The Summer 2026 Anime Preview Guide

I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day

Death lurks behind a mysterious orphanage where children train to become magical weapons of war. Among them is Sheena, who longs to stop the fighting and end the conflict. On one gruesome night, Sheena meets a strange girl covered in blood, with a smile on her face. The mysterious girl turns out to be a secret weapon—an immortal child soldier named Mimi. When the two become roommates, there is growing tension and attraction.

I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day is based on the manga series by Nachi Aono. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

The first big surprise that I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day gave me was that the sinister magic school where it takes place has male students! I'm so used to boarding school yuri taking place exclusively at girls' schools, where Class S tropes can imagine that their homosexuality is merely situational, that I was almost totally blindsided by the presence of male classmates. Not that they played much of a role in the episode's plot, but that's just fine.

After all, I wouldn't want anyone to accuse me of saying that this is one of the more personally engaging yuri anime I've come across just because there are male characters in it. No, I find it interesting because I am fascinated by stories about magical child soldiers forced to fight in a mysterious conflict. The foreboding castle where they're being educated oozes atmosphere—all cavernous halls and winding stone stairs and flower gardens. It's unclear just what these children are being forced to fight for, or if they even know themselves; the only thing that's clear is that Sheena hates the idea of violence. The discomfort she feels with everything about her situation, mixed with her grief for her roommate and the disruption that the otherworldly Mimi brings to her life had me invested in her within just a few short minutes of the episode's start.

However, my intrigue was tempered by a couple troubling elements. One was the way that Mimi fussed and called Dr. Fran, “old man.” I don't know Fran's deal yet, but those prominent protuberances attached to her chest, and clothes that look more like they're meant more for the lounge than professional attire, suggest otherwise. I don't really want to deal with comedy transphobia, even if the joke is that Mimi is so feral that even after Fran has transitioned, she can't see that she's a woman.

The other is that Mimi looks and acts like she's ten years old, and this is ostensibly a romance. This is not my own judgment; this observation comes straight from the characters' mouths, and is supported by design choices such as her sacklike dress that contrasts with the other students' more fitted uniforms. While I'm not expecting a pure, healthy romance from a series with a title like this one's, I'm still not comfortable with such a childlike character at the center of a yuri story with a 14-year-old.

Still, the story and world has me hooked, as does the sinister ambience of the whole affair.

I have to admit, the whole healing kiss thing here is pretty goofy. Mana transfer through acts typically construed as sexual is a decades-old concept, at least as old as Fate/stay night—maybe even before that; I can't say I've done a historical survey of the concept. The way it's presented in I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day feels a bit silly, where it's a lifesaving medical procedure while Sheena also fumbles around calling it her first kiss. It especially casts a dark light on the fact that, as the nurse at a school where students are routinely doing dangerous things, Fran has to do it regularly. It feels a bit like getting surgery and then freaking out because the surgeon sees you naked while operating on you.

Despite this, I'm giving it a high rating, because in all other respects, this show is good. The Insipid Prince gave me a lot to think about how the backgrounds in modern fantasy anime often feel weirdly sparse: wide open spaces, the only furnishings the ones characters are sitting on, diffuse lighting from directly overhead. The dark, moody castle halls, baroque dorm rooms, and ominous forests of I Want to Love You feel positively lush by comparison. Small touches like the weight of a thick rope falling to the ground also create a sense of place and reality. It makes it easier to buy into the still-vague conflict that these teenagers are embroiled in and the threats they face and become invested in their story. This is further bolstered by competent, if not mind-blowing action sequences in this week's mock battle, with some interesting parallels between ALI and Lizzy's teamwork and Sheena and Mimi's separation.

I have a lot of questions about things still: if Sheena is so weak, how did she end up at this school? Just what is Mimi? What's going on with Fran's and her distinctly artificial-looking chest? I don't ask because I'm confused, but because I'm curious and invested. Sheena's fear and grief, her connection with Mimi, and her friendship with the other two girls, has taken hold of me.

