Just days after its official premiere, Grand Blue Season 2 has been leaked in full online. While only Episode 1 has been officially released, all 12 episodes have appeared on unauthorized torrent sites. The material appears to be finalized, including full animation and audio, though the source of the leak remains unknown.
One of the circulating torrent file descriptions includes a link to a Japanese streaming site, happydouga.jp, though its connection to the leak is unverified and may have been falsely added by the uploader.
This is not the first time a high-profile anime release has been compromised ahead of schedule. In August 2024, several upcoming titles set to stream on Netflix, including DAN DA DAN, MAPPA’s Ranma ½ remake, and the Mononoke: Karakasa movie, were leaked prior to their official debuts. Back then, Netflix confirmed that the leaks originated from one of their production partners and aggressively worked to take them down.
In a separate incident, a wave of titles from Crunchyroll’s Spring 2024 lineup, including KonoSuba Season 3 and Sound! Euphonium Season 3, were also leaked following early screenings at the Puerto Rico Comic Con. While the circumstances surrounding the Grand Blue leak remain unclear, the scale and timing echo a growing trend of pre-release security issues across the anime industry. While prevention is better than a cure, discussions are underway in the United States over anti-piracy bills, such as the Foreign Anti-Digital Piracy Act, that would expedite the process for rightsholders to block American residents from accessing piracy sites of foreign origin.
Leaks of this scale will do little to deter the increasing urgency that Japanese rightsholders are acting to defend their IP. Kodansha, a member of Grand Blue’s production committee as the manga’s original publisher, was part of a lawsuit against Cloudflare in 2022, which stood accused of facilitating easy access to pirated material. The Japanese government is also preparing to lend support to anime and manga companies looking to clamp down on piracy, greenlighting $2 million last year for a piracy detection system using AI.
Neither is part of Grand Blue‘s production committee, but major anime companies like Toho and Aniplex have employed fingerprinting tactics and technology in the past to quickly identify leak channels. These methods include watermarks and false credits for episode versions, intended to catch out leakers; the two companies filed subpoena requests using these tactics in August 2024. Meanwhile, Toho most recently filed a request for a court to order X (formerly Twitter) to reveal identifying information of alleged leakers of The Apothecary Diaries and My Hero Academia anime.
Followers are encouraged to support Grand Blue Season 2 through legal streaming platforms as it continues its official weekly run. Unauthorized leaks not only violate distribution rights, but also jeopardize the work of the creators and studios involved. It is streaming worldwide on Crunchyroll.
©Kenji Inoue, Kimitake Yoshioka, Kodansha/Grand Blue Production Committee
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