If you have not already listened to the podcast of this category, this is the final results, so this will spoil the course of the discussion on that podcast! Be warned!
God, can you believe this was the year of the Endless Eight goof? It’s been long enough, I can break kayfabe- Nick and I pretending to be caught in a time loop and recording eight versions of a podcast on the same stretch of massively boring anime was a real test of our creativity and patience. Compared to that, the rest of Oops All Anime and Oops All Manga has been a cake walk. Even the bad ones. But for all the rough patches that show gave us this year, it gave us some pretty amazing gifts. Let’s talk about the best of them.
The Winner
Bubblegum Crisis
It’s hard to overcome a show that we liked so much that we all bought Blu-Rays of it in the middle of the Oops episode. I feel like Bubblegum Crisis being our winner tells you more about us than it does about the show. Sometimes a thing is just rad as hell, and you don’t care about anything else! Should we?
Maybe we could give this spot to a really touching work, a moving one, an ambitious one. I like to think we give those works their due, that we treat them with respect and appreciate them. But what we want more than anything is to sit down and watch sick action with a classic anime style as a lady shreds out some 80s guitar. We Like Fun.
The Runners-Up
ODDTAXI
It’s not really that odd a taxi, to be honest. ODDTAXI’s success is actually a really simple thing to explain- the dialogue is just fantastic. It doesn’t have a particularly novel plot, and the art is nice but it’s not gonna blow anyone away. You are there for the same reason people pick our main character Odokawa’s taxi, out of all the other cabbies out there- just to hang out and talk to this interesting dude. Not that the other characters don’t bring their own appeal, by any means- ODDTAXI just thinks that people are interesting and complicated, and probably trying to be decent whatever that means to them.
The show presents a drug-stealing nurse, a mafia boss, a blunt triggerman, and a corrupt cop, without ever being willing to write any of them off. It’s not trying to defend them, either- it just thinks that this is all hard, this dumb life thing. We do our best, except sometimes we don’t. But everything we do is for a reason, even a bad reason, and sitting in a cab with a grouchy middle aged man isn’t a bad moment to examine why we are the way we are.
Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou
I’m sorry- I’m gonna do a bad job here. Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou is a singularly beautiful work about making piece with the slow end of the world. We did an Oops All Manga about it, which you can and should check out here (though it’s for $1+ patrons). I think any attempt to describe it now, in text, would fall embarrassingly short. It’s a really powerful piece of art.
So instead, I want to talk about something else. Over on the Patreon, which I promise I won’t plug too much, we offer patrons who support at a certain tier for a year the option to pick something for us to cover. We call them Listener Requests, intuitively enough. And you wanna know something funny?
Let’s look at some categories here. Exclude the game categories- we don’t allow for game requests, that’s a huge amount of work. So the Iris Award, Best Anime Character, Anime Song of the Year, and Anime of the Year.
In Iris, one of our runners-up, One Cut of the Dead, was a listener request. In Best Anime Character, a runner-up was from a listener request. Anime Song, ANOTHER listener request runner-up. And here, the WINNER is from a listener request, AND one of the runners-up too. That’s not to mention the nominees for each category- listener requests made quite a few appearances there.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, one of the biggest gifts to the work we do as critics is the support and prompting of our listeners. We try to have a wider vision, to pick things to cover that will surprise or challenge us, but it’s hard. And having folks who appreciate our work point us to things we wouldn’t have found ourselves, or give us the nudge to look at something now that we have on a to-do list that’s years long? I couldn’t be more grateful. Thank you, folks.
Friday is our next Gimmick Award, as we ask, what is the Game of a Decade Ago? Remember 2012? Jen and I were both doing game crit, back then. We had our own personal picks for Game of the Year. But it’s been a decade. How have ten years changed our minds about all this? Let’s see, shall we? But not like right now. Friday. Yeah.
Our art for the Gimmick Awards 2022 is a commission from @inkopolis on Twitter.
