The Best Anime Moments of 2024

A truly great moment comes in multiple forms. Sometimes, the biggest payoff is the denouement. This is when all the threads come together to reveal the truth of the matter, and it can be shockingly effective in fiction. Anime is no exception, pulling back the curtain to reveal the true intentions of the mastermind.

A great moment can also be less serious, like a laugh-out-loud joke or taking a concept far beyond what the audience thought was possible. Below are some of the shocking, hilarious, and truly touching moments that stayed with our writers all year.

Note: Entries below contain spoilers for series and plot developments!

"Whoa, Hey!" (Delicious in Dungeon)

This isn't a huge element of the Delicious in Dungeon manga, and the anime hasn't always done the best job translating this part of the series, but this franchise regularly grapples with some feelings around sexuality and sexual expression! Laios only becomes more overtly ace as the story goes on, Senshi is (correctly) called out as a hunk despite being a weird hippie, and Marcille and Falin give off the most adorable baby-queer vibes.

Despite this, acts of intimacy and overtly sexual acts often have an alien quality to them, like the characters aren't entirely sure how to react in those situations. I was first queued into this in the scene where Falin and Marcille are bathing together in the manga. Rather than Marcille having a blushing reaction to Falin taking her hand in the anime, Marcille's expression originally reads as overwhelmed and unsure to me. While I think Trigger's adaptation of Delicious in Dungeon is incredible, I was a bit bummed that they were seemingly missing this part of the manga.

That is until Falin, now a giant murderous monster girl, rips her top off in the early episodes of DinD's second season! This was one of the year's first viral anime clips, and Trigger does, in fact, understand this part of the assignment! Handled splendidly in the dub, Marcille, played by Emily Rudd, has such a reflexive reaction to Falin's animalistic expression of sexuality that the scene manages to be hilarious, hot, and honest about this part of the human condition all at the same time!

There is so much happening so well in this scene that I'd need an entire article to get into all of it, but I hope I've made the case already for why this is the best moment in anime in 2024.

“Magic Should Be Free.” (Frieren: Beyond Journey's End)

There are so many amazing moments in Frieren, but if we're talking about ones that aired in 2024, one sticks with me more than any other: the climax to the first part of the mage exam. During the test, Frieren and Fern are put on different teams and tasked with catching a bird while defending their feathery prize from other teams.

The action climax comes in a battle where Frieren's team and another pair up and fight. Upon winning her part of the duel and taking back her team's stolen bird, Frieren reveals that she wasn't actually giving her all in the battle. She had been focused on analyzing the dome barrier separating the testing grounds from the outside world. At that point, she promptly does “the impossible” and destroys it.

This not only shows Frieren's power but is seen as a direct challenge by an elven mage even older and stronger than Frieren herself, setting up events to come. We also get the intriguing tidbit that Frieren is the “Last Great Mage.” But what's truly interesting is the reason Frieren shatters the barrier in the first place.

Frieren simply felt sorry for her teammate, Kanne, a water mage. Outside the barrier, it was raining, but none of the water could get in, stifling Kanne's magical freedom. To Frieren, magic is not something to be strictly controlled or used for one single purpose. The true limit of magic is one thing and one thing only: human imagination. And this is why destroying the barrier was a tactical choice as much as a philosophical one. After all, who could imagine themselves beating someone with full control of water while in the rain?

Asebi's True Face (YATAGARASU: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master)

If you'd been paying excruciatingly close attention, you might have seen this coming. For most of the first half of YATAGARASU: The Raven Does Not Choose Its Master, we were meant to feel for Asebi, the seeming underdog of the women vying for the hand of the kin'u prince. She shared point-of-view duties with Yukiya, and the story did its level best to make us think that they were similar: country ravens thrown into the cutthroat court, struggling to understand the machinations of others as they sought to make a place for themselves. That's why it hit so hard when it turned out that Asebi was never as sweet and innocent as she seemed to be. She and Yukiya were moral opposites; he was brashly attempting to understand his new position and help, and she was quietly working behind the scenes to make things go her way. The discovery that she didn't see anything wrong with what she did – her victims were “only hill ravens,” after all – moves her into Lady Macbeth territory, where her style was to “look like th'innocent flower, but be the serpent under't.” As I said before, you could probably have sussed this truth out by paying extremely close attention, particularly to the imagery in the opening theme, but even if you guessed, the reveal is handled with aplomb. You should never trust the ones who act like sweetness and light – at least not without looking at what's hidden in their shadow.

