The Winter 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Dead Account

Ghosts have also inhabited the Internet, following the tradition that ghosts linger on in places where they have strong attachments. Sōji Enishiro, a 15-year-old boy who also streams under the handle "Aoringo," deliberately creates violent, clickbait, and provocative content to elicit reactions and earn money, but it is all for the cause of paying his younger sister's medical bills. In real life, he is a simple boy who loves to eat pudding and is devoted to his sister, whom he would go to great lengths for. One time, while online, he is attacked by a ghost that resides in the online world, and the attack leaves him spiritually awakened. He is recruited by Miden Academy, a school that specializes in training exorcists to tackle the digital realm.

Dead Account is based on Shizumu Watanabe's Dead Account manga. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Saturdays.

I really like the concept here—the idea that mirrors, empty classrooms, and the like in traditional ghost stories, SNS accounts of the deceased act as a portal between the living and the dead. These are all things or places that are very much tied to living humans—and have no purpose without them. And as anyone who's ever walked down a usually busy street at 3:00 AM can tell you, there's nothing quite as creepy as a place devoid of human life that should have tons of it.

I also like the idea that digital ghosts require digital tools to combat them. It's both fitting and hilarious that the weapons we see in this episode are basically a ban hammer and flames. It brings just the right amount of visual puns to the table. I even like the idea that Soji was basically a nuisance streamer—well aware that he was doing wrong but couldn't resist the money.

Unfortunately, the execution of these ideas is where this show suffers. It takes a genuinely well-realized idea and turns it into your basic Jujutsu Kaisen-adjacent shonen anime.

My biggest gripe is that Soji killing his sister's ghost just feels like a wasted opportunity. We had no time to get to know her as anything beyond a cliché, so her death means nothing to us—we don't even know Soji well enough to sympathize with him and his loss. What if, instead, he had let her ghost escape and had to deal with the consequences of that action going forward? Or what if he had managed to force her back into the phone and had to face an internal battle about whether it was right to keep her ghost with him or force it to pass on?

No, instead we're treated to another “boy with special powers has his family killed and is taken to a special school to learn how to fight monsters.” I mean, I know it's a winning formula, but clearly it's one I am tired of.

I'm not sure how to feel about this one, honestly. I'm not thrilled with the way it exploits main character Sōji's grief over the loss of his sister, who appears to be his last remaining family member. It feels unnecessarily cruel, though I understand the narrative purpose of making her the impetus for his spiritual awakening. Grief is something that can cut right through you until you feel like a ragged knot of tattered soul scraps barely attached to your body. And people's need to connect with their lost loved ones has undoubtedly had an outsize cultural influence – just look at the Spiritualism movement of the 19th century.

To that end, Dead Account feels like a reasonably natural update to the Spiritualism movement. As Kukuru tells Sōji, ghosts tend to appear in places where they spent a lot of time (don't think too hard about that in the context of bathrooms), and since we now all have little computers in our pockets, it makes sense that the modern equivalent would be social media. Because Blue Asta spent a lot of time texting his sister Akari while she was in the hospital, she's haunting their text threads, and giving her enough attention there allows her to manifest as a literal ghost in the machine. Except, of course, she's evil, because otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story.

Did Sōji need to be the one to exorcise his sister's now-evil self? Plot-wise, definitely. It's his big Shounen Hero moment, where he overcomes himself and does The Right Thing™. If Kukuru or one of his spiritualist cronies had done it, Sōji would be stuck in his anger and grief. But I still didn't love watching it play out, especially since Akari clearly only returned from the dead because her brother missed her and needed to feel a connection to her. It feels like damning him for something very normal – I know some people who keep a deceased family member's phone on so they can call and listen to their voicemail greeting. It's a coping mechanism.

So, while I think there's something to the idea of social media being a place where modern ghosts would materialize, and I can absolutely see how the medium's toxicity corrupts those ghosts, I don't think this started with the best example. Maybe I'm overthinking it. But I don't like seeing grief exploited. While I enjoyed the original manga creator's prior series, Real Account, as schlocky fun, this one isn't something I care to experience again.