I am so sorry, I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day. You're trying so hard to be deep and dark and dangerous, but when Sheena told Mimi that those girls on the steps weren't kissing, they were “exchanging energy to heal,” I lost it. I laughed so hard it stopped my kitten from playing with his chirping bird toy. I know it wasn't meant to be funny, but in an episode as unsubtle as this one, it was just the final straw for my credulity. My deepest apologies.

This isn't a bad show. There's always been space for yuri tales of love and war; just look at Simoun. This opening salvo even seems to understand that war is capital-b-Bad, beginning with the horrific death of Sheena's roommate and following her mourning period, even as none of the other kids at the world's least ethical orphanage understand why she's so sad. But Sheena, as someone who isn't gifted in the magic all orphans are trained to use in combat, has never been to the front. She's unlikely to be sent unless the cannon fodder situation gets really desperate. That means that her take on war and death is somewhat more innocent than her classmates', some of (many of?) whom have clearly imbibed the Kool-Aid about fighting. Only her friends Ari and Seiran seem to get it, but they also may be approaching it from a different angle, given that they're a couple, while Sheena and her unnamed roommate were not.

Of course, childlike, yet apparently immortal, Mimi understands it even less. She has no idea why Sheena would be sad, why there would be mourning rituals enacted for the dead, and is, in general, just way too perky for this school. She's clearly meant to evoke the ultimate innocence, one which cannot be sullied, or at least one that the powers that be really want to keep from being infected with darker emotions. After all, wouldn't that risk her killing prowess? Why they decided to have her room with Sheena is the only real mystery here. I suspect that the general thrust of the plot will be Mimi learning to be human from Sheena and Sheena becoming less anxious via Mimi, and I can't shake the feeling that there will be tragic consequences. If all four named girls make it out of this series alive, I'll be shocked.

With its gouts of bright red blood and attention to detail in the two girls holding hands or “exchanging energy,” the visuals seem intent on reminding us that this is GL and dark. It frankly worked better in This Monster Wants to Eat Me, although it's too soon to write off any similar emotional plotline for this show. It's emphatically not for me, but if it can manage to create a narrative about the cruelties and horrors of war and child soldiers, it may earn its credentials.

I have, it must be admitted, a low tolerance for shows that think they're deep and use graphic violence to back that up. I'm also not fond of adults who act against the best interests of the children in their care. That makes I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day rather unpleasant viewing for me, although in Professor Omi's defense, she's teaching at a school where she's training children to fight in a war, so the odds are stacked against her right from the start. Still, was sending her class to fight a mock battle on the site of a recent real battle really the best idea she could come up with? It feels contrived, especially since Sheena ends up losing an arm to a crazed survivor, thus providing evidence that even loss of limb can be healed with the power of a kiss – and that Mimi has more than enough power to do whatever it takes.

Is Mimi's kiss so powerful because she's incredible, or is it because she feels love for Sheena? That's the most interesting question to come out of this. It's evident that most of the roommate/partner duos are romantically involved with each other; their body language as they're interacting with each other speaks volumes. Seiran and Ari might be the most obvious pair, but if you look at the classroom, everyone except Sheena and Mimi are as close as they can be. That raises some questions about Sheena and her relationship with her deceased roommate. Were they a couple? And if they weren't was that because Sheena is accounted something of a failure due to her low magic power? Sheena clearly mourns her loss, but perhaps the nature of their relationship was different from most other pairs'. Her roommate was out without Sheena, after all.

The other major question is what Mimi is. Emotionally, she seems much younger than fourteen, and there's a serious disconnect between how she acts normally and how she acts on the battlefield. Her whining in the infirmary makes her sound like she's closer to eight, but there's an alarming maturity to her expressions when she's killing enemies. She brushes off her many serious injuries in the past, although she remarks that they make her feel “alone,” so again, there's an emotional maturity disconnect. This seems deliberately cultivated, and it raises some serious questions about both her upbringing and her humanity.

