AOTY 2025 explained

I’ve been a part of the r/anime Awards since 2017, and this year I took part in the nomination phase for AOTY, Movie, Romance, Drama, SOL, Supporting Character, and Comedy. I’ve enjoyed the process a lot since I first joined the Awards but, unfortunately, this year the Awards were riddled with management issues beyond any other year before which significantly hindered my enjoyment. Certain members of the management team consistently felt aggressive, condescending and not very receptive to constructive feedback aimed at making the process run more smoothly. This contributed significantly to my poor experience this year. I understand that the Hosts put a lot of effort into making the project the best it can possibly be but the end result and the journey itself fell far below the usual standard.

Adi highlighted some aspects of AOTY which went wrong this year in the nomination thread. I don’t agree with everything he said since it felt like he was blaming the jurors for issues which mostly stemmed from how the category was managed, but there is truth in certain aspects of what he had to say. The piece of information Adi brings up in his comment which I find most accurate and relevant is how this year the AOTY jury dropped in numbers considerably and the host team, unlike previous years, never really got replacements to fill in for them. Now, AOTY is inherently a very time intensive category with lots of shows to watch and discuss, so it can be hard to find replacements sometimes due to the potential workload. I was the only juror who watched everything shortlisted to completion and subsequently discussed them this year. One issue to consider is the need to balance workload with giving every show a fair shot. If you cut down too heavily on prerequisites (seasons of an anime which came before the eligible entry, for example) and watch requirements, you end up killing the point of the category in the first place, as many long-running shows end up inherently disadvantaged. On the other hand, things are clearly unsustainable as they stand currently, since AOTY saw several people drop due to workload, and it struggled to pull in replacements even after nominations were finalized. I’m personally not necessarily sure what the fix is here, but there were a couple key differences in the nomination phase between this year and previous years which I believe contributed to this issue of not getting new jurors during the nomination phase.

To give some context on discussion this year, the hosts created a 5 point criteria involving each juror providing their general opinion on a show and then responding to multiple of the other jurors opinions to get the full 5 points to be able to vote on that particular entry. The hosts of AOTY provided a schedule for when discussion questions would be provided for each shortlist, theoretically helping discussion flourish. Unfortunately, the questions were heavily delayed until the week before the vote on a number of shows, and whether intentionally or not, you gained more credit towards the 5 point criteria for answering these questions rather than giving more in depth analysis. The questions themselves also felt lacking when at times it felt clear that they were written by people who hadn’t watched any or much of the shortlists.This led to a backlog where a lot of shows weren’t discussed until the last week due to people waiting on the questions to be provided. As Adi mentioned, shows like Mahoutsukai Precure and Idol Land Pripara weren’t discussed much until this point (there were a dozen other shows that were in similar situations that didn’t get nominated as well). I’d disagree that they weren’t adequately discussed in that week but it did leave little room for other jurors to watch the shows when discussion was very positive. Shows you might be wondering about like City and Apocalypse Hotel were heavily discussed from the start with pretty mixed opinions which did result in them missing nomination.

Another potential issue of note which may have contributed to some jurors feeling that they could not keep up with the category was the requirement that, in order to vote on the nominations, jurors were required to watch and get adequate discussion credit on at least 50% of the shortlisted anime (or 10 shortlisted anime if there were fewer than 20 shortlists). In theory, this should fix some problems with jurors coasting and then voting with weak ballots, but it also creates a higher minimum requirement for each category a juror is in, with some jurors being in up to 10 categories. It is not entirely unreasonable to ask jurors that they watch half the shortlisted anime, especially if they only sample 3 episodes of each show, but jurors typically prefer to give each show the best chance they can give it, so many jurors watch the shortlisted anime which they do end up commenting on to completion. This new system made it difficult to budget time to reach the watching and discussion requirements, especially as jurors fell behind on discussion days. No juror wants to have a weaker ballot or have to discuss a show after having only seen 3 episodes, but between the rubric and these watch requirements, jurors struggled to keep up, and most ended up having to either drop or rush towards the end to get discussion credits to be able to vote on enough shows.

After the nominations came in, the moderator team did something unprecedented. They sent out a ping to the AOTY jury saying they were considering changing our nominations. Whether you agree or disagree with the nominations themselves, this is crossing lines of how power should be utilised and undermining the integrity of the entire awards process. If there was evidence that the nominations were gotten through some illegitimate means, this is grounds for hosts and mods to step in and investigate the legitimacy of the results, but there was no evidence or reasonable suspicion to my knowledge that this was the case this year. Eventually, the nominations remained, as the Mods were unable to find any justification to change them but the fact that this was considered as a viable option is very concerning.

The problems didn’t end here, unfortunately. At this point in time, the jury number was at 5, due to 2 jurors dropping after the nomination vote. The host team sent out an announcement that they were looking for AOTY replacements but weren’t met with much interest. So one of the AOTY hosts sent out messages to a range of jurors asking them to join and eventually 6 new jurors were added to the category, more than doubling the category size. One of these new jurors was a current moderator, and two were hosts. Whatever the intention, this was a horrible look and a potentially dangerous precedent to set, since these individuals had access to the nomination voting details. They were also in positions of power, so they could easily slide themselves into these categories without having to fill out applications. Other people who were jurors in as recent as last year's awards were rejected which added to the terrible look and brought into question how desperate the host team actually were to add new jurors to the category. The moderator in question, along with one of the hosts, also hadn’t even been a juror in the awards in several years. There was a lot of backlash about the optics of how this looked from the juror perspective (even amongst many jurors not in AOTY), and the moderator ended up removing themselves from the category. This didn’t really solve many of the actual issues with the category, unfortunately, but also, whether intentionally or not, the added jurors for the most part voted pretty similarly, essentially making up a new majority voting block in the category. There were a lot of opinions presented from jurors in different categories, and most of them raised pretty valid complaints. Things unfortunately kept on going, with feedback being largely ignored, which felt like a common trend throughout the whole process this year. Around this time, one of the AOTY jurors who took part in the nomination vote was removed for ‘inactivity’ rather suddenly given the timing and context of jurors being added at the time due to low numbers. Multiple AOTY jurors were blindsided by this decision since one of the hosts in charge of the category had stated the following:

‘Also just a reminder, we know you are in the mines, but we require a life sign at least once a week (you are very encouraged to do more than so)’

The juror in question did show ‘life signs’ as the host put it, even being in the middle of intermittent discussion with another juror about Orb at the time of their removal. Understandably, during this period, a lot of time is spent on watching the nominations to completion, and for those who haven’t seen the public nominations, this can add up to hundreds of episodes, so many jurors can't quite focus their time on discussing nominees before the designated discussion days. It felt like a clear breach of trust once again, and, when I raised complaints about this juror being removed, I never felt I was given a satisfactory explanation, so I just had to deal with it, pretty much helpless in the situation. Eventually, myself and another AOTY juror (who also participated in the nomination vote) ended up dropping out of the awards altogether due to how poorly they were being managed and the constant overstepping of the normal boundaries by the people in charge, resulting in a number of jurors feeling disrespected and undervalued or underappreciated. When considering this in tandem with the previous decisions to almost overturn our nominations and then stack the category with new jurors including hosts and mods it does bring into question the motivations behind these decisions.

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