Allowing all the nominations to be finalists eligible for voting would have been a lot. Not just asking people to read through ~20-40 nominees for each category, but taking the time on my end of creating a survey with that many entries. I simply do not have the time to do that. I apologize if I was misleading during the nomination round. Like I mentioned elsewhere, this came together pretty quickly, and I am absolutely open to feedback like this for if/when we do something like this again.

As for sharing nomination data, I don’t want to be completely transparent to that degree. It’s not that I rigged the system or anything, but I just think it invites people to argue over every case of where I made any kind of judgement call and I don’t think that will be productive. In the specific case of Apothecary Diaries, this was surprising to me too. I can share a bit about this category specifically.

Here is a graph of the number of nominations for the top 10 most-nominated titles. I marked generally on the graph where Frieren and Apothecary fall to offer a comparison due to the two shows straddling the 2023/2024 seasons in the same way.

In future iterations of this process, I think I (or somebody) might have to take a more active role in adjudicating nominees. I do worry now that people know I made these calls based on number of nominations that they could simply fill out the form a bunch of times. There are some steps I can take on my end to prevent or filter that, but it would also mean doing things like attaching browser cookies to the form or recording ip addresses, which I haven’t wanted to do out of respect for the users.