The Spring 2026 Anime Preview Guide

Kirio Fan Club

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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.

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James Beckett
Rating:
I have to give Kirio Fanclub credit for reading my mind with such ferocious clarity that the ending of this episode may as well have been a slasher-movie jumpscare. I was maybe five minutes deep into this premiere when the thought struck me, mostly as a joke: “Wouldn't it be funny as hell if these two girls were so horny for this Kirio guy that the shared passion just made them fall in love with each other, instead?” So, when the shockingly quiet and contemplative final moments of the episode appeared to be signaling just such a twist, I nearly fell out of my chair. It isn't often than a cutesy high-school comedy actually takes the smarter and more complicated route over the easy premise and predictable jokes.

In fact, if there's one thing that I was pleasantly surprised by when it comes to Kirio Fanclub outside of its possibly sapphic twist on an age-old love-triangle routine, it would be the surprising amount of grounded humanity that is flowing underneath all of its silly bits. I was expecting something more in the realm of Asobi Asobase's utter absurdity, but from the moment our heroines begin their strange and often embarrassing fixation rituals together, Aimi and Nami are completely believable. This is absolutely a pair of silly, awkward, and completely ridiculous best friends that could exist in the halls of any given high school anywhere in the world. Nene Haida and Nami Sometami do an excellent job of selling the show's jokes while still delivering performances that are just understated enough be cringe-inducingly relatable to anyone who has ever had too many frank conversations with their BFF about the farting habits of the opposite sex.

One of the biggest problems that a lot of high-school anime aren't even self-aware enough to notice, let alone overcome, is the way they reduce their teenaged subjects into flat, obvious stereotypes that just lazily repackage the same five or six routines over and over again. Kirio Fanclub accomplishes the vital trick of presenting two young, hormone-addled ladies who are complete and complex individuals that can still be relatable goofballs that any viewer could empathize with. Just look at me: I'm thirty-four years old, terminally heterosexual, and growing increasingly tired of the anime industry's obsession with telling wistfully nostalgic melodramas about teenagers, and I still spent most of this episode clapping in solidarity while shouting, “You got this, ladies! You can both get your man, somehow!”

Then, of course, we get that quiet little scene at the end where the girls stare with shimmering eyes and rosy cheeks at all of the photos they took together. It's a potent reminder that the one part about teenage life that really is romantic, even so many years in hindsight, is how full of possibility and discovery every day was. One day, you and your lifelong partner in crime are crushing hard on the same dude. The next day, who knows? Maybe an even better catch has been swimming right beside you all this time. What a wonderfully silly and charming little show this turned out to be.

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Richard Eisenbeis
Rating:

To be clear from the start, this is not an anime for me. While relatable to the extreme, awkward humor has never been my thing. I get so embarrassed for the characters on screen it might as well be happening to me. That said, “not my thing” in no way means “bad.” In fact, I'm impressed by how tight the writing was in this first episode.

As the humor in the episode and I don't mix, I found myself focusing on the girls, Nami and Aimi, and how they viewed Kirio. Very early on, I noticed that while Aimi is hyperfixated on Kirio, Nami doesn't seem to be. Rather, she just seems to be egging Aimi on—using her own supposed crush on Kirio as a way to spur the other girl into action.

Yet, despite this, Nami actively gets in the way whenever Aimi has a real chance of interacting with Kirio—be that by returning his forgotten jacket or making her dream of the night before come true. The writing was so consistent, I was able to catch on to the twist halfway through the episode.

And speaking of the twist, the reveal was downright fantastic with Aimi and Nami looking at the same picture. However, while Aimi is looking at Kirio's jacket, Nami is looking at Aimi—as we see when she then scrolls through her collection of all the other pictures they've taken together.

Better still, this twist recontextualizes the anime entirely. Nami is using Aimi's crush on Kirio to stay close to the girl she loves. She is fostering her crush's obsession while also doing all she can to make it not come true. For all the awkward laughs to be had, this is a deeply tragic show where one character is unable to take the first step on the road to dating the boy she likes while the other is only able to stay close to the one she loves by pretending to love another. The writing really is fantastic.

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Rebecca Silverman
Rating:

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.

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Caitlin Moore
Rating:

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.