I get that this has a point it wants to make about war, and that it may be trying to make it more palatable with plenty of GL. I appreciate the effort. But like SHIBOYUGI before it, I cannot like or enjoy it. Beautiful as it can look (although I still hate Ms. Fran's hair), I'm glad to be done with this show.

Normally, a title like I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day would have me concerned about treacly adolescent romances doomed to be cut short by ambiguously terminal diseases in the midst of the most wistful summer vacation ever put on screen. The opening scene of this premiere, though, makes it clear that we're in for something decidedly weirder than that.

In this school, the girls' wistful romances are much more likely to be disrupted by a most unambiguously fatal and explosively gory blast from a magic wand. Not only does this story about magical teenagers actually show us the horrific and traumatizing consequences of giving all of these children access to a bunch of murder-spells with which to wage magical war, but it also isn't afraid of its same-sex couples showing a little affection on screen. Is this what it would be like if That Other Franchise About Magic School wasn't written by a cowardly bigot?

Either way, I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day is just my kind of angsty melodrama. Any residual exhaustion you might feel from seeing the umpteenth anime set at a school for young magic-users modeled in the fashion of late-19th-century Europe is quickly brushed aside on account of how gorgeous this whole production is. Execution trumps novelty nine times out of ten, at least so far as aesthetics are concerned, and I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day has style to spare. This is one of the only productions chiefly produced by Studio ROLL2 that I've seen, save for Love Is Indivisible by Twins back in 2024, and the crew is really going all out for the series, at least so far as this premiere is concerned.

Obviously, anime has a long and proud tradition of exploiting the naturally entertaining contrast of cute anime girls and horrific, bloody violence. That goes double for when the violence is used in the context of grim, fantasy-infused warfare. What helps I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day stand out, beyond the lush and stylish animation, is the compelling relationship that is developing between our somewhat hapless heroine, Sheena, and the mysterious Mimi. Sheena's conflict is exceedingly relatable. If I were a teenager in the throes of puberty, and I was approached by a cute girl covered in the bloody viscera of fresh kill who told me all about how nice I smelled, I too would be filled with many conflicting emotions. On the one hand, this girl could easily kill me with a smile on her face. On the other hand…I mean, this girl could easily kill me with a smile on her face.

I really enjoyed this introduction to Sheena and Mimi's story, and in any other season, I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day would have leaped immediately to the top of my watchlist. This summer is just so positively stacked with stiff competition, though, that I couldn't help but feel like this first episode could have done just a touch more to get me completely on board with its setting and the mysterious goings-on at the academy. That's such a minor complaint in the grand scheme of things, though. If you like the idea of a bloody, bitter yuri anime that will doubtless tear your heart out by the time the story is through, then I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day is probably going to make for appointment viewing.

After exchanging that magic-charging kiss with her new roommate, the mysterious and deadly walking experiment called Mimi, poor Sheena has caught a particularly powerful strain of Yuri Brain. She can't stop thinking about her partner's soft lips and carefree demeanor, especially when she's forced into such symptom-exacerbating scenarios as a tender hair brushing regiment. All signs point to this case of Yuri Brain being terminal. I mean, it's right there in the title of show, and all.

Even though the show is obviously playing around with the well-known tropes and iconography of stories about A Venerable Magical Academy for Youngsters (With Some Dark Skeletons Hiding in Its Proverbial Closets), the premiere of I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day managed to impress thanks to its abundance of visual style and the chemistry shared by its leading characters. Again, Sheena is your typical plucky-yet-average protagonist destined to suffer the tribulations that come part-and-parcel with being the main character of an anime, while Mimi is one of those adorably innocent waifs that can just show up covered in blood and viscera one day with a creepy, oblivious smile on her face. When the old ways work, though, you can't blame a show for doubling down.

