First Look: Winter 2026 Anime Overview: Journal with Witch and SHIBOYUGI (Patreon)

I only watched two ongoing anime last season—incredible, I know, truly shows how much having a partner and reading too many comics is affecting me. I did watch some of The Holy Grail of Eris, but lost interest towards the end and didn’t finish (I felt like there were huge chunks of the narrative being sped through, and with a look at the manga, seems that’s true. I also didn’t enjoy some plot developments) so it’s not on here. What is on here are the other two shows: one absolutely amazing and one fairly interesting, if flawed. Let's get to them!

Journal With Witch

Every so often, I stumble across an anime and just instantly know from the first episode that it's going to be a masterpiece. That it's going to go on my all-time favorites list. I’m happy to say Journal with Witch is one of those. The show started out strong and just kept getting better with each episode.

Journal With Witch, also known as Ikoku Nikki, is a mature, nuanced, thoughtful, and captivating story. It follows Makio Koudai and Asa Takumi. Makio is an independent and somewhat reclusive 35 year old novelist, and she’s cut contact with her sister, who was hyper-critical of her to the point of being abusive. However, her sister and her sister’s husband die in a car crash, leaving behind their fifteen year old daughter, Asa. Makio doesn’t feel any real grief or sadness over her sister’s death, but she does sympathize with Asa. When she sees their relatives callously arguing about passing Asa around, Makio tells them off, and offers to take Asa in, while being completely honest with her than while she can’t guarantee she’ll come to love her, she won’t ever "trample on her feelings".

From there, the story follows Asa and Makio’s journey of learning to live together, with Asa navigating her complicated grief for parents she may never truly fully know or understand, and Makio trying to reconcile her feelings about her sister with her role as Asa’s guardian.

It’s an exceptional character driven show that's impeccably directed with purpose and care. There’s so many moments that hit incredibly hard, like a shot straight to the heart. And I’ll just say it: I’m in love with Makio.

She feels so real, relatable and refreshing as an honest depiction of a flawed, complex adult woman. She’s blunt and acerbic and insightful, she’s kind of a mess, and she’s doing the best she can. Her struggle as an introvert adjusting to having someone in her space is extremely real as someone who’s struggled with the same thing.

She’s disorganized, forgetful, socially unusual, she’s shown to hyperfocus. I got a lot of ADHD feels off her, only to be floored when the anime actually bought up the possibility she was neurodivergent. It’s incredibly rare for an anime to bring up neurodivergence at all, especially for a main character, and while Makio isn’t confirmed, the indication to the audience that it’s fine to read her that way, and that the author had put thought into this, is HUGE to me.

She's also a super accurate a relatable depiction of a novelist.

It truly is like that.

Asa is also a fantastic, fully rounded character, a teenager trying to find her place in the world while dealing with tragedy, and her evolving relationship with Makio is the beating heart of the show.

In addition to having rich, textured charactersm this story deftly touches on a lot of social themes and issues. There’s a subplot about a young queer (probably lesbian) teenager figuring herself out, and Makio subtly noticing and supporting her by telling her she doesn't have to follow any rules about "normalcy", and any relationship with love is valid…then offering her Fried Green Tomatoes to watch. Seeing the girl cry as she watched the movie made me want to cry too.

it just felt like such a thoughtful moment between a supportive adult trying to help someone along without overwhelming her, and a great example of how stories can help people feel less alone.

There’s references to the real life injustice of Tokyo Medical University rigging its entrance exams to deny women admission, and the story shows one of Asa’s classmates who dreamed of being a doctor struggling with her despair about how unfairly the system is stacked against her.  There’s also moments like two men discussing how realizing that they both felt uncomfortably being in hypermasculine spaces and being pressured by the “rules” of masculinity, and how they became happier and more okay with themselves once they realized they didn’t have to be in those spaces. A huge theme in the anime is that conforming to society won’t bring happiness, and that you should find people in your life who don’t expose you to those pressures and accept you as you are. It makes the point with grace and resonance.

It has the same point to make about trauma and grief. Makio doesn’t have to forgive her sister, even as she starts to realize she didn’t completely know all the sides of her. At the same time, she tells Asa that her feelings are her own, and that it doesn’t matter if she doesn’t have the “right” reactions to grief, if she doesn’t feel sad right away—all that matters is that Makio will be there for her when she does.

The anime is wonderfully naturalistic—Makio’s interactions with her friends and the teasing way they talk to each other gives an instant sense of their history and really feels like listening to a group of adult friends, not Anime Adults ™ if you get what I mean.

