The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Saga of Tanya the Evil II

A little girl with blond hair, blue eyes, and porcelain skin fights on the front lines of a brutal war set in a fantasy world. What others don't know is that she's a reincarnated Japanese office worker whose career-driven attitude and ruthless drive to conquer have carried over into Tanya's life. With such a unique set of skills, Tanya begins to climb the ranks of the imperial army.

Saga of Tanya the Evil II is based on the The Saga of Tanya the Evil light novel series by author Carlo Zen and illustrator Shinobu Shinotsuki. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Wednesdays.

It's been nine years since the first season of The Saga of Tanya the Evil and 5 years since its last anime of any kind (a 16-minute OVA called “Operation Desert Pasta”). However, that's not to say that we haven't seen Tanya or her squad since then. In the years since the first season, Tanya has been one of the main characters of Isekai Quartet, a series that mixes the characters of The Saga of Tanya the Evil with those of Re:Zero, KONOSUBA, and Overlord (and later Shield Hero and The Eminence in Shadow.

I bring up Isekai Quartet because the Tanya we see in that series versus this one highlights the vast difference the environment can make in not only her personality but her mental stability as well—and to be clear, I don't mean the war setting as much as the people around her. In Isekai Quartet, Tanya is surrounded by competent people. With no idiots above her in the chain of command and equals like Ainz and Demiurge to help her manage the idiots below her, she is far more understanding (though still strict). She's gained the respect of everyone (even the human-hating monsters under Ainz will follow her orders in his absence).

But here, in the world of The Saga of Tanya the Evil, Tanya is an island alone. Those above her are trapped in the past—unable to understand the horrors of a true world war like the one they are entangled in. Below her are a mass of idiots—either fresh out of school or relics of an age gone by. While she can count on her own, a specially trained air force unit, that's all she really has. She has no equals to help her—no one to speak truth to power.

This isolation gets Tanya wrapped up in her own head. To her, victory is her only escape. She sees defeat as a path to death—either on the battlefield or at the hands of those above her, eager to use her as a scapegoat for their own inadequacies. On top of this, she has the bad habit of viewing the battlefield in modern terms. She sees just how precarious her position is in every battle—how things like terrain, weather, and issues with supplies could all be exploited by any “competent” enemy commander.

The trick, as we see in this episode, is that commanders with her level of knowledge don't exist yet. There was no World War I in this world—they're all still getting used to tanks, airplane battles, and powerful artillery. The situation in this episode seems so wrong to her, not because the enemy commander is some genius outthinking her (as she fears) but because her enemies haven't even started acclimating to modern warfare—so much so that she accidentally wipes out the majority of their forces when probing their lines with artillery. They didn't even consider that moving in large clumped groups was dangerous—and Tanya didn't stop to think they could ever be that dumb.

In the end, this first episode returns to The Saga of Tanya the Evil with a character piece about Tanya herself. It shows how she thinks and why—what she truly fears and how she deals with her emotions. And, as always, we are reminded that her greatest enemy isn't anyone but herself.

Tanya the Evil is an anime that depicts history as a book, every page steeped in blood. It is where war, murder, madness, and tyranny reign supreme, and the only means of achieving progress. Tanya, as unwilling a pawn as she may be, must make herself a divine instrument of God (or Being X, if you prefer) to navigate her way through the trenches, and in the process succumbs to sociopathy of the most heinous degree. All of these themes and motifs have been in Tanya the Evil since its very beginning, and are more or less reintroduced here in this new episode, here so littered with the usual round of war, sacrilege, and villainy.

It's been a good nine years since Tanya's first season, and seven since the movie. The plot isn't as fresh in our minds as it could be, so this new episode of Tanya does whatever it can to reintroduce its world and tone, all of it played out like a nocturnal reprise of a blood-soaked symphony. We go into familiar territory by opening up in the middle of a battle zone, just like the first season's debut did many moons ago, and the violence is as well-orchestrated and directed as ever. Saying it like that sounds callous. War and violence are not desirable (to massively understate things), and certainly we should not see them through the eyes of a character whose very existence thrives on destruction. And yet, the animation, the direction, the swells of Wagnerian music, and Tanya's superego make what should be a vulgar display of power into something irresistible. (Also, is it me, or is there a lot more swearing this time around?)

