Having once been a high school girl, I can assure you that there's nothing mythically pure and sweet about it. High school is messy, and that goes for the girls attending it as well as the boys. Too much media depicts high schoolers as either perfectly snarky proto-adults or impossibly sweet and innocent creatures. But Kirio Fan Club understands that high schoolers are just half-grown children, full of the contradictions of being trapped between adult and child, and that that state makes them behave in utterly ridiculous ways…but also sometimes poignant.

This contradiction is at the heart of Kirio Fan Club, a twelve-episode series based on the six-volume manga of the same name. Nominally, the series is about how high school second-years Aimi and Nami bond over their shared massive crush on classmate Kirio, but even in the first episode, you can start to see the cracks forming in this designation. The way the girls talk about Kirio and fantasize about him sounds an awful lot like a game of pretend. High school girls are supposed to have crushes on boys, so that's where they channel their sometimes-manic energy. But as we dig further into the story, it starts to look like the person Nami likes isn't Kirio (or a boy at all), while Aimi doesn't know what other designation to give to her feelings after having seen Kirio in a vulnerable moment. But really, we have to ask if anything in this story is about Kirio at all.

The answer to that question at first seems very obvious: the girls barely interact with Kirio, and we never see his face. But all of these things are double-edged swords. While the point of the story may be (or seem to be) Aimi and Nami's friendship, Kirio also has his own story going on in the background. The vulnerable moment Aimi saw him in is deeply tied to his past and mental health, and by episode seven, it starts to look like Kirio is depicted as faceless, not because his truth doesn't matter to the girls, but because he no longer matters to himself.

Kirio's mental health issues are just one facet of this series that doesn't, on paper, seem to fit with a show whose first episode involved weird kissing and a discussion of farts. But that's why it works: Kirio Fan Club looks at life as a whole, using the microcosm of five high school kids as a way to examine society at large. I don't mean this in a pretentious sense, but rather that everything that happens here is something that goes on around us in general. The person you see every day has their own life that you know nothing about, and what looks like weird behavior to an outsider may be rooted in something normal that you don't understand. Two of the best examples of this in the show are Nami's feelings for Aimi, which aren't explicitly stated until the final episode but are evident nonetheless, and Aimi's neurodivergence. Again, this isn't explicitly shown until the school trip, when she has a public meltdown, but we can see it in various ways throughout the series, primarily in her difficulties interacting with others. A flashback to her elementary school days towards the end shows that, before Nami, she's always had trouble in social situations, the culmination of which is that meltdown on the school trip, which Nami can help her through. Nami and Aimi have what Kirio feels he does not, and when that comes out, it shows that they're not living in a bubble watching one person; other people are watching them, too.

Like everything else in the show, this is demonstrated throughout before being explicitly stated at the end. Seira is the best example of it. She's a self-proclaimed fangirl (the best type, according to her) who latches on to Aimi and Nami as her dual oshi. She's devoted to watching them watch Kirio, but that means that she's also keeping an eye on Kirio to try and figure out what they like about him and to make sure that they can keep on keeping on. So it's Seira, with her outside view, who sees that Kirio is having a hard time when no one else does. While she's not aware of the entire picture (no one is, barring the audience), she's still the one person who can step in when we're all screaming at our screens – and it's only because of who her obsession is with. Kirio has other friends, but both Momose and Satsuki are too wrapped up in their own issues to notice his. And while Aimi is the sole other person who knows what happened to him in the past, her social difficulties keep her from stepping forward. Seira's own brand of social ineptitude is what saves the day.

That's important to the overall theme of Kirio Fan Club. No one in this story is perfect, which is a large part of its charm. But all of them are remarkably human, from Manda, a reclusive, black magic-obsessed classmate whom Nami and Aimi befriend, to Kirio himself, even if he isn't sure he deserves to be. We're all weird and awkward, in high school and beyond, and the beauty of this series is that it can take us from laughing about it to sobbing in the space of fifteen minutes. Even the Licky Love Song Aimi and Nami write can be poignant in the right moment, because even when you feel alone and unnoticed, someone may be seeing you and is happy that you exist.

In less capable hands, this could have been a preachy show. Instead, it handles dark, difficult topics with respect while still gleefully poking fun at how silly people can be. Kirio Fan Club is life in a nutshell, where none of us are perfect or really know each other, but manage to find each other anyway.