Popverse's top stories

• Welcome to 2026! Here's how Popverse will continue to be your pop culture tour guide & bestie
• How to watch Dimension 20 in order, from Fantasy High to Gladlands and everything in between
• After Stranger Things: The Duffer Bros. original plans for a sequel set in the 90s

Everyone has their own greatest fear. For many, it is spiders or bees, but for us, it is getting inexplicitly dropped into one of the many visual novels or dating sims that we’ve gotten addicted to over the years. Which might be why we’re so excited for the return of Trapped in a Dating Sim, which has recently confirmed that the long-awaited second season is coming in 2026.

Trapped in a Dating Sim: The World of Otome Games is Tough for Mobs was one of the big surprises of the 2022 Spring anime season. It took a seemingly tired concept (office worker gets isekai-ed in a game world) and did some fun things with it. It played with the concept of gender roles and had some very funny interactions between characters. Finding out that the second season is finally coming, almost four years after the first season finished airing, is not the good news that we expected to get at the start of 2026, but we’ll take it. The announcement also included some new key art for Trapped in a Dating Sim Season 2.

Several cast members are returning for Trapped in a Dating Sim Season 2. These include:

• Takeo Otsuka as Leon
• Kana Ichinose as Olivia
• Fairouz Ai as Angelica
• Ayane Sakura as Marie
• Akira Ishida as Luxion
• Kenichi Suzumura as Julia Rapha Holfort
• Kosuke Toriumi as Jilk Fia Marmoria

The first season of Trapped in a Dating Sim aired in April 2022 and was streamed by Crunchyroll. Trapped in a Dating Sim Season 2 will air in 2026, but the exact release date or streaming platform hasn’t been confirmed.

Each week, Popverse's resident anime expert Trent Cannon runs down the latest and, dare we say "greatest," in anime and manga in Popverse Jump. Some recent columns have included... 

• Aggretsuko vs Chainsaw Man: Two Wildly different anine with the same anti-capitalist message
• The Summer Anime season return of Kaiju No. 8, Sakamoto Days, & Dan Da Dan are forcing me to break my vow of watching less anime
• From Tomo-Chan to Oshi No Ko: How some of your favorite manga creators got their start in hentai
• Piracy is baked into anime's past, but, like Crunchyroll, we should move on from it
• Flying whales, mechs, and Miyazaki vibes: Inside Netflix's Leviathan anime with the people who made it
• How AI translations of manga continues the 'enshitification' of the medium, and why Japanese publishers are "less precious" about it
• I never wanted a Cyberpunk Edgerunners sequel, but God help me I'm going to watch it
• The Summer Hikaru Died delivers its cosmic horror at an agonizingly slow pace
• The one thing that Dan Da Dan does better than Demon Slayer ever did
• Studio Ghibli movies have never been as cozy as you think they are and that's what makes them magic