Anime awards are supposed to be a celebration, and to be fair, the 2026 Crunchyroll Anime Awards gave fans a lot to celebrate. The ceremony marked the awards’ 10th anniversary in Tokyo, with Crunchyroll reporting more than 73 million votes cast. That’s not a small fan event anymore. That’s anime operating like a global entertainment machine, with the kind of audience participation that most TV awards would love to have.

This year’s big winners were exactly the kind of shows you’d expect to dominate. My Hero Academia Final Season won Anime of the Year, while Demon Slayer Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle won Film of the Year. GamesRadar described the night as one where Demon Slayer and My Hero Academia “reign supreme,” which sounds about right. These are huge franchises, they have massive fan bases, and they’ve become the kind of anime titles that even casual viewers recognize.

But awards shows are never just about who won. They’re about who didn’t. That’s where the real fun starts. The second the winners are announced, fans stop clapping and start building court cases. This show should’ve won. That category made no sense. That nominee was robbed. That other show only won because it had a bigger fan base. It’s messy, emotional, and completely predictable. Honestly, it’s also the best part.

Polygon already leaned into that side of the conversation with a piece on anime that Crunchyroll’s 2026 awards “failed to honor,” pointing to Apocalypse Hotel for Best Original Anime, City the Animation for Best Comedy Anime, and Orb On the Movements of the Earth for Best Drama Anime. That’s the kind of snub list that gets fans talking because it moves the discussion away from popularity and into taste. It asks whether the awards are rewarding the best anime, the biggest anime, or simply the loudest fan bases.

That’s always the tension with fan-heavy awards. Popularity isn’t meaningless. If millions of people love a show, that matters. Anime isn’t made in a vacuum, and audience connection is part of the art. But the most popular show isn’t always the most daring, the most original, or the most emotionally precise. Sometimes the smaller, stranger, quieter anime gets buried because it doesn’t have the same army of voters behind it.

That’s why snubs matter. They keep the conversation from becoming just a victory parade for the biggest franchises. Demon Slayer winning a major award makes sense. So does My Hero Academia. These are cultural giants. But when shows like Orb, City the Animation, or Apocalypse Hotel get pulled into post-awards arguments, it gives them another life. A snub can be annoying for fans, but it can also be free marketing. People who never watched the show suddenly want to know why everyone is mad.

The 2026 nominations also show how crowded anime has become. Dandadan reportedly led with 20 nominations, followed by The Apothecary Diaries with 17, Gachiakuta with 16, and My Hero Academia with 15. That’s a stacked field before you even get to Takopi’s Original Sin, The Summer Hikaru Died, Solo Leveling, Spy x Family, Chainsaw Man, and One Piece. There’s no version of this where everyone walks away happy.

And maybe that’s fine. Anime fans don’t really need awards shows to tell them what to love. They need awards shows to give them something to argue about for a week. The winners get the trophies, the snubs get the think pieces, and everyone else gets a new watchlist.

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