Rafal's Inquisition (Orb: On the Movements of the Earth episode 3)

Orb is a show with a lot to say about humanity's relationship with science and the kinds of institutions that seek to impede our understanding of it. As good as its commentary is, none connects quite like Rafal's final scene in episode 3. Up to that point, Rafal was a person who defined himself by his ability to avoid sticking out and outwardly conform to societal standards. When he finds himself getting involved with the theory of heliocentrism, Rafal initially wants nothing to do with it, especially since he lives in an age where any involvement in such theories could get him tortured and killed by the church's inquisition. But as his curiosity grows, he finds it harder and harder to resist the desire to learn more about it, and this lands him in the crosshairs of Novak, an inquisitor who is wholly devoted to the maintenance of the status quo and is willing to stamp out anything that interferes with it.

When Novak tries to convince Rafal to recant his theories in exchange for a lighter sentence, Rafal knows that it would be smart to play along and do what he says, but having come face to face with the truth, he can't bring himself to deny the knowledge he's stumbled upon. Instead, he chooses to die defending his beliefs, but not before warning Novak that there are always going to be people in pursuit of such knowledge and that it can never be suppressed as easily as he'd like it to be. It makes for a fantastic way of closing out the show's prologue, and while the rest of the show does a great job of proving Rafal correct, this scene best conveys the importance of why it's so important to resist those seeking to ban knowledge. With America in the middle of book bans across multiple states and an incoming administration that actively denies modern science, it's a message that feels especially timely. While it might not make for one of the flashiest scenes to come from an anime this year, it's certainly one of the most important.

The Best Character Returns (Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Part 3 - The Conflict)

Incoming spoilers for part 3 of Thousand-Year Blood War:

THE BEST VILLAIN IS BACK. IT'S HIS TIME. AFTER ALL THIS TIME, SOSUKE “THE GOAT” AIZEN HAS ARRIVED AT LONG LAST.

It took 50 bajillion years, but what I'd call one of the all-time best villains of the entire shonen genre is back. You wouldn't believe the audible scream I screamed when he graced my screen again after all these years—and let's be perfectly clear, it has been many years. It's well past time he showed up again, and I certainly hope we get to see more of him as the series progresses. Well, let me be more specific: I hope Aizen's able to pull a classic Aizen move that results in his escaping detainment, defeating Yhwach somehow, and reclaiming his rightful place as the central villain of the series once again. I said this at one point in the daily streaming reviews for this season, but it's not necessarily that I think Yhwach is a poor villain—he's a very powerful and intimidating one, indeed. But I love over-planned schemes, and that's Aizen's whole thing.

Suffice it to say, I just find him to be a much more engaging—not to mention entertaining—antagonist than Yhwach (note: no, I haven't read the manga, so please don't confirm or deny my hopes). And let's be honest: it's not like Aizen's not also very intimidating. Even setting aside how devious he is, he's become so much more powerful since last we saw him—and that's despite his detainment. He's stronger trapped in a Mayuri-made chair than some characters in this show are at their full power.

In any case, while we've had brief segments with him—which is more than we can say about any of the previous seasons of Thousand-Year Blood War—collectively, he's only had a few minutes on-screen this season, if that. But what a charismatic few minutes those were. As far as I'm concerned, Aizen is the apex Bleach villain, and now that he's around, it truly feels like things in the show have started to heat up.

Bravern's True Identity (Bang Brave Bravern!)

