The Fall 2026 Anime Preview Guide

The Ramparts of Ice Season 2

The sports festival is over, and now it's time for everybody to go back to their normal high school days…or is it? Miki wonders whether she can go back to how things were with Yota after turning him down, and while Koyuki feels good about finally admitting she has feelings for Minato, that doesn't mean she knows what to do with them. Will everyone be able to move forward or are things now forever changed? Meanwhile, Momoka continues to scheme and try to get Minato to move on.

The Ramparts of Ice Season 2 is based on the manga series by Agasawa Tea. The anime series is streaming on Netflix on Thursdays.

I think most adults can probably agree that being a teenager was hell. Not only were we crammed into socially fraught learning establishments with a bunch of other emotionally unstable idiots with dangerously undeveloped frontal lobes, but we were also forced to develop interpersonal relationships with them? Ewww. The Ramparts of Ice is one of those few anime that truly gets how confusing and painful adolescence is. Our protagonist, Koyun, after a prolonged period of deliberately hiding from the potential of emotional pain, is only now beginning to understand how much those dreaded feelings hurt.

Koyan isn't the only one who spends half the episode in tears. Female friend Miki is still reeling from rejecting Yota's romantic confession. She's tormented by guilt and the worry that she'll lose a friendship she treasures. The problem with confessing one's feelings is the risk that the other person will feel obliged to reciprocate. Does Miki owe Yota anything in that regard? Of course not, but saying “no” is sometimes harder than being agreeable and going along with the flow.

Koyan's troubled by her growing attraction to Minato, whom Yota perhaps rightfully castigates for being “too friendly” and leading girls on. He's fully aware of younger student Momoka's painfully obvious designs on him, but he's too “nice” to reject her, which, unbeknownst to him, is hurting Koyun. Momoka's a real piece of work, considering her bleak opening narration. She has identified Koyun as a rival for Minato's affections, and correctly intuits that Koyun is unlikely to ever proactively fight for the boy she likes. Momoka assumes that if she wears Minato's defenses down enough, he'll become hers, and Koyan will slink off into a dark hole somewhere. It's harsh, but she's probably not wrong in her assessment.

The restaurant eavesdropping scene where the girls overhear the boys talking would be excruciatingly stereotypical in almost any other anime, but here it's calculated to wound Koyan with as much psychic damage as possible. Minato can't be honest with himself, or Yota, claiming he loves Koyan as “only a friend”. Oh, poor girl, my heart aches for you.

The Ramparts of Ice is backfiring on all cylinders, wrenching hearts left, right, and center. Its evocation of adolescence's blinding fog of emotional torment is so squirmingly realistic it gives me flashbacks. It's leavened only by the frequent (and adorable) use of funny little chibi characters that recall the same creator's significantly more light-hearted You and I Are Polar Opposites. As much as I also loved that show, for me, The Ramparts of Ice and its searingly accurate portrayal of confused and inhibited teenagers appeals to my twisted inner masochist. It's one of my top shows of 2026. Here's to another full season of heart-pummeling anguish. I can't wait.

I was pretty much over The Ramparts of Ice by the end of its previous season. The more the story focused on its characters falling in love, the more I fell out of love with the show. What was once a series about the complexity of a group of teenagers getting over the inevitable psychological damage of middle school turned into a decent but typical high school romance. While there's nothing wrong with that – it's a genre I feel no antipathy toward – it just wasn't the show I wanted to be watching anymore.

Despite that, there was a refreshing quality to this episode. Now that everyone has largely managed to move on from their lingering trauma, they just… talk. Much of the runtime is devoted to various configurations of the main quartet sitting down and talking through their feelings about the current situation. Kocha Asagawa clearly values healthy communication. The real magic, though, is the balance between communication and rationality. Their desires and reactions aren't necessarily logical, because feelings aren't logical. They're not supposed to be! But when everyone lays out their context and reasoning, it still makes sense.

But that's just with characters we've been conditioned to sympathize with. We understand Miki's grief at realizing she cannot reciprocate Yota's feelings, and Koyuki's fear of being rejected. But can we shake off our dislike of Momoka, who is positioned as the current villain? She knows Koyuki likes Minato, and that he probably reciprocates, but she's going after him anyway. Here, she spells out her motivation: she won't just let Koyuki have what she wants if all Koyuki can do is sit around and wait for him to fall into her arms. It makes perfect sense, shown in parallel as she does core exercises while calling Minato to make plans, while Koyuki clutches a plushie alone in her darkened room, staring out at the rain. Minato, meanwhile, must contend with the fact that his dating history might make it hard for people to take his feelings for Koyuki seriously.

If you're one of those sickos who's always opining about how fictional characters should just sit down and talk out their issues, The Ramparts of Ice will give you an outlet for your twisted desires.

I appreciate that The Ramparts of Ice wastes no time diving into the existential anxiety I've come to love about this show. After the two massive bombshells at the end of season one regarding Koyuki having feelings for Minato and Yota's confession, I like that the show wastes no time really leaning into the ripple effects of those two revelations. While the romantic chemistry could be stronger, I always love how the show uses everyone's feelings for each other as a jumping-off point to explore broader anxieties, fears, and insecurities I think most people can relate to. Miki feeling overwhelmingly guilty about rejecting Yota was a phenomenal but heartbreaking conversation that makes me genuinely empathetic toward her. It's not that she doesn't care about him at all, but this show highlights how confessions carry enormous emotional weight and can completely upend an established friendship. Most shows focus on the person who does the confessing and barely spend time on the person who has to do the rejecting, but this episode is all about rejection, in both major and minor relationships.

Yota tells Miki he's OK, but even this episode shows how he's bottling up his fears and anxieties, so it's only a matter of time before he reaches his limit. But Miki has no capacity to bottle any of this up, feeling overwhelming guilt about not returning those feelings and even debating whether it was the wrong choice not to give him a chance. Still, this is clearly the most intense she's felt in a relationship, which shows just how important Yota is to her. Whether these are early signs of her developing feelings for him is still unclear, but at the very least, the double-edged sword of their bond makes the rejection feel even deeper for both of them.

This contrasts with Minato, who has spent most of his life being dumped, but only because he's never had a relationship that deep with anyone. Minato has always been more of a “go with the flow” and “let's not hurt anybody" kind of person, but that doesn't mean he's come out of every interaction completely unscathed. Not only has that made everybody view him rather cynically, which he is now being rightfully judged for, but I think the show is highlighting how all of those rejections from others have left him emotionally beaten down. It's like death by a thousand cuts; he's a lot more raw and sensitive than he even realizes. Even if what everybody is saying about him is technically true, it's clear a feeling is brewing in him that he might think he's undeserving of any kind of love. While obviously that is a good excuse to maintain some semblance of the status quo with Minato and Koyuki not confessing to each other despite being romantically interested, I like that there is still a believable character reason for why that status quo is maintained

Besides, this episode covers so much legroom, and it still had the courtesy to clear up major misunderstandings. Probably my favorite scene is when Koyuki and Miki air everything out at the restaurant, since they spent the better part of an entire season assuming the other was at least vaguely interested in someone else. I like how this still fits the episode's main theme, because both of them still felt guilty about potentially misreading certain scenes retroactively, but it is definitely played up as a lighter, comedic moment rather than a tragic one. The question is, though: what major shake-up is going to happen to get a lot of these characters out of the emotional hole they have dug themselves into? That is probably the overarching theme of this season based on this first episode, and I'm really looking forward to it!