To be honest, I'm with
@Joshawott, I don't think the awards particularly are a measure of quality so much as a measure of popularity. Nobody expects
The Act of Killing to win an MTV Movie Award, but that doesn't invalidate the MTV Movie Awards. They just serve a different purpose, and no matter how the awards are cut or handed out, there is always going to be a huge snub somewhere. It doesn't invalidate the MTV Movie Awards, it just means I won't be formulating my viewing list based on Best On-Screen Kiss nominees. (Not that I would anyway, kissing is gross.
)
And we know from the UKA Awards discussion thread, that even after they gave out awards via committee, a couple of the committee members later expressed disappointment
KIZNAIVER didn't get nominated for Best OP. So there is no infallible way of making sure the "best" titles always win or even get nominations. That said 4 seems like too small a number to get a good spread of shows and examples, when there's thousands of hours of animation a year.
I don't know that the nominees were particularly varied enough, but maybe people's expectations are unreasonable. Nominating a sequel season, carries the expectation people will watch the previous seasons, which in the case of JoJo's is 70-odd episodes. I don't know that I'd expect new episodes of anything that isn't a major long-running shonen from WSJ or Kodansha's Weekly Shonen Magazine to stand a chance compared to a "one-shot" series. I absolutely loved
Blood Blockade Battlefront last year, I was rather disappointed it didn't get many nominations in UKA's Awards, but it doesn't mean the awards are bad or the show is bad, it just means UKA's staff didn't like it (or maybe didn't see it). I like lots of obscure and weird things other people don't (like the
World Trigger anime), that doesn't invalidate their opinion or my opinion, it just means I'm more awesome (or something like that)!
I don't know that restricting the awards to Premium Members is especially fair, as it cuts off members on low income or those too young to have access to a PayPal account, or even those that tried things during the last season but didn't like them. Maybe Free Members who registered before the nominations were announced would work. I have also seen suggestions that the awards should be restricted those that Crunchyroll can confirm have watched three-quarters of the nominees, which seems like a bad idea as it limits the nominees to titles for which Crunchyroll holds streaming rights, potentially excluding many foreign fans and dub viewers, and their viewing tracker doesn't seem all that accurate to me. (I can't seem to get it work online, but it works fine on their apps.) Maybe restricting it to Free Members who registered before the nominations were announced would work, but more making it more substantial systems start to unfairly(?) exclude certain groups.
The complaints about exploits of the voting system seem like a distraction to me. The assumption that
Yuri!!! on Ice fans were doing it, but fans of other shows weren't, is a clear and insulting attempt to deligitimise votes for
Yuri!!! on Ice. This is not to say the complaints about the voting system are invalid, just that tying them to
Yuri!!! on Ice's victory specifically seems unfair when for all we know
ERASED fans might have been doing it as well/instead.
As an aside, the amount of people criticising
Yuri!!! on Ice fans for not knowing enough about animation, whilst also referring to it (seemingly meaning the entire show) as being rotoscoped is doing my nut in. Tracing some sequences and rotoscoping the entire show are different things.
Yuri!!! on Ice deserves credit for successfully incorporating and including several sequences that involved tracing from other sources, but never letting them feel or look out of place in comparison to the rest of the show. Also, rotoscoping and tracing are legitimate animation techniques, that have been used for sequences in
Terror in Resonance, as well as apparently backgrounds in
Free! Iwatobi Swim Club, why is everyone being so dismissive here?