There's a school of thought that a plot twist is devalued if you manage to predict it ahead of time. This is wrong. Now, credit where it's due: I absolutely was not the one who called Bang Brave Bravern's most outrageous swerve. A couple of colleagues, including my esteemed former TWIA alum Nicky, were the ones who brought the possibility of the big gay robot being Smith from the future to my attention. At the time I heard this, barely a couple of episodes into the show, I wrote it off as a meme. A joke. A jape. But then the evidence of the possibility continued to mount, evidence that I really was only considering because the seed of the idea had been planted in my head earlier. So when this nutty idea was confirmed as 100% true and central to the plot and Smith's whole arc, I was hardly annoyed that what would otherwise have been a left-field shocker had been "accidentally spoiled" for me. That's payoff, baby, and that sense of satisfaction is a sign of good writing! Bravern felt like a series constantly in conversation with its audience, as Obari and pals played along with viewers who love this earnest material as much as they do. Building up to and confirming their craziest fan theories was just the ultimate expression of that love.

Isami and Bravern Confess Their Love (Bang Brave Bravern!)

Nobody out there is making anime quite like Bang Brave Bravern these days, and bless the brave souls at Cygames for allowing legendary mecha director and designer Masami Ōbari to create this unbelievably homoerotic love letter to super robot anime the likes of which hasn't been seen in decades. The mecha genre may not be entirely dead, but throwbacks like this don't exactly come around very often, either. While its breathless pace may have kept it out of my top five – the story really needed to be twice as long, easily – it gave us some of the year's most memorable moments.

I was going to keep it classy and choose Smith going back in time to become Bravern, demonstrating his indomitable burning spirit and completing the time loop. However, the image of Isami, splayed topless in the sand with Bravern's enormous face next to his muscular naked torso kept demanding I acknowledge it. I must admit defeat and select that scene as my top moment: Isami and Bravern confessing their love on the beach.

But wait! I can justify this beyond my love of big-titted anime men, even if that's part of it! Homoeroticism has long been a part of the mecha genre, even before Char Aznable and Amuro Ray wrestled in their suits atop a grassy hill. However, it's rarely acknowledged in text, left only to subtext and shippers' imaginations. Male fans scoffed at female fans for noticing what lay just under the surface despite it being obvious to anyone with their eyes and hearts open. Isami and Bravern (and by extension, Smith) openly expressing their feelings and having a physical encounter, albeit one that gets interrupted, is downright historic and genuinely courageous—or should I say brave?—move by Obari and Cygames, considering how common homophobia can be in male-dominated fan cultures.

Utena Curses “Subversion” (Gushing Over Magical Girls)

I must ensure that Gushing Over Magical Girls gets its laurels somewhere in this end-of-year feature, and this seems as good a spot as any. Honestly, there are a bunch of moments from this show that I could prop up here. My Gushing journey was dotted with delight as it revealed to me all the ways its narrative and themes were carefully composed and frequently poignant. This is filth with a heart and a brain. Because despite all the consternation about its content, I discovered that Gushing is fundamentally about a girl getting in touch with her queerness and kinkiness. Utena confronts her internalized shame and repression, and through the power of a magic riding crop, she finds acceptance and community. If you can make your way through Gushing, there's a heartwarming earnestness waiting for you.

That earnestness also extends to the magical girl setting at the heart of Utena's journey. The series is a parody, but it's the kind of parody that can only stem from a place of pure love. Utena herself is a gigantic magical girl geek, and that informs how she interacts with the “heroines” of the story. Moreover, it defines the framework of the BDSM roleplay at the core of Gushing's structure. Utena, as the villain, plays her role so the magical girls have an adversary to defeat. She fights and teases them because she knows they can fight back, and both parties have fun playing those roles at the end of the day. That “play” is a layered and complex thing in and of itself, and Gushing extracts a surprising amount of nuance out of it.

There is, however, a moment where that roleplay breaks down. An overstimulated Magia Azure gives up and surrenders to Magia Baiser's dominance, and it utterly disgusts her. It's the first and only time we see Baiser/Utena act genuinely mean because, to her, it's a betrayal of their contract. It goes against everything a magical girl should stand for, and she tells Azure to cut the bullshit. It's a dagger stabbed in the digital cellulose, and it marks a big turning point in the show, after which both the heroines and villains refocus on how they approach their relationship.

