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Voting closes at 23:59 on Sunday, January 16 PST. As with last year, voting will be done through a Google form to make counting the votes easier. Vote here for your five (5) best anime of 2021: https://forms.gle/ehjvesiZpWjkw54C8 Sortable spreadsheet of qualifying anime: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1R0BOL1fkMhVM9Cr-jRrBlI-qGDGHqxPXF4JNKmkKBm0/edit?usp=sharing  YOUR VOTE WILL ONLY COUNT IF YOU VOTE IN THE GOOGLE FORM You can optionally vote for your honorable mentions and rank your top five. The weighted top ten will be determined by points, with 5 points going to first place votes and 1 point going to fifth place votes. Unranked votes will all be given a flat 3 points. I'd like to include a summary of the winners even if just in word cloud form, so please do post your reasons for your choices, even if all you have to say is "it's funny" or "Squark threatened to laugh at me for saying I would vote for it again last year even though I'm regretting it now." I encourage you to post in the thread even if you have nothing to say because it helps with the vote validation. If I don't know who you are, I might throw your vote out! Don't double vote, but if you're on the list below, you voted when I said not to, so you'll need to vote again.  The results: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3989334&pagenumber=3#post520778896 Previous AOTY threads: 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | 2016 2015 | 2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 Strange Quark fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Jan 17, 2022 |
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Dec 31, 2021 21:31
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 14:18 |
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The worst thread willl be posted by namtab, you'll get your chance to talk about it there
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Dec 31, 2021 22:11
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Honorable Mentions SK8: The arc about intrepid teen protagonist learning how to deal with his inadequacy and lack of inherent talent is well done and all, but it's straightforward and narratively simple. SK8 sets itself apart with its primary antagonist, who struggles with having skateboarding as his only escape and also having it as a pivotal point of trauma, where it invited greater censure from his over controlling aunts and cutting down his first real friendship. It's the kind of situation with no easy solutions, so it's a shame they dropped the plot thread they gradually set up about his political enemies trying to sabotage him to speedrun a redemption arc for him in the literal last ten minutes of the show. 2.43: Seiin High School Boys Volleyball Team: The messy bitch gay drama of Battery but now in a form that isn't in danger of putting someone into a coma out of sheer boredom. They skipped around a lot as far as volleyball action goes, but what they did show looked pretty nice, and they did a great job making you want the main rival team to win too. So be the limitations of a one cours sports anime. Bonus shoutout to the simulcast subs for actually using the volleyball lingo English speaking players say (e.g., hitters instead of "spikers") which not even Commie got right for Haikyuu. Visual Prison: The finale was rather lackluster (the Utapri director can go way harder than this, man), but this is basically the uncontested 2021 pick for gay yearning. The quirky character traits in the secondary cast that might come as poor substitution for proper characterization are better realized here. This is in part in thanks to the setting, because these dudes who are hundreds years old vampires are obviously too old to care. Even so, the jokes themselves feel more natural, like when they show Dimitri lounging around at home completely naked and letting it go by uncommented on instead of doing some wacky manzai routine. 5. Build Divide has the same issue of later Vanguard where the card games aren't very followable with how much they skip, but it knows how to spotlight moments like the protagonist going all in on a turn where he explicitly mathed out the probability of him instantly winning that turn, so it feels like there's more strategy going on than your average card game anime. Where the show really shines though is in its setting, which draws in the audience with a meta-narrative that's never directly addressed until the end of the season. The world constantly feels slightly off. Society literally runs on succeeding in the card game which was introduced during the Sengoku era, but also the world outside the city quite literally does not exist. Flashbacks to the characters' childhoods are shown exclusively in a 4:3 aspect ratio. Being the first half of an unproven split cour it could very well not deliver on anything, but at least it'd probably still be funny. And hell, it's always refreshing to see a card game show not go down the same old save the world route. 4. Re-Main is ultimately a story about learning how to get over yourself and becoming a better person, which is not the most unique thing in the world for a sports narrative, but the particular struggle here feels fresh because of how it hides behind and interacts with the amnesia element. It's a convoluted as hell setup of 1. Getting amnesia and forgetting you were an rear end in a top hat, 2. Finding out you were an rear end in a top hat and then getting your memories back, and 3. Getting amnesia again but this time forgetting everything since getting amnesia 1, so you're an rear end in a top hat again. A wild ride I loved every second of. This is the one show where I really wish they had twice as many episodes to flesh things out. 3. I won't dwell too much on Odd Taxi as it's the most mainstream pick on my list, but it's got superb execution and ticks many of my favorite drama checkboxes: murder, deep-seated psychological trauma, and bricking your phone as soon as you roll the chase SSR in your longtime mobage. Easily one of the best mystery series of the past few years and my pick for favorite show that made me lose faith in my fellow anime fans. 2. Yeah, that's right. I'm putting a second card game anime in here. People dumped on Shadowverse for not being an adaptation of the game's story mode, but I'm very glad they didn't go for the generic fantasy setting. What we got instead is the classic mix of Saturday morning cartoon antics, hype shounen moments, and parental abandonment and child abuse flavored melodrama. Sometimes the most important fight of the day is helping your mom stop your dad from destroying the world after they both mysteriously vanished ten years ago, and sometimes it's teaching your rival who only started playing the card game to win money to pay for treatment for his sister's crippling illness how to love the game. Most card game anime tend to be best received by children and fujo audiences, and yeah, they definitely play into that angle. A solid contender for straight up one of the best card game anime out there. 