Two additional things that worked here. One: the scene where Tanya insults her men. It would be enough to do a shot/reverse shot in this scene, but it does something very clever with its visual storytelling. As Tanya is insulting her comrades, she is pacing around the room, with only her legs exposed, as the soldiers stand meekly in the back. It's a forced-perspective trick that makes Tanya appear to tower above her minions, making you feel their entrapment and inability to stop her domineering ego. The power dynamic is made loud and clear, and Tanya gets to stand tall despite her short stature.

Two: Aoi Yūki's performance. Of course. She crushes it as Tanya. Yuki knows how to perfectly tap into that husky, demanding tone when she needs to make Tanya as manipulative as possible. Which makes it all the more shocking when Tanya drops the act to put on the voice of a kawaii-desu anime girl. It's so flowery, cheerful, and out-of-pocket. The forced sweetness makes for a great antithetical side of Tanya, and how Yuki can twist her voice on a dime like that makes for terrific acting. Especially when Tanya drops the sweetness immediately afterward and goes back to sounding like the supervillain that she is.

Tanya the Evil will stand as one of the bloodiest, most politically and philosophically charged, most dramatic, controversial, and exciting anime of the summer season. In a world where evil rules supreme, one can only wait with infinite patience for the day the other shoe drops on Tanya. If it ever does.

Oh, Tanya, how I have missed you. I thought you'd never return. I mean, it's been nine- and-a-half years since your first season, and over seven years since your movie. I thought for a moment that you didn't love us anymore. At least you haven't changed in the interim, in that you've certainly gained no more love for god – ahem, sorry, “Being X”, to whom you're still obligated to pray to unleash the full power of your magical attacks. I imagine it sucks being an atheist forced to worship a god whose existence you forcibly deny with every fiber of your being.

And that's the tragedy – and comedy – of Tanya's existence in a nutshell. It really does suck to be her, so she makes sure to wreak as much havoc as possible on those around her. Thrown from a life as a (likely sociopathic) salaryman into the body of a child in alternate history Germany, during an extended First World War that never ended when it did in our reality, Tanya wants nothing more than a quiet life. She's essentially a pacifist – to her, war is pointless, and she wants no part of it. Shame she's so bloody good at it, really.

We pick up the action in 1926, with the war still raging on multiple fronts. To the south, an enemy force advances on the Empire's North African territory. To the North, in the Nordic regions, insurgents are making life difficult for the Empire. To the West, not-Great-Britain maintains air superiority, significantly assisted by support from serial-number-filed-off-USA. Finally, to the East, the border skirmish with I-can't-believe-it's-not-Russia threatens to devolve into an unwinnable quagmire as the first snowflakes of Winter fall.

Tanya's trying to break in her new unit, comprised of infantrymen, tanks, and flight officers of varying degrees of uselessness. One major standout scene comes when Tanya, disgusted by her subordinates' ineffectuality, takes to the skies and wrecks a bunch of enemy planes in a display of pure, unfiltered magical aggression. Everything explodes, and it looks incredible. I don't remember the action scenes in either the movie or the first season being as spectacularly kinetic, but I'm not complaining.

The episode does a good job of reintroducing most of the major characters, from Tanya's scheming superiors far away from the battlefield, keen to use the pint-sized hellion for their own purposes, to Tanya's similarly blessed U.S. equivalent, the not-so-subtly named “Mary Sue”, still smarting from her humiliation at Tanya's hands in the movie. We even check in with the off-puttingly creepy, slavering ersatz-Russian leader Loria, who is based on real- life rapist and sexual predator Lavrentiy Beria, whose Wikipedia page makes for deeply unsettling reading. I never want to experience any further scenes involving his distressingly moist tongue for as long as I live.

So Tanya's back, as gloriously OTT and absurd as she ever was, disturbing her men with both her cuttingly delivered ire and her girlishly saccharine charms. I'm not sure which is worse, but I'm delighted to watch either version rail against the fate assigned to her by a capricious god, wreaking destruction and madness in her wake.