(Special Thanks to JunKuga for the picture.)
Scene: Inside the offices of The Fandom Post, 1 am on January 1, 2014. There is a room littered with various bottles that once held “strong” refreshments as well as numerous pizza boxes. A rather forlorn looking robotic cleaning machine is constantly hitting against a leg of a chair. Suddenly, from under a heap of pizza boxes there emerges a figure wearing a rather fashionable tuxedo.
Oh, hi there and welcome to the Reviewers’ Lounge. I’m Greg Smith, anime reviewer and occasional columnist for The Fandom Post. Last year, Bryan Morton and I did a look back at all of the new anime that debuted on air in Japan and were legally streamed to the wider world during the year and shared some thoughts about it. This year, we decided to do things a little differently, trying to gauge the entire staff’s thoughts about last year’s shows. I thought it might be fun to do things in an awards format for a change, though we don’t have any physical trophies to offer and don’t even have a nickname to call them by (one person suggested “Fannies” and was immediately sent out on said part).
Without further ado, it is my pleasure to present the inaugural Fandom Post Year in Anime Awards for 2013.
Recognizing the Best from a Good Year
A whole new slate of anime (with some returning favorites and sequels) is starting to be broadcast in Japan as the Winter 2014 season gets into full gear. That makes it the perfect time to look back at the year just passed. It was a good year for anime as 2013 provided us with a broad range of entertainment, an affirmation that anime is far from dead as a medium, despite the best attempts of the mainstream media to use it solely for tentacle jokes (as a certain satirical news show that shall not be named did recently. Poor Tsukiko). We had action, drama, romance, comedy, and the just plain weird. In other words, a normal year for our favored medium.
During the course of this month, individual reviewers will be sharing their Top 10 lists (and Editor in Chief Chris Beveridge has already posted his Top 15 disc releases of the year), but we asked the staff of the Fandom Post to sit down in the Reviewers’ Lounge (with the results seen above) and share their thoughts about what did and did not impress them during the course of the year. Based upon their rankings of shows in the various categories, winners were determined by the overall strength of support for them. Not every winner had a string of first place votes behind it, so I will be providing some commentary, and even the various reviewers’ own discussions of the nominees, for several of the categories.
Let’s get this circus party started!
