The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans

Rei Hitoma is a licensed high school teacher, but a bad experience led him to leave the profession a few years ago. Now he's stuck, spending his time in his room playing video games and saying that he's looking for jobs when the reality is that he's not sure he wants to interact with people ever again. That changes when a strange job listing at a remote all-girls school pops up. Without knowing what he's doing, Hitoma applies and gets the job. When he arrives, he finds out that the school is a special facility for animals and spirits who want to become human. In charge of the advanced class, this self-proclaimed misanthrope now has to teach a class of girls how to become the very thing he hates – and he just might figure out whether or not that's true as he does so.

A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans is based on VTuber Natsume's A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans (Jingai Kyōshitsu no Ningen-girai Kyōshi: Hitoma-sensei, Watashi-tachi ni Ningen o Oshiete Kuremasu ka......?) debut light novel series. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

Today's premieres are starting to feel like an endless parade of, “I liked it better when it was called _____!” In this episode, I liked A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans more when it was called Interviews with Monster Girls! And that was better when it was called Scooby Doo at the Ghoul School! Don't forget to tip your waitress!

I know Interviews with Monster Girls didn't have the most interesting character designs and was overall pretty anodyne, but at least they had a dullahan. Dullahans are easy: just draw a cute girl, and make her head removable. I suppose these girls are supposed to be demi-human beastpeople, not actual monsters, but you still have to give them more interesting features than ears and tails. But I suppose A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans isn't here to challenge us. It's much more interested, I suspect, in offering tepid platitudes about how humanity isn't so bad.

It sets up the central mystery of just what happened to Rei Hitoma to make him ~such a misanthrope~ but to be frank, I'm not very interested. Teaching for four years often has that effect on people – children can be awful, to say nothing of parents or intra-faculty politics. There doesn't need to have been some big traumatic moment, and frankly, it would ring truer without that. Rei refuses to respond to his students' prying to draw in viewers who hope to find out the answer, but that would require an investment in the characters that I am not willing to make. The girls aren't much better, as each one displays a single personality trait: prickly Usami, bold Haneda, blabbermouth Minazuki, and shy Ogami. Their names are all puns, including Rei's, which means “human world.” Groan.

The cowardly character design is nowhere close to the show's sole visible failing. Most of the episode is the characters sitting at or standing behind desks, and the animators still managed to muck it up. There was one off-model frame of Rei, his features distorted in the way of someone who doesn't know how to draw a three-quarter view of a face, that kept coming back. Every single time, the camera held on it for several seconds at a time. Whenever it popped up, the room howled with laughter and dismay.

There's another thing too, one that I haven't harped on too much because this doesn't seem to be quite the right forum for it. But what the heck, I'll say it anyway: the vibes of a school where the students are punished for not assimilating well enough are weird. Maybe I'm bringing my own cultural baggage, but it feels like they're being told to leave off pieces of themselves. I'm not here for that.

For these demi-human girls, what does it mean to be human? Does it mean that they will actually, magically transform into human beings? Will their animal ears disappear as they fundamentally discard what they were born as? Or does it mean simply learning enough to pass as human—enough to throw on a magical glamour like the principal does and walk around in the human world.

Either way, this seems to be a story that throws the traditional message out the window. Rather than learning to accept yourself for who you are, this is a story about throwing away your culture and history to join another. This is made more complex by the fact that each of our four main girls has a deeply personal reason for doing this. For one, it is to repay a human who helped her once. For another, it is because she loves to dance—which is, admittedly, a bit hard for a mermaid.

The most interesting of the girls, however, is the one who can already become human: a werewolf. She is trapped between worlds—neither fully wolf nor human. Thus, she feels uncomfortable in her own skin. Only by fully becoming one or the other can she truly become herself.

Then, we add to the story of these girls who idealize humanity a man who hates it. And honestly, this feels like a smart choice for the school. As a person who has lived decades in a country not their own, I can't tell you the number of people I've seen arrive in Japan all starry-eyed only to become disillusioned with the reality of Japan over time and subsequently return to their old country and lives.

Having someone to prepare them not only for the social norms of the human world but also for the darker side of humanity will only bolster their chances for true assimilation. And who knows, in the process, he may also learn to see the good in both humanity and in himself.

With distance comes forgetting – which is a mildly poetic way of saying I forgot how goddamn annoying Usami is. Now that I've seen and heard her in action on the screen, my mind is flooded with memories of how much I disliked her when I read the novels. It's entirely possible that her gremlin voice is part of the problem, but she's just so incredibly irritating that she almost hides how annoying other parts of the show are. And before you rush to assure me that she gets better, yes, I do remember her backstory. It is better. But that doesn't detract from how much she impeded my enjoyment of this episode with her unwarranted accusations. It gives off the impression of a rabbit girl who doesn't actually want to be human, despite being in the class, which undercuts the basic plot pretty drastically.

