Spoiler alert! This article contains spoilers for the following series: Revue Starlight, Planet With, Asobi Asobase, Attack on Titan Season 3, Gintama, A Place Further than the Universe, and Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online.

Lauren Orsini

Unveiling The True Antagonist (Revue Starlight)

An unseen hand has forced the girls of Seisho Music Academy to duel one another in order to become the top star. But could the person behind the curtain be closer to home than anyone realizes? This “devil we know” trope is attempted often but rarely done well: see 2016's Erased and its own troublesome take on the familiar foe. Here, the discovery is accompanied by a clear motivation and the warning signs that were there for us all along, if only we'd thought to look for them.

James Beckett

The Final Lesson (Planet With)

When hatred and fear are allowed to combine and fester in the human heart, their toxicity can tear apart individuals, families, and entire societies. Both in the realm of fiction and throughout the history of the real world, it is all too easy to point out when people were driven to do terrible, evil acts because of what they hated and what they feared, and the characters of Planet With understand better than most. Soya's entire home planet was destroyed out of a misguided act of hateful destruction, and Ginko and Sensei spend the whole series building an army to fight their well-meaning but fearful tyranny of the alien Sealing Faction with their own Pacifist Faction. When it comes time to confront the big-bad villain of the series, Soya, Ginko, and Sensei encounter a literal husk of a man who has been transformed into a monster through the sheer force of his desire to enact fearful, terrifying justice upon the galaxy. Our heroes have a message for him though: Upon reflecting on the beautiful moments of kindness and healing that have defined the story of Planet With, Sensei tells his foe, “Change your perspective with love, and behold, the universe is filled with blessings”. It's a simple, almost childlike lesson that hit me like a dump-truck full of feelings-bricks. I cried when it was first uttered in the series finale, and I'm tearing up a little bit even now. This has been a very difficult year, both for me personally in with society at large, and I can hardly express how meaningful it is to have a show that spends its final moments explicitly urging its viewers to work towards building a world defined by love and empathy.

Christopher Faris

The Bawdy Isekai Show Turns Out To Be Good (How NOT To Summon A Demon Lord)

I've watched a lot of bad anime. So sometimes I get more judgemental than I should about something out of the gate. So hearing about a new isekai show about a shut-in gamer guy who gets sucked into an RPG world, accidentally enslaves a couple of girls, then decides to roll with his role by acting the part of the villain? How could that NOT be a dunkable disaster? Then I actually watched the show. Demon Lord shockingly plays its main character's affects for maximum humor and drama of a very entertaining stripe, and doesn't skimp on developing its other cast members or even its world in surprising, interesting ways. Titular Demon Lord Diablo turned out to be an impressive case study in understanding the idiosyncrasies of writing a character defined by their social anxiety. The unique bond connecting Rem and Klem actually wound up tugging at my heartstrings towards the end. Even the fanservice thankfully mostly eschewed anything related to the show's nominal slavery premise in favor of more positive portrayals, notably showing Shera as a character enjoyably into the setting's magically-mandated sexytimes. Demon Lord wasn't a perfect show, but the way it grew for me from a serviceable curiosity to a guilty pleasure to a genuine pleasure was one of my most surprising highlights of the year. I'd be happy to see another season of this thing, which I never thought I'd say about an isekai slavery fanservice show!

Paul Jensen

Shirase Finds Takako's Laptop (A Place Further Than the Universe)

The second half of A Place Further Than the Universe featured an impressive number of dramatic high points, but the most memorable of all happened in the show's penultimate episode. Shirase's search for closure over her mother's disappearance in Antarctica was one of the show's central plotlines, and script pulled no emotional punches in resolving it. We went into this scene knowing that Shirase periodically sent emails to her mother, so Takako's old laptop computer turned out to be the perfect prop to bring everything together. The ever-increasing number of unread emails that started downloading once the computer turned on, coupled with the implication that nearly all of those messages were from Shirase, drove home just how important the journey to Antarctica was to her. It was a clever, artful way to say a lot with very little dialogue, and it hit me harder on an emotional level than anything else I watched this year.

Lynzee Loveridge

Levi's Family Tree (Attack on Titan)

Attack on Titan has continued to draw out its many mysteries over the last three seasons. I could make easily make a case for the series' royal blood line or Eren's dad but in the end the twist I was most excited for was Levi's origin story and his familial connection to Mikasa. This is very old news to manga readers but I chose to wait it out for Attack on Titan's anime adaptation and have (mostly) been able to avoid manga spoilers. Levi's been a fan-favorite of mine during the show's run and while I always expected him to have a rough childhood like everyone else living in that hellish world, being raised by a legit murderer was something else entirely.

