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
You are missing out.
Try giving them a chance.
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.