The Summer 2025 Anime Preview Guide - Rascal Does Not Dream of Santa Claus

It's called "Puberty Syndrome"—a phenomenon where those coming of age develop something akin to an uncontrollable superpower stemming from a wish or insecurity. One person may become invisible due to not wanting to always stand out. Another may body swap with a person due to living in their shadow. Yet another may cause a time loop in order to avoid a big change. Sakuta Azusagawa has spend the end of his high school career helping one person or another with their Puberty Syndrome problems. Now, as he heads off to college, all that's behind him—or is it?

Rascal Does Not Dream of Santa Claus is based on the Rascal Does Not Dream... light novel series by author Hajime Kamoshida and illustrator Keeji Mizoguchi. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

This episode does a great job of twisting what we thought we knew about Puberty Syndrome. Up until now, there has been a single person with a core problem that blossomed into a supernatural occurrence. But this time, things aren't so clear.

It's no doubt true that Uzuki has had a shift in personality. While before she was charging on towards her goal—heedless of the opinions of those around her—she is now able to “read the room”. Now she makes sure to poll her friends before suggesting a spot to eat and dresses more like them to not make them envious. But with this newfound social awareness, she has started to lose sight of herself. Is it time for her to give up on childhood dreams—to seize the opportunities in front of her, even if it means betraying her past self and those who supported her?

On top of this personal dilemma, there is also the possibility that this is the result of Puberty Syndrome. However, rather than Uzuki being the cause of the phenomenon, it seems it might be due to everyone else. Those surrounding her at college are jealous of a person so unlike them—someone with a clear goal and sense of self. They want Uzuki to stand out less—to be less self-centered and outspoken—so they don't feel bad about themselves in comparison.

If this is a case of Puberty Syndrome, Uzuki is being brainwashed, yet Uzuki does find the clarity she has gained important. For her, the best result would be a happy medium—a version of herself that has a strong core but can keep her more self-centered actions in check. However, we'll just have to wait until next week to see if such a thing can come to pass.

Of the many sequels we're getting this season, this one is the most unfriendly towards newbies. While the existence of Puberty Syndrome and several past incidents are mentioned, a new viewer will have no idea who all these characters are, what their relationships are, and why everyone seems to gravitate towards Sakuta despite his overly sarcastic personality.

Of course, to someone fully caught up on the TV anime and subsequent movies, this is a fantastic premiere. It serves as something of both an epilogue to the high school years part of the story and a prologue for things to come.

Throughout the episode, we get at least a brief look at what all the previous heroines are up to. Toyohama, for one, is now in college with Sakuta and Mai. Meanwhile, Rio is working nights at a cram school with Sakuta (he's a busy guy) while Kaede and Tomoe are working at “Benny's” together. It's welcome to see that, even though Sakuta has entered a new phase of his life, his old interpersonal relationships aren't forgotten.

The other focus of the episode is on setting up the various dilemmas (possibly connected, possibly not) for this season. Uzuki, the lead singer of Sweet Bullet, has appeared a few times in the story so far, enough for us to understand her personality. In general, she's one of those people going full-steam ahead in her little world, which is why the change in her demeanor is so strange. Judging by her actions in her final scene—first going along with where her other classmates want to go for lunch and then saying exactly what Toyohama was planning to say to her—it seems like she may have developed mind-reading thanks to Puberty Syndrome.

Next, we have the mystery set up at the end of the last film: that of Touko Kirishima. At the moment, we have only two clues. The first is that the Sakuta from the ideal timeline left our Sakuta a message—that he needs to figure out his relationship with Touko Kirishima. The problem is, he doesn't know her beyond the common knowledge that she is a popular singer with a hidden identity. The second is that, in the various timelines Shoko experienced due to her own Puberty Syndrome, Touko Kirishima did not exist.

The final bit up we have is for the titular Santa Claus. Mirroring his first encounter with Mai, he sees a woman dressed as Santa moving through the library stacks. He tries to brush off the encounter, but that doesn't stop the young woman dressed as Santa from tracking him down. However, one thing seems likely—no one else can see her but Sakuta.

In addition to all that, we have the introduction of Miori Mito, a girl who seems like Sakuta if he were a woman. How she's connected to any of these dilemmas (or if she is at all) is left ambiguous as well. To put it bluntly, there are a lot of moving parts in this episode, and all of them are captivating in the way this series is at its best.