1. IDOLiSH7 distinguished itself in its first season by allowing its characters to fail and allowing those failures to have actual consequences. Failure as a real possibility should be a key trait of any competition based story, but it feels increasingly rare in idol anime, particularly in 2021. At best you'd see the sports anime cliche of losing at the last minute in the first competition to go on to win the next one later in the year. Aside from that though, IDOLiSH7 S1 more or less followed the same plot beats as the original iDOLM@STER series, albeit in a more cohesive realization. A fun show to be sure, but nothing groundbreaking. Season 2 changed the game by elevating the character writing to highs we rarely see in the medium. The main developments in the plot continue to be characterized by soap opera esque elements, but how characters respond to events feels very natural and grounded. Conflict can crop up even between people who care about each other deeply without hinging on simple misunderstandings. Deep-seated doubts aren't going to be cleared by a pep talk and soft assurances. Sometimes there is no easy solution to public ridicule. IDOLiSH7 has from the beginning always been good at balancing its humor and drama, but the frankness to the writing is what sets its second season apart. There's realistic depictions of how support structures can help someone deal with trauma but also how they might fall through even so. As the first half of a split cour, IDOLiSH7: Third Beat! is mostly setup for the new antagonists (led by one delightfully hammy piece of poo poo), but S2's character writing strengths continue to shine, and the storyboarding grows more inspired in concert with the drama ramping up. The confrontations we've avoided and deflected from in the previous seasons come to a head here, even spilling over into bouts of physical assault. The tension is palpable in each scene and the dialogue equally sharp, with one standout line meant as encouragement in an earlier season getting recontextualized into something decisively bitter. Even through it all, the raw feelings of frustration, self-hatred, concern, and love bubbling underneath it all are no less clearly conveyed. It's a show unafraid of being open and honest in its portrayal of the human condition warts and all while still deftly avoiding slipping into nihilism. A breath of fresh air in a year otherwise so often dogged by narrative cowardice. tl;dr: idol show turns local fans into emotional masochists 
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Jan 1, 2022 04:47
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last i saw, namtab said he's holding the thread hostage until he gets more posts in the resolutions thread, and i don't know how facetious he was being
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Jan 3, 2022 10:39
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Yes_Cantaloupe posted:Yeah, having now watched the Revue Starlight movie, I gotta rank it. #3, I think, bumping Mushoku Tensei and Superstar down, and Dynazenon off. 👍
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Jan 10, 2022 01:09
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There are just over 48 hours left to vote! So far out of 64 responses, the current standings for everything with at least 10 votes are:code:
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Jan 15, 2022 03:08
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Voting is now closed. Results will be posted tomorrow afternoon after I finish tabulating and verifying the votes.
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Jan 17, 2022 08:59
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We got a total of 79 votes and 85 unique anime worth voting for. Let's get to the top ten unranked (ties are broken by honorable mentions). 1. Odd Taxi | ODDTAXI - 42 votes + 6 HM The standout favorite pick, comprising over half of all total votes. No other show quite gets the same praise for its dialogue as Odd Taxi does.  2. SSSS.DYNAZENON - 17 votes + 7 HM Apparently not as good as its sister show Gridman, but good enough to follow suit in taking second place like Gridman did in 2018.  3. Vivy: Fluorite Eye's Song - 16 votes + 5 HM An AI narrative that borrows its themes and especially aesthetics heavily from David Cage's Detroit Become Human, but it seems reviewers were too afraid to acknowledge this fact directly. Another winner with a caveat where most people did not care for its ending.  4. Jujutsu Kaisen - 16 votes + 4 HM Sometimes good production values coupled with your popular shounen adaptation is enough to win many hearts. Did you know that it's a shounen?  5. Sonny Boy - 15 votes + 1 HM Praised for its imagination and uniqueness, but at the same time acknowledged to be incomprehensible for some of its viewers.  6. 86: Eighty Six - 11 votes + 9 HM 7. SK∞ | SK8 the Infinity - 11 votes + 7 HM 8. Shin Evangelion Movie:|| | Evangelion: 3.0+1.0 Thrice Upon a Time - 11 votes + 3 HM 9. Re:Zero kara Hajimeru Isekai Seikatsu 2nd Season Part 2 | Re:ZERO -Starting Life in Another World- Season 2 Part 2 - 10 votes + 4 HM 10. Attack on Titan Final Season - 10 votes + 2 HM The ranked top ten: code:Usernames highlighted in red indicate cases where I found a discrepancy in the vote, usually in the form of more ranked votes than anime voted for or vice versa. If there is a discrepancy between the anime voted for in the form versus the thread post, I defer to the thread post. Manual fixes to the vote are marked in the bolded green text. If someone ranked fewer shows than they voted for, I simply treated the remaining anime as all ranked #5. If there are any mistakes, please let me know.
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Jan 17, 2022 19:08
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the ranked results being ignored is proof that dav hates alternate tabulation methods
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Jan 17, 2022 19:41
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Jan 18, 2022 01:01
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 14:18 |
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You're right, I forgot to mention that Vivy stole from Portal too.
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Jan 18, 2022 08:50
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