Folks, is it a good quality or not when a show like Dead Account tells a story that could only exist in our modern, technology-poisoned hellworld? On the one hand, I feel like a critic like me should commend Dead Account for its attempts to satirize the brain-rotting effects that app-driven smart devices and the algorithm demons of modern social media have had on society's collective ability to function at a basic human level. On the other hand, every day we all have to experience a reality that is honestly not so far removed from this “exaggerated” cartoon world, which depresses me. Of course, in our world, it's not spooky ghosts we have to worry about, but rather the exploitation of the digital legacies of our dearly departed loved ones. There are already plenty of delusional tech-bros and amoral A.I. peddlers who are willing to do that evil work while they still walk this earthly plane.

That said, despite my dour feelings about the state of current affairs for us meatbags in 3-D land, my biggest gripe with Dead Account comes from how I don't think it explores some of its thematic underpinnings with more bite. Even Sōji's whole deal as a character before the phone-ghosts and exorcist-buddies start running amok in his life is that he is an online goon who intentionally trolls and harasses people for money. Dead Account's protagonist could honestly stand to be more of a self-interested dick. Everything about his tragic backstory involving his chronically ill sister, who gets turned into a monster-of-the-week ghost in the very first episode of the show, rubs me the wrong way. If Sōji had been more genuinely self-absorbed or damaged in his own right, Dead Account might have found something more substantial to say about the way that people get “possessed” by technology in ways that are by no means supernatural, which could have made for some nice, complex parallels to the ghost-hunting business that will clearly be taking center stage in this story.

Instead, though, we get the old “temporarily driven insane by grief over losing my improbably perfect younger sister to Anime Bone-itis” routine, which feels like a cheap shortcut to creating a generic shonen protagonist who has the bare minimum amount of backstory to function as a main character without making him too interesting or unique. As for the exorcising itself? It's fine. I'm not in love with the animation, the character designs, the worldbuilding, or any of the other factors that would help Dead Account stand out, but it's not like the show fails at anything in particular. The horror trappings are always welcome, in my book, but I can't help but feel like this is the kind of show that is destined to add up to less than the sum of its parts. Dead Account seems destined to fill the watchlists of folks who've already gone through their backlogs and checked off the truly noteworthy shonen action titles, which means now they just need something to kill time in between the new episodes of the shows they're actually interested in.

This is just Bleach with smartphones, right? It's about a brawler who gets pulled into fighting ghosts because he's suuuuper strong and special, because Reasons.

I'm not actually opposed to the core idea of the series. The question of what happens to the accounts of a dead person is something our society has been struggling with for decades now. Tying it to yurei mythology, where spirits become malicious ghosts due to a strong attachment to a place, is almost clever. If we consider the internet a “place” that is just as impactful as real life, there's no reason why a ghost wouldn't come to haunt a social media account. As someone who has lost some dear friends whom they only knew through the internet, it struck a chord with me.

Alas, the execution just isn't there. Technically, it's fine; the animation is good enough but unremarkable, and Nobuhiko Okamato is well-suited to playing a shouty shounen protagonist. However, I kind of hated the character he was playing. Sōji is the kind of YouTuber who thrives on hate-views, committing wanton destruction, and just generally making the lives of the people around him worse. There's nothing that can make me sympathize with a guy like that, who apparently makes his money off of randomly assaulting others and acting as a detriment to society. No, not even that he's doing it to earn money for a sick little sister.

It's always a little sister, isn't it? These schmucks can't be interesting on their own. They have to have a sickly, parentified little sister who takes care of them, whom they must protect. Sōji's little sister scolds him about not eating well, exhorting him to stick to one pudding cup a day and eat some vegetables instead. And they're orphans, for extra pathos! Every time the script reached for my heartstrings, however, it came up short. It was too weighed down with lazy writing and cliches.

The rest of the script was silly in a way that might have been a bit clever if I could only figure out how sincere it was trying to be. When he manifested a hammer and called it his “Banhammer of Civility,” I cackled. What brilliant localization! But also, the situation was dead serious, so it didn't seem like it was intended as a joke. Maybe? It's late in the preview guide, and I'm exhausted.

Dead Account looks to be this season's Serviceable Shonen, because remember: the most important thing in a battle shonen series isn't the story. It's not even the gimmick, because that inevitably wears away. The most essential thing to a shounen's success in this day and age is having a collection of guys and giving them Hype Moments that people can clip and post on TikTok.