January 2026 Anime Roundup

Now that I'm a full-time professor, the holidays and New Years season comes with a lot of free time. I have to prep for spring semester of course, but it's important to recover from grading last-minute assignments and final reports and such. I made sure to catch up on a lot of otaku media this January.

Fate/Strange Fake is finally releasing episodes after the teaser film released last year. Fate/Grand Order did something like this years ago, but the release schedule for that FGO spinoff is decidedly all over the place because Aniplex resumed with Absolute Demonic Front Babylonia and the Final Singularity, then the Camelot films. 

Strange Fake feels closer to the Apocrypha series with precisely how...strange it is. There's a grail war in what looks like Arizona or some other Southwestern region of the US, and the war is a front for an actual summoning that needed the first war as a catalyst? Vampires are also in this universe, a subject straight out of another Type-Moon vehicle, Tsukihime. Strange Fate is undoubtedly cool, so I'm along for the ride anyway. But is the plot easy to follow? Hell no.

There's also Jujutsu Kaisen Season 3. I'd love to stop watching this series, as it's terribly depressing, but I can't. The animation is too good to look away. Episode 3 of this season almost brought me to tears with unpalatable mounds of exposition. Episode 4, though? Sheesh, I had to watch it twice because it was so flashy. One of the coolest fighting episodes of anything I've ever watched. Apparently, JJK manga die-hards were upset about it in Japan because the content in Episode 4 wasn't treated with enough gravitas, but they're insane. Anime should tell stories in the best way anime can, full stop.

Now, I engaged with two dark fantasy shows recently, Clevatess and Sentenced to be a Hero. I watched the former in Spanish, so I relied a lot on visual cues for context and missed out on some plot nuances, but Clevatess wasn't as good as I'd hoped. When they introduced a protagonist who resembles Claire from Claymore, and the story took place on a darkened continent surrounded by monsters and divine beasts like Claymore... Even forgetting about Claymore for a second, Clevatess is a weird experience. 

Hero Alicia is immediately defanged by Clevatess, one of four beast kings that humanity is trying to overcome so they can expand their territory. She is turned into a corpse-slave that lives thanks to Clevatess' blessing, and helps the beast king look after the infant heir to a kingdom he absolutely wrecks in the first episode. The earlier violence yields to some misunderstandings about breastfeeding, so Clevatess goes to find someone (other than the non-lactating Alicia) to feed this baby, and then the team actually finds a slave who happens to be lactating... Look, some stories just exist to satisfy a creative itch, I suppose. Not mine, to be clear.

Sentenced to be a Hero, on the other hand, successfully mixes dark fantasy with pathos in a non-creepy way. In this story, "heroes" are ironically named because they commit terrible crimes and are brought into an infinite-reanimation cycle to serve the state; in other words, more anime slaves. Xylo is one such slave, but instead of managing a royal child and searching for tiddy-milk, he accidentally bonds with an ultra powerful goddess who sees the good inside of him. Said goddess is naturally in the vessel of a child, but it's not weird, I swear! The story reminds me of other long-term revenge plots like Tales of Berseria and, dare I say it? Nah, you already know the anime I'm thinking of.

And then there's Frieren. Need I say more? If you liked the first season, you'll like the second season. I loved this story as it was released in manga (which is now in HIATUS, damnit), so the show manages to do it justice with more of that contemplative silence, serene countryside, sprawling fantasy music, and the occasional combat sequence. Just watch it, y'all. 

Know what I don't recommend? Tune into the Midnight Heart anime, which looks stiff at times and wonky at others. The manga's hilarious, so read that instead.

Chivalry of a Failed Blogger, or How Fictional Fighting High Schoolers Make Me Feel Young Again

I just learned that "gray" is the American English spelling of the color we all know, while "grey" is the spelling all those other former English colonies and territories use. Although I prefer the latter version, I'm obliged to use the former. Guess I'll stop drinking Earl Grey tea while I'm at it. 

Anyway, for a blog titled The Anime Guardians, I write a lot about anime-adjacent hobbies. Let's at least start out with an anime as I write about what I've been up to this fall/winter.

Chivalry of a Failed Knight

Because I'm old, I remember seeing Chivalry of a Failed Knight floating on my Hulu home screen for ages and never watching it. Or did I watch it? The banner always reminds me of The Asterisk War, which I definitely tried to watch once but couldn't get into it. The premises seem kind of similar in any case; maybe pink-haired heroines and fighting schools were the craze in 2015. 