Not that the other girls in Hitoma's class are much better. Mermaid Minazuki has what my mother calls “diarrhea of the mouth;” she can't seem to stop talking. Tobari the bullheaded shrike is too perky for her own good. And Isaki the werewolf is…fine, I suppose. She's the least present of the girls, which perhaps unfairly paints her as less annoying simply because she doesn't speak as much. It's an interesting decision to make everyone so uniquely irritating.

The story's logic feels remarkably murky. It's unclear why a self-avowed misanthrope would take up teaching in the first place, but having had a couple of miserable classroom experiences in a public school, I can believe that a combination of a bad class and insufficient administrative support could have jaded him. But why would he <>return to teaching feels a little suspicious. That's not nearly as odd as a mermaid who doesn't eat seafood, though. What else would she eat if not fish? I suppose she could exist on seaweed, but why would eating sashimi be any better than eating processed fish products? I'd think it'd be worse in terms of feeling like cannibalism, but maybe that's just me.

While I didn't dislike the first novel (I can't say the same for the second), this animated adaptation turned me right off. Between Usami's and Minazuki's grating voices to the underbaked internal logic of the story's world – to say nothing of the fact that we see the same profile image of Tobari talking nearly every time she opens her mouth – this just isn't that good. If you just want cute monster girls, give it a chance, but otherwise, I think you can safely steer clear.

As I've gotten older, I have found myself caring a lot less when a show caters to apparent kinks or fetishes that aren't my bag. Even when stuff is brazenly crossing the boundaries of good taste, I'd rather live in a world filled with perverts who are all getting catered to (and nobody is actually getting hurt or exploited in the process) than a world where sex only exists in the hushed tones of scandalous conversation. Sure, A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans is far from the trashiest thing that's debuted this season, and teacher-guy Rei goes out of his way to explain that he isn't into children (thankfully), but the title is a dead giveaway for the romantic fantasy that it's peddling. Rei is the self-insert guy whose kindness and understanding will endear him to the affections of all the different demi-human girls in his class, and even if nothing explicitly sexual goes down, the show is still playing around with that nebulous mix of paternal/fraternal/mentor attraction that anime loves so much, and you know what? More power to it.

All of that said, since I am a teacher, I cannot shut off the part of my brain that recognizes how absurd it is for anyone who isn't a legitimate creep or a teenager themselves to be entertaining fantasies of a teacher-student variety. Never mind the inarguable ethical problems of the entire premise; if you've ever taught teenagers for any length of time, you know from firsthand experience that most teenagers are awkward, insecure, naive children who are incapable of being attractive to any adult that isn't already a weirdo (no offense to any teenagers who might be reading this, of course). In other words, I cannot ship it. I cannot ship any of it.

So, there's strike one against A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans. Strike two, for me, comes from the “Demi-Humans” part of the title, because let's be honest here: This is just Diet Monsterfucker Trash for cowards. Tobari, Sui, Kyoka, and Isaki all seem like perfectly - if also blandly - nice girls, but they're basically just cosplayers who act out cutesy little animal quirks and either lack the skill to create their own high-quality fursuit or the funds to commission one from another artist. It's 2026, people, and I don't know if you've noticed, but shows like BEASTARS, BNA: Brand New Animal, and With You, Our Love Will Make it Through have proven that the anime furries are here to stay. All I'm saying is that nobody is going to be drawing cute fan art of the girl with goofy-looking feathers sticking out of her ears, because the fan artists can smell cowardice from a hundred miles off, and we should all be following in their lead.

The point is, A Misanthrope Teaches a Class for Demi-Humans has put itself in the strange position of seemingly refusing to cater to any audience that would be most primed to give it the time of day. It isn't smutty enough to appeal to the perverts, even though the basic “harem for teacher” setup is going to turn away a good percentage of the normies out there. Of the viewers who stick around, I'm sure there are enough fans who will settle for these weak-sauce character designs, but we've already got Umamusume, don't we? At least that franchise is clearly trying as hard as it can to perfect its “Furries for People Cursed to Give a Damn About What Other People Think” appeal. What does that leave the premiere of Misanthrope to work with? About twenty minutes of half-assed worldbuilding and cliche jokes that all feel like desperate padding to fill out a script for a concept that would have struggled to justify itself even as a ten-minute short. As I said, this is “Taco Bell Mild” levels of weak-ass sauce, all around.