One of the best aspects of watching a Rascal Does Not Dream… project is seeing how Puberty Syndrome is going to manifest in whatever unfortunate girl that Sakuta ends up helping out. The show's approach to the supernatural mysteries of each story arc feels more in keeping with a magical realist approach than anything legitimately scientific, no matter how many lectures we get about quantum entanglement, causality, and alternate dimensions; that is just fine by me, though. The point is not to interrogate the believability of whether or not a girl could, say, spontaneously generate a duplicate of herself that acts out on social media with lewd self-portraits, or if it “makes sense” that someone could instigate a combination time-loop/prophetic vision based on their fears about being made an outsider. The point is to investigate what this big old metaphor can tell us about the characters.

In the case of Sakuta's idol friend, Uzuki, the Puberty Syndrome of the latest storyline is much more subtle. Uzuki's apparent shortcoming has been her inability to “read the room”, which results in her being judged for her airheadedness and her unconventional choices (like skipping out on regular school in favor of an online one). The way her case of puberty syndrome is manifesting has to do with her ability to “read” the moods and subconscious judgments of the people around her. It's like mind-reading, except less targeted and not controlled by Uzuki herself. She's just suddenly become aware of all the snide comments and secret resentments people keep in their heads, and it has been causing her to dress and behave more “normally.” Naturally, this means that her skills as an idol are going to fray as well.

The formula of these Rascal story arcs is still very much in effect, meaning that we're only just figuring out what Uzuki is going through, and how Sakuta could help with it. While I won't say that this is the most riveting case that Detective Big Brother has been assigned during his storied career, Uzuki is a likeable gal (because they all are), so I am curious to see how her story plays out. Rascal Does Not Dream of Santa Clause continues' the series' proud tradition of exploring the fraught and seemingly infinite complexities of trying to stay sane in Japan's culture of conformity, especially when girls like Uzuki are also trying to navigate the distinct perils of the pop-music industry meat grinder.

If I have one concern about this new season, it's that the cast may have finally ballooned to a size that not even Sakuta can manage without coming apart at the seams. I like all of the characters, new and old, but there are just so damned many of these girls that orbit Sakuta's life, now, and it's becoming difficult to remember who is who without a handy cheat-sheet, or something. I need my fix of Sakuta and Mai being perfect together, darn it, and that's going to be harder to fit into Sakuta's schedule when he has thirty-seven other platonic gal pals to chat with every week.

Leading up to the premiere of Rascal Does Not Dream of Santa Claus, I took the opportunity to rewatch the original Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai and the three sequel films with my wife, who had never seen anything of the franchise before. Just the other day, we were both remarking about how so many anime protagonists suffer in comparison to Sakuta Azusagawa and Mai Sakurajima. Sure, Sakuta's ever-expanding circle of lady friends and their increasingly strange and obtuse cases of “Puberty Syndrome” have made for a story that can sometimes be a little convoluted—especially since the Dreaming Girl and Knapsack Kid movies doubled and tripled down on all of the time-travelling and parallel universe shenanigans. It's easy to stay grounded, though, when you have a lead couple as superbly written as Sakuta and Mai. They're both smart, complex, and likeable young adults who have only continued to grow as the series has progressed, and it's their journey that makes the Rascal series something truly special.

Speaking of growing up, the series has fully transitioned to the next big stage in everyone's lives. Sakuta and Mai are both adult college students now; Mai is as busy as ever with her work in showbiz, and Sakuta is navigating the uncertain waters of freshman year. As you might expect, this means that, in addition to staying awake through lectures and getting through social mixers, Sakuta also makes new female friends and discovers more complications in his life due to that pesky Puberty Syndrome.

Given that this series reliably follows a pattern of adapting one of the source novels across three or four episodes, this premiere is unsurprisingly focused more on setting up all the pins that will inevitably be knocked down by some supernatural event or another later on. We're already dealing with echoes from parallel universes, potentially body-swapped musical idols (again!), and mysterious girls in Santa Claus outfits—so who knows how esoteric Sakuta's life will get by the time this arc wraps up?

With the series back after its extended hiatus from television screens—and with the movies being notoriously expensive and hard to find for English-speaking viewers—I'm sure that plenty of people are wondering if Rascal Does Not Dream of Santa Claus makes for a quality reintroduction to this world (especially if you haven't caught up on Sister Venturing Out or Knapsack Kid, which Crunchyroll still has not added to its streaming library for some unfathomable reason). Well, the good news is that the series hasn't lost a step since 2018, and this is the same show that so many of us fell in love with way back when. The bad news, though, is that this premiere absolutely expects that you have seen everything up until this point. The events of past films are alluded to but not recapped, and we're already building on character relationships and details that won't make any sense if you have only ever watched the last television season. So, do your best to catch up on those movies, and then get ready to dive back into the world of rascals, bunny girls, and Puberty Syndrome, because all signs point to this being one of the summer's shows to beat.