Fuko Ibuki

About Fuko Ibuki

Fuko Ibuki is the first mystery Tomoya meets in Clannad, a first-year student who sits alone carving wooden starfish to give away for her older sister's wedding, while something about her presence at school does not add up. Childish, stubborn and completely sincere, her short arc teaches the audience exactly what kind of story Clannad is: small, kind, strange and quietly devastating.

Appearance

Fuko is a very small, childlike girl with light brown hair worn in low twin tails and soft brown eyes, looking younger than her first-year status and often slightly dazed, as if listening to something far away. She is almost never seen without the tools of her project: a wooden star shape in her hands, a small carving knife handled with surprising care, and shavings in her lap. Her expressions are the character in miniature: blank and dreamy one moment, then flashing into furious, puffed-cheek indignation when someone calls her carving a starfish instead of a star.

Personality

Fuko is earnest, odd and immovable. Once she decides her sister's wedding will be celebrated by the whole school, no mockery, exhaustion or logic can shift her; she simply carves another star and offers it again. She is childish in her joys, obsessed with starfish, which she insists are stars, and with cute things generally, and she is hopeless in ordinary conversation, drifting into trances of delight that Tomoya learns to snap her out of. But her love for her sister Kouko is the purest in the series, entirely selfless and years long, and her arc's sadness comes from watching the world slowly forget a girl who only ever wanted one thing for someone else.

Background & Story

Fuko is the younger sister of Kouko Ibuki, a former art teacher at the school. Years before the main story, on her way to school, Fuko was hit by a car and fell into a coma from which she has never woken. What walks the school in Clannad is something like her spirit or projection, visible clearly only to some, appearing because Kouko is finally getting married and Fuko's whole heart is set on the school celebrating it. She carves wooden stars, insisting they are stars and not starfish, and presses them on students as invitations. Tomoya and Nagisa build her a campaign of helpers, but as the wedding approaches, people begin forgetting Fuko, exactly as the nature of her existence dictates. Her arc ends with the wedding, a schoolyard of carved stars and one of the series' defining images, and she returns briefly, impossibly, in After Story, as such things happen in this town.

Powers & Abilities

• Carving: She can produce an endless supply of hand-carved wooden stars, working with speed and skill that impress even sceptics. Each one is an invitation, made by hand, one at a time.
• Her presence: Fuko's existence at school is supernatural: a comatose girl's feelings made visible. Some people see her clearly, others barely, and as her purpose fades, so does everyone's memory of her.
• Persistence: Nothing discourages her. Rejection, ridicule and her own fading are met with the same answer: carve another star and offer it with both hands.
• Starfish trances: Her ecstatic daydreams about starfish are a running joke, and also the sign of a mind fixed on pure, simple joy, which is her gift to everyone she meets.

Key Relationships

• Kouko Ibuki: Her older sister, a former teacher, whose wedding is Fuko's whole mission. Fuko has loved and watched over Kouko through years of coma and visits, asking for nothing but her happiness.
• Tomoya Okazaki: The first person to take her project seriously, in his blunt way. He teases her mercilessly and works harder for her than anyone, the template for all his later friendships.
• Nagisa Furukawa: Her champion and friend, who believes in her instantly and recruits half the school to the star campaign. Their bond opens the series' heart.
• The school: Hundreds of students receive her stars, and for one day the whole school celebrates a wedding for a girl most of them will forget, which is the bittersweet point of her story.

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