“You are the person whose existence itself is weird.”
Fuko Ibuki Quotes
2 quotes from Clannad, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
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.”
Tomoya asks where he ranks with her, and this is the answer, 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 one scene away from watching a girl fade 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.
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, who has spent the episode pretending to be her, teasing her, and hiding her carving. 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 everyone who befriends her will lose the memory of her when the wedding is done, which the show plays for tears in episode nine and then, in After Story, quietly reverses when she wakes. 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.