This scene works well in the context of the show, but I also love it for two other reasons. First, it's a curt rebuttal to the past decade of “dark” magical girl anime. Both Utena and Gushing hold nothing but genuine love and respect for the genre, and I wouldn't be surprised if her dialogue were intended as a response to the idea that magical girls are inherently silly and only interesting when “subverted.” Second, it's a great example of the show's excellent translation, which sprinkles similarly colorful language throughout the dialogue. The crassness complements the bawdy tone of the anime and makes it even more fun to watch. Seriously, if you're curious, give Gushing a go.

The Ballad of Acro Silky (DAN DA DAN)

Sometimes, the best moment in an anime comes after weeks and weeks of buildup, and expectations pay off in a sublime payoff or shocking reveal. At other times, though, a show will shift gears and take us on a much more unexpected journey, offering us something we never even knew that we wanted until right at that minute. Episode 7 of DAN DA DAN is one of the latter kinds of triumphs, where it takes the already great material from the manga and elevates it into a shattering work of art that functions as a beautiful short film in its own right. The conclusion to the initial Turbo Granny storyline already proved that DAN DA DAN was capable of injecting genuine pathos into its otherwise wacky and shlocky proceedings, but the flashback we get for the backstory of Acrobatic Silky is operating on an entirely new level of emotional gut-punchery.

In addition to the framework provided by the original story, so much of this sequence's success lies at the feet of episode director Kōtarō Matsunaga, storyboarder Shūto Enomoto, and composer kensuke ushio. Their bold creative instincts led them to craft an episode that respects the intelligence of its audience and takes aesthetic risks that, in less skilled hands, could have easily come across as either pretentious or just fundamentally at odds with the tone of everything else DAN DA DAN had done up to that point. Instead, though, the Science SARU team imbues an overwhelming amount of empathy and beauty into this tragic story of a single mother whose life was stolen and broken into a hundred jagged shards, only for her grief and rage to reform her into a monster ripped straight out of a child's nightmares. It's the one DAN DA DAN episode that I've gone I've already gone back to revisit over and over again because of the pure, raw power of its artistic vision. Even if every single other element of DAN DA DAN had somehow come up short, this one ten-minute sequence would have made it all worth it a hundred times over. It's one of the best things I've had the pleasure of experiencing all year.

“Dio Aedes Vesta" (Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? V)

Long derided as a silly boob string-wearing comedy relief character akin to KONOSUBA's “useless goddess” Aqua, DanMachi Season 5 finally sees Hestia stepping up to the plate to rescue her beloved Bell Cranel from the clutches of terrifying love goddess Freya and her cult-like familia. One of DanMachi's greatest strengths is original light novel author Fujino Ōmori's attention to mythical detail. While Freya is a Norse goddess of love, fertility, and sex, Hestia is a Greek goddess who pledged to remain an eternal virgin – her Roman equivalent is Vesta, of Vestal Virgins fame. Their very natures are antagonistic to one another, and this also explains Hestia's resistance to Freya's charm. While the rest of the city falls under Freya's mind control, only Hestia maintains her unblemished memories of Bell's true place in her familiar.

It takes multiple episodes for Hestia to win back her Bell, during which time he suffers terribly at Freya's hands as she attempts to break him. Hestia's ultimate victory comes as a natural consequence of her identity as hearth goddess – her plan to “make Orario into a hearth,” infusing her blood into every piece of firewood distributed on a certain day, covers the city in her charm-dispelling powers. This sequence, the culmination of much foreshadowing, is a testament to the skill of Ōmori's plotting and the respect and attention paid by studio J.C. Staff to their source material. As Hestia stands above the city, her arm outstretched, as every home, every hearth resonates with her divine powers, cleansing the city of deceit and evil, it's impossible not to feel a little overwhelmed with emotion. Maybe I'm easily influenced by pretty colors and soaring music, but to see Hestia truly employ her powers as a goddess to save her Bell is a powerful moment.