Makio’s relationship with her friend and ex-boyfriend and the lingering feelings they have is depicted in a similarly naturalistic fashion—there’s not overwrought soap opera drama, just a relationship between two people who care deeply for each other that fell apart, leaving yearning, regret and trepidation. To repeat myself, it truly feels like a relationship between two adults, and all the compromises that come with that. You really understand why these two love each other. And the small moments of intimacy are handled in a subtle way that makes it honestly a lot sexier than in other anime.

And of course, Makio and Asa’s relationship is handled wonderfully, and it’s great to see them help each other grow and learn more about each other. The conflicts they navigate are realistic and heartbreaking and messy, but there's always a sense of care and warmth there.

There are so many moments in Journal with Witch that blow me away, from quotes that succinctly hit on something fundamental – “there’s not a single thing in this world that is completely irrelevant to you” being an example—or deeply emotional moments like Asa’s messy breakdown. At one point Makio gives writing advice, saying "write with the intent to kill". It's pretty clear the writer of the series took her character's advice, because this story has murdered me with how good it is.

I could go on forever about this anime, but I implore you to go watch it and see how wonderful it is for yourself. I also can’t wait to read the manga that inspired it (which seems to have additional story the show didn’t cover). This is a true gem of a tale, and you're missing out if you don't experience it.

SHIBOYUGI: Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table

Shiboyugi follows Yuki, a girl who lives in a world where rich men create death games for their viewing entertainment. Unlike a lot of the death game genre, the death games aren't usually the kind that leave a sole survivor. On average, only a third of the competitors die in each game. This allows some competitors to essentially participate in death games for a living, since they apparently get cash prizes. The other things that distinguish these death games is that all the participants are women. Yuki, our main character, is a veteran player who's goal is to win 99 death games for mysterious reasons, and the anime follows her through her various games.

If you like death game shows, this one is definitely a decent watch, with stylish direction and visuals. The show has a very artsy style, with painterly far-way shots, long moody atmospheric moments, and so on. There's a lot of dismemberment, but the show is not very gory thanks to this futuristic technology that immediately stops the blood flow and turns it into this white stuffing-like substance the second a wound is opened

This both allows characters keep playing the game even after they've lost limbs (and if they survive, they get their limbs replaced with cybernetic ones) and very obviously drives in the theme that these girls are being treated like dolls the audience is playing with rather than human beings.

Yuki, our main character, has a "compassionate" but very pragmatic play style where she will help out the other participants however she can, in hopes they'll return the favor, but she will take them out unhesistatingly the second the game puts her in a position where she has to kill someone to survive, even if she's previously bonded with the person. We do see that this affects her emotionally, but it's how she has to live. The show isn't super nuanced about it, but it does make for interesting moments in the games.

As for the players all being girls... the show is very “have our cake and eat it too” with the fanservice. The girls are made to compete in maid outfits, in a bathhouse wearing just towels (anime towels that never budge) and in Playboy Bunny outfits. Since it’s mentioned that rich men are watching, the idea is obviously that this is a fetish for them, and making the girls wear sexy outfits is part of it. It’s an extension of the girls being treated as dolls.

But the audience is fully invited to indulge in enjoying the sexy outfits too without any discomfort, so the idea falls flat. I think this is obvious in how the outfits are treated as a pure aesthetics- the girls don’t struggle to fight in these outfits, they never complain, they don’t act like a real person would if she was forced to fight to the death in playboy bunny gear. There’s a lot of missed commentary opportunity there, but the show just frankly isn’t actually interested in it.

The way it's treated as set dressing even kind of takes me out of themes sometimes-- there's a small moment where a side character talks about how she's fairly masculine, even talking in a masculine manner (she uses "ore"), and this even meant she had trouble getting a job. She did try to go along with society for a while, but it felt like dying, so participating in a death game feels more like living to her. But, uh, the death games clearly would make her wear hyper-feminine sexy outfits a lot, so I don't understand how she'd feel free of gender restrictions. It's possible she can be fine with super feminine clothing even while being masculine, but she'd had the knowledge there are men ogling her and thinking of her in that very misogynistic way...yeah, it just messes with that logic a little.

The world-building outside the games is very minimal (though, as you can probably tell from the title, it's based on ongoing light novels so we might get more of that later), which leaves a lot of questions on the table but also makes you feel a similar isolation to the girls-- these games are their whole worlds, and so the show mirrors that.

The overriding theme of the show is that these death games is that killing each other is the only way these girls can feel alive, and while it isn't as deep as the artistry would have you believe, it still has a lot of interesting clashes between deeply screwed up characters that can be fun to watch. The games are fairly exciting with good cliffhangers that had me binging it at first, and there's even some toxic yuri subtext.

It's definitely no writing masterpiece, but it's an entertaining and intriguing enough watch, and it is very pretty. So yeah, if you like death games and girls competing in playboy bunny costumes doesn't take you out too much, go for it, it's a solid show.