Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion – December 28, 2025


Anime Questions, Recommendations, and Discussion – December 28, 2025

This is a daily megathread for general chatter about anime. Have questions or need recommendations? Here to show off your merch? Want to talk about what you just watched.

This is the place!

All spoilers must be tagged. Use [anime name] to indicate the anime you're talking about before the spoiler tag, e.g. [Attack on Titan] This is a popular anime.

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Recommendations

Don't know what to start next? Check our wiki first!

Not sure how to ask for a recommendation? Fill this out, or simply use it as a guideline, and other users will find it much easier to recommend you an anime!

I'm looking for: A certain genre? Something specific like characters traveling to another world?

Shows I've already seen that are similar: You can include a link to a list on another site if you have one, e.g. MyAnimeList or AniList.

Resources

Other Threads

State of the Subreddit – Looking at r/anime heading into 2026


State of the Subreddit – Looking at r/anime heading into 2026

Howdy folks, hope everyone has had a great 2025 and is looking forward to the new year. As we wrap up the year, we wanted to put together something of a meta thread discussing notable changes to the sub in the past year, and just generally get a sense of what people are looking for in r/anime as we head into 2026. So let's dig into the meatier topics of the past year!

We've got a quick survey to get a sense of what the community is looking for out of r/anime

The Anime Specific Rule

While nothing has changed on this front in quite some time, this year definitely brought the most substantial discussions on the matter in quite a few years. For anyone unaware, r/anime is specifically a subreddit for animation produced by Japanese animation studios. This year did bring a couple discussion points though, so we might as well run through them:

First off was To Be Hero X which has Aniplex involved as a producer, but the primary animation studios were all Chinese. There was a not insignificant amount of Japanese involvement in other avenues, and the series debuted with a Japanese dub that Crunchyroll had incorrectly labeled as the original for some time. Second was Lord of Mysteries which was a Chinese series through and through, but was again on Crunchyroll and has an established audience that wanted to discuss it here. And third and least notably was Who Made Me a Princess, an isekai series based on a Korean webnovel with a Chinese animated adaptation which came with a Japanese dub. Again on Crunchyroll. Not as big a name, so we didn't see as much discussion about it, but still worth bringing up.

Right now, the view of the mod team is that anime is a distinct culture of Japan, though it has prominent influence on animated works produced around the world. We don’t view anime as an aesthetic, an art style, a set of themes/genres, where it's streaming, or anything else. With the sheer volume of anime that has been (and will be) produced, we currently have a truly massive scope, spanning thousands of movies, series, shorts, and music videos. We aren't currently looking to expand that even further. The community is also generally more focused on the 70+ seasonal anime airing at any given time. Any expansion of scope inevitably gives less priority to the seasonal shows that are already niche.

There were a variety of ideas presented about ways we could potentially expand the scope of the subreddit, but the bulk of these tended to feel less like genuine ideas targeted at improving r/anime, and more as ways to justify one or two shows being added to the subreddit because people wanted to talk about those ones specifically.

For now, we’re pretty content with the scope of the subreddit and aren’t looking to make changes. That said, we’re always keeping an eye on the community in case something else makes sense.

Engagement on r/anime

Based on comments per month, we can say that activity on r/anime is down at the present.

Part of this is that we’re inevitably tied to the relevance of whatever is airing. With Frieren S2 and Jujutsu Kaisen S3 both airing in January, I suspect we’ll be back up. We’re also at a time when text based engagement is broadly down as people move to more consumable platforms rather than ones they directly engage with. That said, there’s certainly a lot of room to look at what is and isn’t working on the sub and consider what options might be available if we’re looking to make the subreddit more engaging.

This is always a balance. More comments just for the sake of them isn’t something that we want to do. The priority from the mod team’s perspective is that we want to have varied and meaningful discussion on r/anime. We want r/anime to be somewhere that people can go for a sense of community and for things that are interesting and engaging within the context of anime at large. But that's not something we can just do on our own. We can provide the canvas for people to operate on, but without people doing interesting things with it, we won't see improvements in engagement.

Fanart and Cosplay

A few years back fanart and cosplay were allowed to be posted as images again, and overall the tide has never fully turned back to the absolute glut we were seeing circa Spring 2020 when the frontpage was, on average, 50% fanart at any given time. Overall it’s been mostly a net positive now, as it’s cool to see, but it hasn’t been killing everything else. That said, we definitely had seen some users try to monetize our community in various ways, and were looking at what we might want to do about it.

And then the cosplay wave came in. This was never that much in terms of total numbers, but they tended to shoot straight to the top, and they tended to be NSFW. Most of these were specifically advertising OnlyFans accounts, and that definitely drew some ire from a lot of people. While some of it was well intentioned, a lot of it was not.

In the end, the decision was made to disallow promotional content from fan creators whose accounts we determine to be “primarily centered around advertising goods and services will have their posts removed if they advertise (directly or indirectly)”. This does not apply to say, a YouTube channel or website that also has ads on it. Overall, this change seems to have worked out pretty well. We’re still getting fanart and cosplay, but now without as much of a financial incentive.

That said, I think there was a bit of disappointment on our end how much of the discussion was either “think of the children!” or some flavour of misogyny. The general anti-sexualization sentiment that came up was in stark contrast to just about every other type of content on r/anime (such as clips or recommendation threads) and the concerns about advertising were not reflected in fanart posts that also were transparently advertising. A large number of bans were handed out in this time over some choice words people were using about the cosplayers.

Other Points of Note

Flair Changes

The [Writing] and [Watch This!] flairs have been replaced with [Essay] and [Review]. The Watch This! Project had a good run, but after more than a decade there wasn’t much continued participation, and so replacing it with a more general review flair was seen as the most obvious direction, especially since it opens the door to a more varied set of opinions than focused praise. Thus far we do seem to have been seeing more users take advantage of the [Review] flair in particular.

Source Material Corner

We've recently been able to implement some changes to how the Source Material Corner works. It's no longer auto-collapsed on the app anymore, which hopefully makes more aware of it's existence. We were also able to implement an improved and more comprehensive autoflagging method to more completely enforce the Source Material Corner rule. Lastly, we've also added additional clarification that the Source Material Corner is not specifically and singularly about explicit spoilers, and have different removal reasons to make this as clear as possible.

Have you noticed any differences in Episode discussion threads in the last month? And how do you feel about the Source Material Corner rule and source readers talking about the source in general. Does the presence of source readers in the threads affect your desire to use the Episode Discussion threads?

Changes to Subscriber Counts

I’m sure a lot of people have noticed that Reddit changed from showcasing number of subscribers to number “active members”. Alongside this, they also changed something about either how subscribers occur or what is counted, because while we were monitoring this, the numbers had sudden, very distinct dropoffs at a couple of points in the fall. This hasn't noticeably impacted activity on the sub. We’re going to be re-evaluating exactly how we do events as a result, because X million subscribers is basically dead at the moment.

For everyone that's made it this far, thanks for helping make r/anime a great community. We're hoping to make even more of it in the coming year.

We hope you're enjoying the holiday season, and that you have a happy new year!