Kirio Fan Club – Episode 1

Content Consideration: Self-induced gagging/vomiting

What’s it about? Aimi Miyoshi and Nami Sometani have a friendship forged from their mutual obsession with Ken Kirio. The pair spend their days plotting the best way to approach their classmate, but their image of Kirio don’t exactly match up with the reality. Then again, they’re keeping some secrets from one another too.

Alright, we’ve got a show about two girls who are crushing on the same guy. If I know the average reader of this website, you probably made the same joke that I did: ladies, please; there is a much easier solution to your problem.

And then I think the show heard me?

To be clear, I was already in love with Kirio Fan Club before the final minutes revealed that while Nami definitely has a crush, it’s not on Kirio. It’s nice to have a grounded josei series about women’s lives just as Journal with Witch has taken its beautiful closing bows. Even before the final reveal, when the show is still pretending to be about two girls vying for the same boy, it’s not really about Kirio. Nami’s supposedly dead-on impression just involves him being sleepy in class. He’s absent for 80% of the episode, and is drawn with a blank face when he does show up. Nami’s favorite things about Kirio are that he’s “nice,” while Aimi’s overly intense but equally impersonal list includes all his major organs.

“Weird girls vibing” is something that I never tire of, as long as it’s well done. Aimi does genuinely seem attracted to Kirio, or at least the idea of him, but she still has absolutely no idea how to proceed from there, and the answers she finds are the perfect mixture of absurd and quotidian It’s also not afraid to let the girls make weird faces and look otherwise uncute, which is extra refreshing since the art style has one foot in realism. The girls’ conversations brought back memories of both O Maidens in Your Savage Season and Migi&Dali, and I worry that this show being on HiDive will consign it to the same relative obscurity as both of those hidden gems.

Whether it turns into a romance between Nami and Aimi or a more general story about learning to support your fellow teens as complex and fallible humans, I’m really impressed with the craft here—not least because a lot of the creative team is either new to the industry or stepping into new roles for the first time. We’ve definitely got a full adaptation on our hands, since the manga ran for a tidy six volumes. Now all that remains to be seen is how the story will flesh out its ensemble and the truly important relationship at its heart.