I watched (rewatched?) Failed Knight earlier this year when I was still a new dad and between power naps. It's good stuff! Protagonist Ikki Kurogane is the titular "failed knight" who, despite his superhuman swordsmanship, is considered bottom-of-the-barrel because his mana use isn't flashy or scary or something stupid like that. His family hates him save for a way-too-clingy younger sister who cockblocks the lad as he bumbles into a relationship with Stella Vermillion, the cool transfer student.

Failed Knight keeps a lot of action at the forefront while making the romance genuinely worth the screen time. (I mean, there's some ecchi stuff cuz it's 2015.) Ikki is the over-analytical type, which  works for his perpetual underdog characterization. Think Dr. Stone's Senku or Death Note's L with sigma-male swag. Like any good fighting school anime, our cast ultimately competes to enter the Seven Stars Battle Festival, a tournament which has global repercussions not fully explained in the show. These details made me read the light novels to continue where the anime leaves off. If you're interested in reading after watching, volume 4 is where to start. I'm really digging volume 5 right now. 

Fate/Hollow Ataraxia Remastered

I recall ending the Switch version of Fate/Stay Night Remastered with a strong feeling of emptiness. Heaven's Feel route was a doozy! Do I think Shirou and Sakura belong together? I get the appeal, but if I were Shirou, loving the person who threatened to wipe out my entire town and to swallow her sister into eternal damnation wouldn't be my first choice. Anyway, I jumped into Hollow/Ataraxia because of a sunk-cost fallacy: why not continue feeling strangely empty and anxious if it means I find out what happens after the Holy Grail War?

The good news: There's a lot of wit and humor to the strange world our characters occupy. The servants are still around. Rider gets a lot of screen time for anyone who likes her; I've come around now that she's an enticing yet menacing recluse who reads all day. The other characters seem to grow jealous of this Shirou x Rider pairing. (This explains a lot of the, ahem, pornographic fan art I've seen.)

The bad news: not enough Tohsaka. She's at the Mage Association abroad, but our central cast talks about her with apprehension, as if she'll appear and crush them with her oppressive attitude. 

I'm also haunted every time Ilya shows up onscreen. I liked her Heaven's Feel incarnation, but Hollow/Ataraxia keeps reminding me that she also wants to shackle Shirou's soul to a stuffed animal toy. I don't understand the brother-sister complex that shows up in otaku fiction. These people need to stop.

Alright, that's what I've got for the end of 2025. I get a month off from school to prepare for next semester, so maybe I'll rot on my couch and catch up on some anime instead. I should probably do some fiction writing as well. Happy holidays, everybody!

The TCG You've Never Heard Of

Weiss Schwarz!!! It means "black and white" in German, but it's also the name of an esoteric trading card game from Japan. Featuring an assortment of anime, gaming, film, and other pop culture franchises, Weiss is the perfect game for otaku. After eight months of playing, I'm still learning new things and making a fool of myself at the local game shop. 

The end-game for Weiss is simple: do enough damage to your opponent to win. Unlike most TCG, Weiss doesn't have its own stable of characters, and there are no obvious deck-types or elemental advantages to consider. To balance this game, you really have to understand your own deck's character-based gimmicks to create an effective winning strategy. The Seven Deadly Sins anime has one of the lowest-priced trial decks, so that was my first Weiss purchase. I didn't do a good job of learning that deck's tricks; needless to say, I was thoroughly beaten for many weeks.

Is Weiss Schwarz fun? At first, hell no. I didn't win a game until I put together an entirely different deck: a Fate/Stay Night one based on character Rin Tohsaka. The deck is a little underpowered compared to others, but Rin's low attack damage is remedied by conditional buffs to beat tougher opponents. I won my first game with that Fate deck...before losing many more matches.

Rin Tohsaka: best girl in Fate franchise. 

Weiss isn't nearly as popular as Pokemon, Yu-Gi-Oh, or Magic the Gathering, so we're a small group at the back of the card shop on Sundays. When the Pokemon or Magic tournaments get too large, Weiss is cancelled for the day so there are more tables available. Because of the game's obscurity, it's difficult to obtain Weiss cards unless you preorder them early. On the other hand, there are no scalpers lurking around supermarkets and vending machines to buy all the stock at once, which has become a serious problem for Pokemon players. 

Why do I play? It's nice to be part of a community, no matter how small. It's nice to have new experiences. It's nice to get out of the house, play cards, and return home in time to eat dinner with my wife and kid. I think my record is 3-25 or something terrible like that; I picked up two of those wins during my last playthrough, so I've made progress! If I win another game before the end of the year, I'll be happy.