Anitrendz and Crunchyroll posted their awards. Not too surprising there are barely any overlaps between the two…I already written off CR’s award a long time ago and really only check them out for the guests. As a US-based subscriber from pretty much the start I am a bit obliged to pay attention to it, but it’s just disappointing. At least it consistently puts Sally in a nice dress and in front of a global audience!
It’s a bit salt-on-wound when the Yoasobi segment from CR’s award show was cut from the stream on archive…given this stream starts 6pm JST which is not really humane hours for US ET. US PT was 1am so it’s a bit better? Not to mention the whole Yoasobi “tour” that stopped only at 2 Californian stops… [Whoever is trying to do this is just … not good. You can’t just do “let’s squeeze 2 shows around Cochella” for Yoasobi, they deserve way, way much better, their fans deserve much, much better…they’re too big for this sort of nonsense. (See you in LA?)]
I always posited that these “best of” games are good discovery tools. A video games award-y pow-wow for the industry is like, okay, I guess? But it is a lot of money into a circle jerk. Anime is getting more mainstream in the west and the US, so I expect more fanfare, I just hope CR just doesn’t take the lazy way out…well it already is, so I guess it can’t get much worse.
It really can’t get much worse because you would have discovered nothing as a current-anime follower–every title in their list is well-known. Like, do you really need to rep One Piece, Demon Slayer, or Jujutsu Kaisen? Maybe Jujutsu Kaisen for old timers who don’t watch any anime anymore…but do you really need an annual award for this? Or is that the target audience? That isn’t the case for the Video Game awards or the Oscars. I am a bit at a loss at the point of the CR’s other than as a marketing exercise. I don’t even care about the bias, dozens and dozens of great titles on CR gets buried every year and their own dog-and-pony show doesn’t even do anything, lol. They should be more biased if anything.
After all, just look at the Reddit one. It is outright a superior one than CR’s. Just join forces. Whatever it is, it would be an improvement than throwing cash into a farcical furnace that it is doing right now.
