“You are the person whose existence itself is weird.”
Fuko Ibuki Quotes
3 quotes from Clannad, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
A girl handing out wooden starfish to strangers, who everybody will forget. The first place Clannad puts its supernatural machinery in plain view, and its funniest arc.
“I like you better than a sea slug.”
This is Fuko's ranking of Tomoya, followed by the clarification that she likes the sea slug fairly well, so he should be glad. It is the funniest line in her arc and it comes in the episode where the arc turns, with the other students beginning to forget she exists. That is the trick the writers are pulling. A viewer laughing at the sea slug is watching the episode in which a girl fades out of everyone's memory, and Clannad is relentless about placing its jokes right next to its losses, on the theory that the joke is what makes the loss cost something. Fuko's affection is sincere and ranks him below a marine invertebrate. He earns the ranking. The show's plainest bit of wisdom is that being liked a little by someone who does not lie is worth more than a speech.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“If no one else thinks so, I think they're a great hit!”
Sanae has already said that the starfish pastries have regular customers when Fuko offers her endorsement. Tomoya is surprised by the sales claim; Fuko is concerned with declaring her own pleasure. She is hardly an impartial judge, and the scene gives no reason to treat her enthusiasm as a reliable guide to anyone else's taste. Yet that is also why her answer is useful. Sanae responds by promising a special starfish pastry for her, which turns a discussion of general popularity into an exchange between a maker and a particular admirer. Fuko's partiality is the point of contact. She does not need to establish that everyone ought to like the pastries before Sanae can enjoy making one for her. The praise has a modest, concrete result: someone who already likes the idea is offered more of it. Dismissing the exchange because its judgment is biased would mistake the purpose of a compliment for the purpose of a review.
Fuko spends her arc carving wooden starfish and handing them to strangers as invitations to her sister's wedding, and this is her verdict on Tomoya. It is a good insult and, in the way Clannad does things, a diagnosis: the boy who finds her existence strange is the one who will forget her. Fuko's arc is the first place the series puts its supernatural machinery in the open. She is a girl in a coma, and the people around her begin to lose their memory of her before the wedding, which the show plays for tears in episode nine. Read with that in view, the line is a coma patient telling a living boy that he is the odd one, and the series more or less agrees with her.