A couple new trailers are out, and they’ve revealed some very interesting information that has me really psyched about the second season of Shakugan no Shana!

The first interesting thing that caught my eye was the introduction of two new characters. Well ok, the first thing that caught my eye was “OMG Shana is hawt!”, but I figured that kinda went without saying.

The first of the new cast members is a character from the novels, Firesu (or Pheles, depending on your preference for romanization).

She has a particular interest in Yuuji which I won’t go into in detail about for fear of spoiling too much, suffice to say that… SHOW SPOILER

In any case, she’s a fascinating character with a mysterious background. She also has awesome long green hair - something which this series has been sorely lacking in up until now.

With the introduction of Firesu to the story, they needed another loli character to meet the minimum DFC quotient, so they brought in Mea.

Mea is a character who first appeared in the Shakugan no Shana PS2 game, which was later ported to the Nintendo DS. I have the DS version of the game, which is classified as a “Battle Adventure Game” according to the Japanese Wikipedia.

Basically it’s like a visual novel type game, where the player makes periodic decisions that influence the progression of the story, but it features turn-based battles in between dialogue sequences that help keep things varied. It’s pretty fun, but also rather short.

At any rate, I think Mea is one of the cooler characters to have been introduced into the Shakugan no Shana universe, so I was pretty excited when I saw her in the trailer.

Aside from being a goth loli with horns and a frilly parasol, she’s also got something of a tsundere streak to her. Of course, no one can compete with Shana in that department, but it still makes for some fun dynamics between the two, which hopefully will transfer well to the animated version.

She’s also…SHOW SPOILER

Since the game features a separate story arc from the novels, it’ll be interesting to see how they handle the anime adaptation. It would be easy enough for them to keep the Mea plot in its own self contained story arc, and preserve the main story as more strictly canon, but there’s also a lot of potential for weaving the two together in interesting ways.

It’s also very encouraging to see that we’re getting to the part of the story where Yuuji finally learns to suck it up and be a man. If you were put off by his wishy-washy indecisiveness in the first season, stick around, he gets a lot better.

He even has a few GAR scenes, which hopefully we’ll get to see in the anime very soon. On the other hand, he does keep something of a whiny streak, but of course that also helps fuel a lot of the humor between him and Shana.

Anyway, I don’t want to give away too much the story, which in my opinion becomes a lot more interesting after the events of the first season, but fortunately you won’t have to wait long to find out! The show starts up on Thursday, October 4, Japan time. Woohoo, I can’t wait!