The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Kirio Fan Club

Aimi and Nami love Kirio, down to his most biological level. If he farts, they debate how to pinpoint the distance of the object of their affections. These are the kinds of deep, philosophical questions the two friends/rivals in romance pose to each other to prove their love for this boy who hardly seems to know they exist. That won't stop them from conducting nightly rituals to entice him into their dreams, though, or listing out what exactly they like about him, down to the very last organ.

Kirio Fanclub is based on the manga series by Ponchan Chikyū no Osakana. The anime series is streaming on HIDIVE on Thursdays.

My favorite thing about the Kirio Fanclub manga is that Nami and Aimi are never shown as anything other than regular high school girls. There's no romanticization of them – they're just normal teenagers being weird in the way many teens are. Why get all dreamy over your crush's eyes when you could think about his farts? Or pose with his forgotten uniform jacket? Sure, you could say you love him for his kindness, but do you really love all of him if you don't think about his organs? Even if you weren't these kids, you probably knew them.

Even more interesting is the way that the episode turns out not to be fully about the girls' crush on Kirio. He's the basis of most of their interactions, but in some ways that feels like an excuse. Kirio is what links them, the subject of their fevered imaginations and purportedly romantic dreams. The scene where they come across an actual couple mid-confession says a lot: rather than be caught up in the romance of it all or jealous that it's not them and Kirio, they're kind of icked out. Real romance, at least in its most recognized high school form, isn't actually what they want. It's much more fun to just think about it.

Although the art is a bit washed out in terms of colors (although to be fair, the manga does have a lot of white space), it excels in emphasizing the girls' actions and reactions. That moment when the other two students go in for the kiss is kind of amazing – it's the least romantic, grossest kiss I've seen in a while. Likewise Aimi's weird faces, to say nothing of shoving her entire hand in her mouth because barfing in front of Kirio's as good a way as any to get his attention, all emphasize the fantasy nature of their crush. I don't doubt that at least one of them really does like Kirio, but I also don't think they actually want to do anything about it.

I say “one of them” because I don't think Kirio is the one Nami likes. The final scene of her looking through her photos with Aimi seems to imply something different, and her panic at the thought of Aimi dating Kirio feels like it's more about Aimi than Kirio. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but I can't help but feel that there's something more going on.

The only person who at this point doesn't seem to have much of anything happening is Kirio. We never even see his face. Maybe that's the clearest sign that he's more object than person to the girls. This episode may be a little slow, but that alone makes it feel worthwhile to keep watching.

The expectation in romances aimed at female audiences these days tends to be that the lead character operates as a blank slate for the presumed reader to project herself onto. Especially in shojo, she must be awkward and uncertain, like a baby deer taking her first steps toward falling in love, while the male lead is more interesting and distinctive. There's nothing wrong with this approach, but it does get repetitive after a while if you yourself are not an awkward, uncertain teen looking for a protagonist to relate to.

(I should also note that this is by no means unique to shojo. Plenty of shonen romances pull the same maneuver with the genders reversed.)

Kirio Fanclub takes the opposite to the extreme. Its leads, Aimi and Nami, are so in love with their classmate Kirio that they worship him like a god. Their conversations are filled with hypotheticals about him, they use a mantra to dream of him, and they treat his forgotten uniform jacket like a holy relic. The gag here is, of course, that Kirio is a complete nonentity. He doesn't even have eyes, like some sort of romance game self-insert. The incongruity between what we see and what they see makes the whole thing charmingly surreal, along with the extremity of their devotion. The comedy maintains a nice blend of dialogue-based jokes, delivered with confidence by Nene Hieda and Shion Wakayama, and physical gags as well.

That balance is important, because the animation is not going to carry the series. It's not so bad as to get in the way most of the time, though it does throw off the comedy sometimes, but it's noticeably stiff and some parts seem to even lack in-between frames. Aimi and Nami are never looking quite in the right direction, staring into the middle distance between them. It also has a moderate case of light pollution aesthetic, a term I cannot take credit for, with washed-out colors that kind of make it feel like we're looking at everything through a haze of fog.

It's a cute comedy about two teenage girls with a lot of feelings, which was a nice 25 minutes, but it didn't give me a lot to chew on. That, combined with the fact that it's on HIDIVE, could make it hard for Kirio Fanclub to find an audience.