Amy McNulty

No, You Still Don't Get A Proper Ending (Gintama)

This shocking moment in the anime is actually augmented by reality: Gintama mangaka Hideaki Sorachi's inability to finish his manga after many, many promises that the end is coming for the manga soon, down to specific dates given for the last chapter to appear in Shonen Jump. The anime, which was attempting through a combination of cour-long breaks and animating skipped manga arcs to not catch up to the manga, nonetheless caught up and reached the end of its run before the manga did, prompting the series to adapt the manga beyond the “climax” and into the time-skip long-running epilogue and then… just stopping midway. Before the credits roll, Gintoki breaks the fourth wall and launches into an energetic rant about the choices the anime staff faced in light of the manga's end date getting delayed time and again in a segment that's pure Gintama through and through, even if still a bizarre and unexpected way for the show to bow out.

Rebecca Silverman

The Horrors of Shoko's Past Are Revealed (Libra of Nil Admirari)

Good as it was, I certainly didn't expect Libra of Nil Admirari to contradict its (very) loose Latin definition, “scales of no surprises.” That changed when Tsugumi learns Shoko's past towards the end of the series. Nothing had been particularly rosy in the show, but the darkness and trauma of Shoko's backstory was still striking, in large part because it was precisely what Tsugumi feared from her own arranged marriage and mirrored the fate of many women of the late 19th century. Shoko being one of the proverbial madwomen in the attic made Tsugumi's own choices make sense in a historical context while also reminding us that she and her friend Koruri are the exceptions rather than the rule, a breath of cold reality in a story about hot guys hunting down evil magic books.

Rose Bridges

Maeda's Magic Butt (Asobi Asobase)

Asobi Asobase had already established itself as one of the sharpest and weirdest of anime comedies, a highlight of my week during the summer season. Then along came episode four, and it decided to kick that weirdness into overdrive. Right from the start of the episode, we learn that Hanako's trusty butler, Maeda, has the ability to shoot lasers out of his butt. This was already building on a weird Hanako non-sequitur joke from last week, but then Asobi Asobase didn't stop there. Unlike a true gag anime, its jokes rarely existed in isolation, but rather were stepping stones to stranger and funnier jokes down the line. In this case, Maeda also had a tragic backstory about being unable to control his butt from blowing up toilets, with the laser firing every time he had a bowel movement. It was the result of alien abduction, and indirectly led to his employment as Hanako's butler. Asobi Asobase kept having more and more fun with Maeda, but nothing beat his explosive introduction.

Theron Martin

LLEN's defeat of Pito in Squad Jam 2 (Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online)

While the timing and ultimate outcome of this scene was fully expected, the way it happened is what makes it stand out among all action scenes for the year. With the short LLENN dangling helplessly in Pito's grasp, Fukaziroh uses a knife that had been doubling for a hairpin to cut LLENN's hands off at the wrist and then kick her into Pito so LLENN could finish her off with a bite attack to the throat. Granted, it's fully abusing the game mechanics, but it's still one of the most audacious kill scenes that I've ever seen, with the stunned reactions of the crowd only amplifying it. Other especially memorable scenes and plot twists for the year including the breathtaking moment in the first episode of Megalo Box where Joe first confronts Yuri boxer-to-boxer in the rain, the stunning execution of Nami in episode 8 of Full Metal Panic! Invisible Victory, and the jarring death of Shoko in episode 9 of Happy Sugar Life.

Mike Toole

Hellshake Yano (Pop Team Epic)

With Pop Team Epic, there's not really a story there— protagonists Pipimi and Popuko don't have character arcs, they're just a pair of adorably mean, spiteful schoolgirls who react to most of their gag-driven situations with a mixture of profanity and violence. Most successful anime adaptations of gag manga succeed by either preserving the short form, or by carefully weaving the gags into longer story arcs. Pop Team Epic just presents the manga's jokes, along with some new ones, as crudely and haltingly as possible. Thanks to the producer's approach of involving multiple creative teams, this yields some wonderful fruit, like a wholly unexpected felt-puppet-driven tribute to Earth, Wind & Fire. The show's finest, most startling, and most impressive moment is the locus of a gag involving Hellshake Yano, a mysterious metal guitarist that the characters frequently find themselves thinking of. We are then shown Hellshake Yano's finest hour onstage, as presented by a pair of grinning doofuses in lab coats flipping through a pair of sketchbooks in dizzying rhythm, somehow using the crudest and simplest of media to depict something incredible. That's what Pop Team Epic is all about, man.