Tonight, the latest addition to cable anime blocks, Axs’ Anime.com Hour, will be airing the conclusion of the first season of Aniplex’s Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works. Axs has been airing this block since February 13, 2025 at 10 PM, when it debuted with a full hour of Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works, airing the double length episode 0. The following week, the second show of the block debuted, with the former Toonami staple My Hero Academia getting a full hour. Axs chose to start from season 1 episode 1 rather than continuing from where Toonami left off at the end of season 6. The seventh season’s climactic battles have already fully aired in Japan, with an eighth on the way this fall to conclude the series, but season 7 has yet to air on either Toonami or AXS. After a couple more weeks of the two anime alternating full hours, due to episode 1 of Fate also being a full hour, they finally settled on a pattern. One episode of Fate and one episode of My Hero Academia have aired every week throughout the spring.
Tonight, May 22 at midnight eastern, My Hero Academia will be preempted due to the double length season finale of Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works. Schedules for the 29th indicate Axs intends to continue directly into the second season of Fate. It has been known that Axs currently can air the first two seasons of My Hero Academia due to official X posts from the Azuki social media team that runs the Anime.com website and sponsors the block. What remained ambiguous was whether they had both seasons of Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works, as the mouthful of a title was all that was confirmed, with no season specifications. Recent schedule listings for late May and early June confirm they continue to air Fate every week. Unlike previous occasions when Fate has run long, they show no signs of doubling up My Hero Academia to make up for the skipped week.
The Anime.com Hour’s first season has been tumultuous. On the axs website’s schedule page, the Anime.com hour is listed at midnight at the top of the Thursday tab, which can give the wrong impression that it is airing on Wednesday night at midnight. My Hero Academia’s airings are no longer even noted by any schedule sites. Axs has simply programmed guides as if Fate is airing for a full hour every week except for the double My Hero Academia weeks and one other occasion. Due to the amount of ad time required by Axs, openings and endings have frequently been cut, sped up, or even skipped entirely in the case of the double My Hero Academia blocks. The final appearance of My Hero Academia on any official listings from Axs was on week 6, when the Anime.com Hour experimented for a couple weeks with alternating between Fate/Stay Night: Unlimited Blade Works and My Hero Academia on the listings every week, while airing both in one night. AXS stopped listing My Hero for the six weeks following that, listing Fate as a full hour even when it was a half hour episode. Tonight’s episode will be the rare occasion where Fate’s listing will be fully accurate, as it actually is going to consume a full hour due to the length of the finale. Thus far the block has shown no signs of splitting up longer episodes, and the listings for next Thursday confirm they are proceeding to season 2, requiring a full hour for Fate tonight.
The block’s ties to an NFT anime website have stirred some controversy, as has the passive aggressive marketing campaign which has has posted messages like “remember Toonami? It’s a core childhood memory for us” positioning Adult Swim’s Toonami block as a dinosaur they are succeeding. For a time, this seemed like it might succeed, as Toonami failed to acquire any new shows throughout early 2025. However, Toonami has recently counterprogrammed hard against the Anime.com hour. On April 26. Toonami aired the Ginger Root: Shinbangumi music video album for a special hour at 3 AM, directly going up against the music themed Axs channel. In response, Axs moved the Anime.com hour’s Saturday encore from midnight to 3 AM, where Fate Stay Night’s finale will face off against Sailor Moon and Common Side Effects this weekend. Toonami’s latest retaliation to Axs claiming one of their most popular shows in My Hero Academia was to bring back new episodes of Bleach and Blue Exorcist. With 220,000-254,000 viewers on last week’s Toonami, Axs’ Saturday anime encore is facing tough competition.
Not only the weekend encore has been delayed. The Thursday block has moved later, as AXS’ top rated wrestling program TNA iMPACT! now receives a full two hour instant replay, pushing the Anime.com hour down from its original 10 PM slot to midnight. AXS also experimented with moving Anime.com encores from Saturday night to Sunday night in early April, during the weekend of the Lazarus premiere, but this proved to be a temporary change. On some occasions, the block has also been delayed to 12:30 due to musical events running long. There have also been issues with duplicate series listings causing episodes to not record for Fate. Watching live is the most reliable way to catch the anime.com hour, but if it is on too late for you, it is best to check your DVR.
Will you be watching Fate Stay Night and My Hero Academia on AXS, or Sailor Moon on Toonami?
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The post AXS Confirmed to get Season 2 of “Fate Stay/Night: Unlimited Blade Works”, will air Season 1 Double Length Finale Tonight appeared first on Anime Superhero News.