This second episode sees our duo paired up for their first real mission, as the girls in class have to prove their worth as magical weapons of war and score a hundred kills on the mobs of feisty critters crawling all around the forest. It is a basic setup for an episode, but it allows Studio ROLL2 to show off some more of those action chops with all of the high-flying, explosive spectacle that the girls get up to, which makes for an entertaining time indeed. The show also exploits the expected contrast of these cute anime girls and the bloody violence they are expected to engage with. While Mimi is the capable killing machine that her reputation suggests, Sheena can't even nab a single notch on her belt before an insurgent ambushes her and explodes her entire arm.

It's a good thing that swapping spit with Mimi is enough to regenerate missing limbs. We're still not at the point where the underlying mysteries and lore of I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day can carry the story on their own, but Sheena is a good enough protagonist that we can get by with being able to see the consequences of this life on the one girl alone. For now, at least. For as much fun as I'm having with I Want to Love You Till Your Dying Day, I am curious to see if the story will have the substance it needs to carry on through to the finish line.

This show looked gorgeous, from the subtle gradient shading on all the characters to just how visceral the blood looked. For a show that really wanted to flash-bang you with the violence that these girls are regularly subjected to, to the point where it almost feels casual, I think highlighting that red as a stark color contrast was the right way to go about it. It made Sheena and Mimi's introduction a lot more powerful, and the energy Mimi brings to scenes really elevates the narrative and emotional impact. War is hell, but if war is all you know, then a lot of the death and tragedy becomes very commonplace. That's something I really appreciate the show nailing right off the bat. No one except those close to those who die is really affected by it because it's almost like something that you should just come to expect. Even then, I can tell that Sheena wants to grieve more, but she can't.

The show is definitely going for commentary on that, but I'm curious how the other narrative elements will tie into that theme. It's clear the show is going for some kind of yuri romance to develop between the two leads, even using kissing as a convenient gateway to healing, while Mimi has her about the way the world works outside of combat played up. Is this all going to be done to heighten the later-established tragedies, or is the show going for a dichotomy between how the weak are perceived and how the strong are perceived during war? I really liked the line Sheena's roommate gave in the flashback about how Sheena should consider herself lucky to be so weak, because weak soldiers aren't really considered a priority to shove onto the front lines. However, many of these kids' perceptions of being useful are so warped that Sheena ends up feeling melancholic and useless because of her weakness. A lot of this is stuff I have seen before, but it's still executed really well, with a solid presentation. Now all I need to see is how some of the rogue elements will tie into the larger theme of war.

I wasn't expecting the series to get right into combat and the sheer disparity between Mimi and the rest of the other students, but I appreciate the show's pacing. It makes sense because these students could be sent off to battle at a moment's notice and according to Sheena, this is far from the only time they have taken a test simulating real combat before.

In fact, if the premiere was all about highlighting how weak Sheena feels compared to everybody else, this episode is meant to highlight just how strong Mimi actually is. What took star students a tremendous amount of effort to take down one of, Mimi effortlessly takes down ten of by herself—and she has enough magical energy to fully restore somebody else's arm. I like how the show is really leaning into Mimi being this weapon of war, leaning into the idea that she has probably killed dozens if not hundreds of other people but that gets glossed over because of how expected it is.

There's a cute point of separation between how Mimi describes being on the battlefield with what she is actually describing. It doesn't seem as violent or crazy when a cute teenage girl with pink hair is talking about nearly dying multiple times, but in some cases it's worse—and that is the point. The growing relationship between Sheena and Mimi is gonna revolve around this external conflict of the war, but also the internal conflict of how this war potentially dehumanizes the both of them. It's a really scary idea to deal with, but that is just the way that these characters live so they don't actually see it that way until they are actually confronted with death—as was the case with Sheena and nearly losing her arm. I hope the show maintains this pace going forward with this animation quality because it looked amazing. Not only did it communicate the speed that the girls are operating in, but the different ways that the magical energy tracks around looks really fun. It's what I wish Harry Potter was more like. It also continues to highlight the gruesome violence of this war so that the rest of the girls can start considering exactly what they want out of life.