Grand Blue Dreaming lines up a fourth season
The anime adaptation of Grand Blue Dreaming has confirmed a fourth season, announced on the series' own site as its third season finished.
A fourth season is coming
A fourth season of Grand Blue Dreaming is in production. The announcement went up on the series' own site alongside a new key visual, dated 22 September in Japan and landing as the third season's final episode aired. It gives no release window, no broadcast details and no word on where the series will stream.
The visual is a fairly pointed statement of what the new season is about. The site's own note describes it as hinting that the contest for Iori's affections is about to get hotter, and says more information will follow on the official site and the series' X account.
What is confirmed so far
That is close to the full extent of it. The site has not attached a broadcast partner, a studio change or a cast list to the new season, so anything beyond the artwork and the production confirmation is guesswork for now. The credits printed on the series' site name Shinji Takamatsu as director, scriptwriter and sound director, with animation production shared between Zero-G and Saber Works, and the original manga comes from Koji Inoue and Kimiyoshi Yoshioka, serialised in Kodansha's good! Afternoon.
The four main voices are also on the record, named in the site's post for the season-three finale: Yuma Uchida as Iori Kitahara, Ryohei Kimura as Kohei Imamura, Chika Anzai as Chisa Kotegawa and Kana Asumi as Aina Yoshiwara. That is the cast of the season that has just finished rather than a confirmed line-up for the new one, and the announcement did not say whether any of them will change.
The timing to watch
The Japanese press picked the news up the same afternoon it appeared - Famitsu, Natalie, Dengeki Online, Animate Times, Mantan Web and Oricon all carried it within minutes of one one another - which is a fair measure of how much appetite the series still commands after three seasons and a 2020 film. This franchise has never run to an annual schedule, so a fourth season existing at all is closer to the exception than the rule.
Our opinion
A comedy built on a university diving club where almost nobody dives is a strange thing to keep commissioning, and yet the arithmetic is hard to argue with: this series has now outlived every reasonable prediction about it, surviving the gap between its second season and its third and returning with enough confidence to announce a fourth before anyone had to ask. The interesting question is not whether it gets made but what it is made of. Season three took the cast overseas, and the manga has plenty more material in the direction the new visual is pointing at, so the risk is less about quality than about drift - a gag comedy slowly becoming a romcom because that is what sequels do. The announcement gives fans nothing to hold on to except the artwork, and in fairness that is all a production confirmation ever is. Watch the next update for a window and a cast list rather than for another visual.