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Of all the announcements and reveals at Anime Expo 2024, few were as exciting as the announcement that Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt was coming back to our screens in 2025. After more than a decade of waiting, season two of the chaotic classic anime is finally on its way, but the world it is being released into is a very different one. Can Panty & Stocking deliver the same shock value with season two?

The glory of Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt has always been the shocking, gross-out humor that ran through it. From the first episode, which saw the Anarchy Sisters defending Danten City from a giant poop demon, Gainax sought to establish a tone of unrestrained chaos and an overwhelming sense of very cool weirdness. When it first came out, this style of adult animation, with its crude humor mixed with lewd references and distinctly grown-up language, was newer and fresher. This was before Rick and Morty, before Bojack Horseman, and before Hazbin Hotel. Shows like this were distinctly niche back in 2010. The most mainstream options were Ren & Stimpy and Drawn Together, and neither of those was quite as creative as Panty & Stocking. 

That’s not the case anymore. Now, we have plenty of options when it comes to adult animation series.  Archer is the show that will not die, and Rick and Morty has done promotions with McDonald's of all places. Even Star Trek got in on the fun in their own way. The Panty & Stocking formula has exploded in the age of streaming, where creators don’t have to worry about network censors getting in the way of their fun. They are free to be as weird as they want to be, so how can Panty & Stocking’s second season make the same impact in the West their first did?

The answer is by doing more of the same because no one in the intervening years has done it quite as well as Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt. This is a series that does not care about continuity – the cast is turned into undead at one point only to be fine moments later. It isn’t interested in being subtle or having a sensical plot structure. An entire bloody episode is dedicated to the horrors sperm face when they encounter a tissue. If chaos is your flavor and you want to see a pair of angels eat and bang their way through a city, there is nothing quite like Panty & Stocking; not at the time the first season was released and not now more than a decade later.

This is why there is still such an appetite for this show, despite coming out so long ago. It scratches an itch no one else has. It goes places no one else dreams of. Who else is going to deliver the kind of show where a magical girl transformation takes place on stripper poles? No one but Trigger, that’s who. In the vast ocean of weird animated shows available to us, Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt is still probably the weirdest and the best.

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