Hi, I'm the Yuri Sorcerer. Just remember, if you need your enemies to have their souls magically divided in twain so they can be transformed into two women kissing, I'm your gal
If there is a real tragedy to Kirio Fan Club, it's that its strengths often actively play against one another. However, I think the finale is one of the very few episodes of the series where this isn't the case, so we end things on a good note.
There are moments in this finale that are legitimately hilarious and some that are actually very sweet, and they largely make sense together because of the show's absurdist carpe diem bent that lets all the silly and tragic happenings, both individually and alongside each other, feel like just a natural consequence of life.
I don't think Kirio Fan Club is a great show, but it's a good one, and if someone wanted to build a case for it being better than I've said while writing about it over the course of its runtime, I think they'd find the materials to do so here. I cannot stress how important Nami actually just saying that she loves Aimi is to making the finale work; even if they don't get together and even if Aimi, dumbass as she is, only seems to really half-understand what Nami means by that. The finale shows them all still friends by the time of graduation, which I think is also an important detail. (It's also worth noting that Nami and Aimi are established as going to different colleges in the future. Nami, girl, for your own sake, please crush on someone who isn't painfully straight, I beg of you. While I'm in a parenthetical I feel like they missed an easy trick with the show's final shot. A stylistic conceit of the series is that we haven't seen Kirio's face because we don't really know him, now that the girls *do* know him I think it would've been an easy alley-oop to show us his eyes in the closing shot of the series. But, well, what do I know.)
Also yeah the whole dragon coworker skit is funny, as is Satsuki randomly blurting out her own unrelated love confession to Momose in the middle of everything. The full-band version of the song the girls wrote about Kirio is also surprisingly nice sounding, which is kind of funny in its own right.
But perhaps the funniest moment in the entire finale was this:
imagining a far-off future where humans have gone to outer space and now refer to themselves as "terrestrials" to indicate that their species originated from Earth even if they as individuals were born on some other planet and never left which leads to the gen Þ teens on Mars inventing the phrase "extra terrestrial" to refer to people born on Earth because they're somehow not aware that it was already a word meaning the exact opposite of what they're using it for but the new definition is so pervasive on the internet (which now stands for inter-PLANETARY network) that it drowns out all objections from naysayers until it is eventually de facto the "correct" definition and feeling somewhat annoyed
Kind of funny as fuck to introduce a *second* character who's searching for a missing parent. Ken is cute, though! I feel super bad for him! I am suspecting a sort of brotherly dynamic will establish itself between him and Yuru.
A delightful episode of Gujo being dragged through the torment nexus. There are whole seasons where we don't get even one anime episode this good, and this is, what, the third or fourth episode in this show alone to be so?
I really like an early comment Gujo makes here about her own inability (or, at least, perceived inability) to appreciate art. She's succumbing to what I think of as lock-and-key interpretation of the arts, she reads all kinds of interviews and other external opinions because she wants to know what a given work means. She wants a single, specific answer. Despite Chin-lan's reassurances, she feels like at the end of the day she just "doesn't get it."
And, I mean, of course we're not talking about just art here. She feels this way about interpersonal connections, too, obviously. What does Botan have that she doesn't? There isn't a singular answer, but she's spent a lot of time looking for one regardless. I don't want to come down too hard on Gujo here, she's young in the grand scheme of things and, in any case, is not a real person. But I do have to admit that I get a sickly sort of catharsis out of watching her run in circles about Ibuki. I have both been and had inflicted upon me This Whole Thing, the desperation of wanting to be closer to someone who just doesn't think of you that way. It's a bad look on absolutely anybody, and just because I can relate doesn't mean I sympathize, you know?
If there's a consolation, it's in the fact that Gujo is clearly her own biggest obstacle. Chin-lan invites her to drinks---this takes up much of the middle of the episode---and without even really trying, Gujo demonstrates that she understands art just fine by engaging Chin-lan with a conversation about film. (She certainly knows way more about them than I do. I will note that it feels meaningful that she appears to cut herself off just before making a reference to Tom Stoppard, but then again, I suppose it could be a different Stoppard.) The problem is one of mindset; she likes talking with Chin-lan, and she likes spending time with her. But that isn't the same as her feelings for Ibuki, or at least, she can't quite tell if they are or not. (The archetypal rich girl college student, she expresses this by comparing her mind to that old opening line cliche; a storm.) It's left to Chin-lan to make the explicit opening move. In maybe the most romantic come-on in a show that is hardly short on those, she quotes a letter by Van Gogh about the sea, and how its dangers have never kept sailors away from it. She asks Gujo, will you come out to sea with me?