Uraraka Saves Toga (My Hero Academia Season 7)

I think it's safe to say we live in a world where a lot of people fall through the cracks of society. Yes, no society is perfect, and no society is built for the betterment of all of its inhabitants. It's a sad reality that many of us try to push out of our brains unless we are directly affected. However, that's why season seven of My Hero Academia is so important. The people who have been forgotten and hurt by society are instigating the show's main narrative force. These “villains” are at the center of some of the most emotionally gripping and impactful moments I've gotten to experience this entire year.

We could talk about how Dabi's neglect led to him generating a festering hatred that literally and figuratively seeks to burn everything down to the ground. But the moment that meant the most to me was when Uraraka finally reached out to Toga, a character who easily became one of my favorites in the entire franchise and maybe one of my favorite anime characters of all time. She undoubtedly did horrible things to get back at a society that wronged her, but I feel her backstory is the most relatable and empathetic compared to the rest of the cast. This is a girl who was forced to suppress her desires and who she truly was for the sake of everybody else's comfort. She was born into a society that was not mature or thoughtful enough to handle what she was, choosing to label her as a demon who needed to pretend to be human instead of just seeing her as the innocent little girl that she was. The results became a self-fulfilling prophecy where her first true act of violence came out in an uncontrollable burst after over a decade of suppressing a natural biological desire that she was born with. However, while she is tragic to the audience, society sees that as the evidence they need to justify their already twisted thoughts towards this girl.

As someone who works with special needs kids who have fallen into this exact same pattern, I found it heartbreaking to get the full context of where Toga fits into this larger narrative and what she is most likely supposed to be analogous to for our modern day. Toga needed a friend, someone to talk to about the most mundane stuff with, or someone to offer her a little bit of blood every now and then to keep her smiling. This moment here, where Uraraka finally reaches out and grabs her, telling her that she's the cutest girl in the entire world, was so poignant because you could tell that if this had happened just a few years earlier, then neither of these characters would be in the dangerous situation that they are in. The voice acting in both languages carried so much pain and poignancy to the point where I was legit sobbing in my hands once the episode was over. Everything from the build-up to the familiar leitmotifs playing in the background, to the animation, and even the acknowledgments that this was not a perfect solution or a victory elevated this moment to something beyond what I had read in the original material. This isn't just one of my favorite moments of this year, this is probably one of my favorite moments in anime of all time.

Mayu Robs Kumiko of Her Moment...Twice. (Sound! Euphonium Season 3)

For a moment, I really believed that Mayu was the Antichrist. Because my God, that was some stone-cold killer shit she pulled. Underneath all of those innocent attempts at undermining herself was a Mayu who understood that her talent could overwhelm Kumiko's own. Trying to snag a coveted solo is never an easy feat for anybody (the tiff between Yuuko and Reina in season 1 proved this early on), but to see Mayu pull the rug out from under Kumiko's feet was devastating. Kumiko tried her best to be a good class president, attempting to be as understanding as ever while extolling the virtues of meritocracy. Yet Kumiko never deluded herself in believing that the solo belonged to anybody else but her. Rewatching the season makes you realize that Mayu was not-so-secretly a musical prodigy this entire time, but as they say, hindsight is 20/20.

This was such a dramatic gut punch for me that I decided to hold off on Euphonium's final run of episodes so I could be prepared for the show to destroy me. It sure as hell did when Mayu beat Kumiko in the second round of auditions. Sound! Euphonium never had a proper villain per se as much as it had certain characters throwing monkey wrenches into plans that caused a whole rigmarole for Kumiko. Along with the competition, there was Kumiko's struggle to initially understand Reina, figuring out what went wrong between Nozomi and Mizore, cracking Asuka's mask, and changing Kanade's trifling ways. Through Mayu, Kumiko was forced to grapple with the fact that even the most unsuspecting of people might still be better than you, and no, three times isn't the charm after all. Nothing is ever guaranteed or “in the bag” like that. And that is a hard pill to swallow.

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