  • Best Drama - Summer Hikaru Died
  • Best Fantasy/Adventure - Secrets of the Silent Witch
  • Best Romance - Fragrant Flower
  • Best Slice of Life - Apocalypse Hotel
  • Best Action - Dan Da Dan Season 2
  • Best Animation - Chainsaw Man Reze Arc
  • Best Soundtrack - Rock is a Lady's Modesty and Umamusume Cinderella Gray (tie)
  • Best Voice Acting - Mikako Komatsu (Nagumo from CITY the Animation)
  • Best Musical Sequence - Kaseijin by Yorushika - Shoushimin Season 2 OP
11
Crankreply
ani.social

First of all, big thanks for making this happen.

As for the factors contributing to lower turnout, I think the following might have affected it:

  • RCV voting system - it's harder to understand than your typical voting system where you only cast one vote for your favorite show. It might be more fair overall, but people might have questions like:
    • does specifying the second, the third choice, and so on, affect the chances of my first choice winning?
    • if I didn't watch all the nominated shows, should I include them in my ballot at all?
      I think instead of thinking this through, people might just decide that I don't understand this system, I don't want to think about it, so I will not vote at all
  • in the nominations phase: not having a list to choose from, and having to come up with the nominees on your own. I think such list should include not just the titles but also posters to make the search easier (also needs to be mobile friendly)
  • having to edit a markdown file by hand. It might be discouraging on a desktop computer but it's straight up annoying on mobile devices, and I imagine that more than a half of the userbase uses their mobile phones to browse social media.
  • as others already mentioned, the user interface of Lemmy doesn't make it obvious where do you send a private message. Perhaps there's some way to create a direct link, like https://ani.social/create_private_message/5000605 ? But that only works if someone is registered on ani.social. Anyway, if you plan to use private messages in some way again next year, I think it would be a good idea to explain how to send one (which would be challenging anyway, because each mobile client does it in its own way)

Sorry if it came out as overly critical. It wasn't my intention. I know it's hard to come up with a good solution that satisfies everyone and I'm grateful for all the work you've done.

8
ReluctantlyZenreply
ani.social

Total turnout this year (~25 votes) was down quite a bit compared to last year (~90 votes).

Damn, that's very low. I figured it'd be higher, given the amount of upvotes.

The private-message voting system was new, and I don't think it seems like it was popular.

Yeah, it wasn't great tbh. The whole markdown list was a bit tedious. Can't do it on a phone well either. But also, I find private messaging very unintuitive on Lemmy. I opened my laptop to fill it out, but it took a while before I even found the chat thing (in the notifications area apparently).

I found it interesting that Maomao absolutely ran away with the voting for best Voice Acting, but she didn't even make the nomination list for best character. In fact, Shisui received more nominations than Maomao for best character.

I think Maomao is great, but I think Shisui meant more for this season than Maomao did.

5
OmegaSunkeyreply
ani.social

i personally didnt vote this year because i didnt see any of the animes listed

2
Wayhold
lemmy.world

Apocalypse Hotel was really amazing. I went in not knowing anything about it and was really impressed.

5
Protoknuckles
lemmy.world

Where's the best place to catch these? It's been awhile since I watched some good anime. Maybe I should get back in.

4
wjs018reply
ani.social

Apocalypse Hotel, the overall winner, is available on Crunchyroll (at least in the US, it can vary by market). Honestly, if you are in the US, most of these are going to be on Crunchyroll I think. CR are continuing their "take over all the things" arc within this niche. So, if you only subscribe to one service, it should be the one (unless you just sail the high seas). Other places you find some quality titles from time to time would be Netflix, HiDive, Amazon Prime, or Disney+.

5
e0qdkreply
reddthat.com

CITY is not on CR -- or, at least, it wasn't when I was looking for it last year.

Wikipedia has it listed as licensed by Amazon Prime Video. (I expect most people just raised the Jolly Roger though...)

4
Crank
ani.social

I'm happy to see Apocalypse Hotel being recognized. Anime originals are usually not as popular, so it's great that it won AOTY. As for the rest of the results, Reze and CITY sweep was quite predictable. Both are visually stunning and have been very well received, and Kusuriya was probably one of the most popular shows last year.

3
ReluctantlyZen
ani.social

Nice! Only one I didn't watch on this list was CITY. I didn't care that much for Nichijou, so CITY didn't really catch my attention either

3
celeste
kbin.earth

I appreciate posts like this even though I rarely watch shows as they come out, so I don't feel comfortable voting, usually. I'd just vote for the one show I'd seen, which doesn't seem fair.

Good luck figuring out a voting system! It seems like a pain to organize here, but I appreciate it. Now I know I should check out Apocalypse Hotel!

2
neuracnu
lemmy.blahaj.zone

I adored Apocalypse Hotel and am delighted to see that it won, but CITY the Animation and others are still on my to-watch list.

I don't know if this applies to anyone else here, but I felt genuinely unqualified to vote having not seen every one of the series nominated. In fact, I'm not sure if there was any category from which I'd watched all the nominated entries.

For more participation, I'd ask for perhaps fewer nominees or more time between the announcements and closed voting.

2
Unboxiousreply
ani.social

Yeah, it feels especially weird with ranked choice voting. Do I leave them off? Do I put them on? If I put them on, how can I possibly order two shows I haven't seen? If everyone leaves off shows they haven't seen, won't this just be a list of the most-watched shows of the year?

2
melsaskca
lemmy.ca

It's nice to see someone's effort at bringing together a collective. I will watch a few of these (I'm old and the only anime series I've ever watched was "One Punch", it was really enjoyable).

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Announcing Winners of the 2025 Fediverse Anime Awards | Spyke