We don't hear her response, as the episode's final third is about Yaeka and Akane (with Botan along for the ride). This is the simplest of the three chunks of this episode, but it ties into the previous two by also deploying the arts as a tool of communication, here between Yaeka and Akane. It's easy to say that everything is fine in their relationship---despite some griping on Yaeka's part about how she feels as though she's giving more than she gets in the relationship, Akane "just happens" to play a song that they bonded over in their first year, and all is seemingly forgiven---but the rockiness that can result from a relationship that's hit its ' ' boring ' ' stage is interesting in its own right. (As for the fact that Akane actually plays that song becuse Botan discretely texts her to ask her to do so….well, Botan is honestly quite the little schemer. The rest of the cast, sans Gujo perhaps, is lucky that she largely only seems to want to pursue Ibuki seriously.)
Even the post-credits scene, shot almost entirely from Ibuki's point of view, continues the whole "art as communication" theme, this time by playing up the differences in what the girls know for laughs. Chin-lan, who knows her literature, references A Hundred Years of Solitude to Akane's bewilderment, leading to Akane similarly being incredulous that she doesn't recognize jazz musician Eric Dolphy. (I have to give the point to Chin-lan here, sadly, I did not recognize Dolphy by name, off hand. Although honestly I haven't read A Hundred Years of Solitude, either. I am humbled before this gaggle of anime college girls.) It's a nice reminder that despite the complex emotional entanglements going on, these people do in fact get along and are friendly with each other, and the quote she reads out in full---"When you hear music, after it's over, it's gone in the air. You can never capture it again."---is genuinely relevant to the episode's themes. It's also a bit of casual peacocking, I think, capping a very erudite episode for this genre with yet more references to various bits of high culture. Not that I blame the series, these references never feel forced or contrived, and I imagine weaving them into the text of the series is fun. It's also, however, communicative, which is the point---or at least a point, be wary of locks and keys---of the episode on the whole. If Kamiina Botan is trying to make the case that it, too, is music, I think it's making a pretty strong one.
I did not expect to walk out of this show with my two favorite characters being Manda and Seira but here we are.
This episode essentially marks the "twist" (it's not much of a twist) of Kirio Fan Club being fully out in the open. I've enjoyed my time with this show well enough and I think I am ready to give an overall assessment even if the series doesn't end until next week. Kirio Fan Club is a crude but reasonably effective bit of comedy / melodrama, and I think if I had gone in with higher expectations it *might* have let me down by "just" being that? But I went in expecting something solid and solid is what I got, so I'm happy with where we're at. I do wish Nami's whole crush on Aimi was explored more but the next episode is the last and it doesn't seem like we'll have time to get to that. Oh well.
Probably going to end up pegging this somewhere in the 6/10 bracket, but maybe the finale will surprise me.
And thus the (relative) truth of the middle school matter is revealed. I could razz Koyun here but honestly I'd have been way, way more gloaty and insufferable if I stole someone's guycrush without even really trying lmao.
Back in the present day I'm interested enough in the new girl (Kuriki) to be a little sad the season is almost over. (Or at least, I assume it is, if this ends up being two consecutive cours that would be a tragedy of timing because, much as I do like this show, summer is shaping up to be very competitive in terms of anime.)
Yeah I'm ngl I have liked this show but I think this plot development is a little whatever, and at this point I think I'm sorta just ready for it to be over.
I also have to stop forcing myself to watch stuff in a specific order because the entire time I watched this (which took me something stupid like three hours) I kept thinking about how I'd rather be watching Witch Hat Atelier which also drops on Mondays. So, I dunno, really just sabotaging myself here but as I say I am also kinda just ready for the show to be done. Little bit of Lyric x Kikuka tease in the post-credits was cute though.
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