Crunchyroll Anime Awards nominations shockingly leave out fan favourites

Crunchyroll Best Anime Award Nominees
Crunchyroll Best Anime Award Nominees (Image via Crunchyroll)

Crunchyroll recently released its Anime Awards nominations for 2023, and fans can now vote for the same. However, the nominations have disappointed fans after the streaming service decided to make changes to this year's nomination qualifications. As such, the new changes have caused some major titles to miss out on being nominated for the same.

Having started first in January 2017, the Crunchyroll Anime Awards, also known as the Anime Awards, is an awards ceremony conducted by the streaming giant to recognize the best anime of the previous year. The awards are given annually as fans all around the world are allowed to vote for the same.


Anime watchers express disappointment after Crunchyroll omits several fan-favorite series from the Fall 2022 anime season

For the first time ever, Crunchyroll decided to exclude the Fall 2022 anime from all of its nominations, stating that those anime will qualify for the 2024 edition of the Anime Awards.

This decision disappointed a lot of fans as it meant that several anime, which had dominated the industry during the Fall 2022 anime season, might lose their opportunity to get recognized. Some of these anime include Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, Chainsaw Man, Bocchi the Rock!, Mob Psycho 100 III, and Blue Lock.

That being said, fans are almost certain that the streaming service may have made such a decision to help promote the sequel seasons of the anime that have appeared in the nominations, i.e., Attack on Titan Final Season, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, and Spy X Family.

Fans are especially tired of seeing Attack on Titan appearing in every award nomination. Considering that the anime has worldwide recognition, it is bound to get nominated for multiple spots, thus not allowing other deserving anime to win awards. Moreover, the situation feels quite probable since Attack on Titan already has 12 nominations in the Crunchyroll Anime Awards.

While fans of popular shonen anime such as Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War, Chainsaw Man, and Blue Lock have expressed disappointment over the anime nominations being predictable, several fans were also rooting for Bocchi the Rock! to win the best anime awards.

Many anime watchers believed that Bocchi the Rock! was set to rack up awards in the 2023 Crunchyroll Anime Awards. However, that moment was snatched away from the streaming service's executives.

While fans do realize that the streaming service might have wanted to avoid recency bias, it is frustrating to see that some of the most popular anime were omitted from the nominations only to have been released during the Fall anime cycle.

Meanwhile, other anime fans had different problems with the nominations. Firstly, none of the shows that were nominated for the awards were female-centric anime, which saw several anime being excluded, including the likes of Sasaki to Miyano, Idolish7, I'm the Villainess so I'm Taming the Final Boss, and Koroshi Ai.

In addition to this, fans even noticed how the streaming service created the category called Best Anime Song, a category besides Best Opening and Ending, only to add them as a collective in the same. This didn't make sense, as the same could have been used for OSTs that were featured in the anime.

Overall, fans were disappointed with Crunchyroll's choice of nominations and its decision to leave out some of the major fan-favorite series from being considered for potential Anime Awards categories.