If the show/film initially had a wide release in 2025 and is not continuing into 2026, then yes! This applies for any show/film that is eligible to discuss in this community, meaning that it has either a MAL page or an AniList listing. This means that Chinese-produced shows like “Lord of the Mysteries” or “To Be Hero X” are eligible in these awards. Also, shows that started their run in 2024, but continued into 2025 are eligible, such as “Orb: On the Movements of the Earth.” Another peculiar case is something like “The Colors Within,” which was released in Japan in 2024, but didn’t see wider international release until 2025. In this case, I am deeming it eligible since the bulk of our community would not have access to Japanese theaters. Feel free to ask if you have questions about any additional edge-cases.

To be frank, not enough people really participated last year in that medium to have a formal award system like this. Additionally, there is a lot less structure in the world of translated manga due to the nature of official releases and unofficial translations/scanlations in many different languages that means marking things around a calendar year makes a lot less sense. Somebody’s favorite series that they read in 2025 could be an older series that is just now getting a scanlated release in their native language.

Instead, what I plan on doing for the manga community is to have the next general discussion thread be a discussion of favorites from the past year so that both communities are having this kind of conversation at the same time.

I apologize for people that might have been looking forward to those awards, but as I was trying to think about how to run them and looking back over the responses from last year’s awards, it just seemed less and less feasible. As an example, many categories consisted of nominees with 1-2 nominations at most that I hadn’t read because it was relatively rare for two users to nominate the same series. This led to a situation where it was a ton of work on my part to try to read enough of every series to try to jury the nominations. I just don’t have that kind of time this year.

I mostly used the same categories as last year with some changes based on the feedback from that time. For instance, the different genres have been tweaked to be a bit broader for each with fewer overall genres. Specifically, I dropped the suspense category due to lots of confusion about what could be included there last year. I also clarified that fantasy includes adventure (this would include isekai as well).

Another change from last year is broadening the musical sequence category to be either OP, ED, or insert song. There were some that asked for this category to be split up into OP and ED separately, but looking through the nominations from last year, I don’t think there was enough of both category (it was almost all OPs) to separate them.

A category that was dropped from last year is the best duo. This category led to lots of nominations that were permutations of characters from ensemble shows and basically resulted in romantic interests being the most nominated. I thought about turning this into a best couple or best ship category, but at the end of the day, I just opted to drop it so that I have fewer categories to sort through the nominations for.

Finally, I clarified that the voice acting award is for a specific role instead of all of a performer’s roles in the past year, and in a specific language.

I am sure most of you are familiar with our resident episode discussion thread bot, @rikka@ani.social. I initially looked into doing this voting with her as well, but it made my life easier to utilize a separate account for this purpose so that I didn’t cross the thread request and voting streams, thus @kurisu@ani.social. As our resident assistant, Christina Kurisu will dutifully record everybody’s nominations and, later, their votes.

I will reply to this comment with Kurisu so that it is easy to click her username and compose a message that is simply !nominate.

make sure that the first line of your reply message is !nominations. If you followed directions and just copy/pasted the markdown from kurisu’s message, that is how the message should start. Then, each category is a heading. Just populate the bulleted lists under the heading for the category you want to nominate things for. Please don’t edit the headings as it will make my life much easier when I am parsing all these replies. As an example, the beginning of my reply might look like this (I picked some random shows):

!nominations

# 2025 Anime Series of the Year

- Sanda
- Tsuyokute New Saga
- mono

# 2025 Anime Film of the Year

…and so on for the rest of the categories.

In roughly a week (or so). I don’t have a set time yet, but I don’t think I will leave nominations open longer than February 13th or so. I will then take a couple days to collate all the nominations and select the final nominees. Then I will open up voting (again for roughly a week or so).