YMMV / Kemono Friends

• Adaptation Displacement: Few fans of the series will recall the show actually had a mobile game and manga, as the game sold so poorly that the app was discontinued a month before the anime began. Taken a step further when the staff announced several new mobile and arcade games specifically based on the anime continuity.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Red Fox says they really hunt by sensing their prey's magnetic field, but Silver Fox brushes it off as nonsense. However scientists do think that foxes do use the earth's magnetic field as a means to guide them to their prey since if they face magnetic north, they have a very high chance of catching something.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: Kemono Friends might be the biggest example of this in the anime media. Based on a dead mobile game about animal girls with only ten people working on it for five hundred days, No Budget and full of noticeable CGI, basically the real life version of Shirobako, even the creators expected it to flop terribly. Yet the generally decent writing, solid character designs and surprisingly compelling Ontological Mystery made for a solid watch, and it ultimately became extremely popular through internet word-of-mouth. Its first episode became the most-watched anime episode on Nico Nico Douga; disc sets and merchandise quickly sold out, and the "Do It Yourself" Theme Tune reached #3 on Japan's iTunes rankings.
• Creator Worship:
  • TATSUKI, and the rest of Yaoyorozu in general, are held in higher regard than the other creative teams in the franchise, including Ryuichi Kimura and Tomason of the 2 era.
  • Naito Ryu, the writer of the manga adaption of Kemono Friends 2, for not only solving the traumatic depictions of certain events but also managing to take some of the more negatively received aspects of the second season and either spinning them around or retconning them in ways that have had near-unanimous praise from fans.
• Die for Our Ship: Thanks to the post-season gender reveal, the already much-hated Kyururu is this for all yuri shippers, as the anime is entirely made up of females sans the gender neutral Lucky Beasts.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: As expected of a show with so many characters, some stand out more than others.
  • Emperor Penguin is probably the most popular of the PPP, despite being not the most active.
  • Shoebill also has a sizable fanbase, as noted in One-Scene Wonder below.
  • Overall, Crested Ibis is one of the most popular Friends in the show, with merchandise of her selling out quickly.
  • Alpaca Suri is also very popular, placing high in polls.
  • Tsuchinoko also has quite a large number of fans.
  • A poll among Russian fans of the show resulted in Silver Fox winning as the second most favourite character, right after Serval.
  • Of the season 2 cast, Domestic Dog and Greater Roadrunner get quite a bit of fanart, the former for being a loyal, sweet and powerful friend, and the latter because of the fact that she was one of the few friends in the season to have an actual, consistent personality.
• Fan Nickname: The huge Black Cerulean from the climax is sometimes called "BigDog", due to having the body layout like the Boston Dynamics robot of the same name. In the Sega game, it is implied to be modeled after a Big Dog used by CARSC.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • Many fans like to pretend that season 2 never happened after learning about the fates of the original cast, as Serval lost her memories of adventuring with Kaban. Even though Kaban was still alive and later met with Serval, they never had the opportunity to truly reconnect. The initial "tease" of what might have potentially been Kemono Friends 2, where Kaban and Serval set off to explore the Gokoku Region, wasn't followed up on.
  • The post-series backstory explanation, which came out months after the season aired, made fans distance themselves from 2 more. What makes the post-series backstory explanation reaction more complicated is that much of it came from Kemono Friends World, a Japan-only event. Deliberate misinformation about the event was spread in the Japanese and English fanbases. A translator from the fan community that handled translations for the Guidebooks, the Nexon game cutscenes, and story cutscenes/tie-in anime for the Kemono Friends 3 game was able to go to the event to get accurate info. The explanation about human Friends (like Kaban) being unstable, while Kyururu was a regular human with no side effects from being a clone of a boy attacked by the Cerulean Queen, was interpreted by some as being another diss towards Kaban.
  • The idea that season 2 actually took place two thousand years after season 1 also baffled many fans, with many feeling that there was absolutely no reason for such a large time skip, since not only does this raise the question of how are any of the manmade structures still standing, but nothing significant enough happened to justify such a massive time skip anyway.
• Funny Moments: Plenty.
  • In episode 3, we get Japanese Crested Ibis's awful singing. It's so bad that nobody likes it...except for Kaban, who isn't bothered by it at all.
  • In episode 4, we get Tsuchinoko freaking out at Serval and Kaban's appearance in her ruins and screaming in a screechy voice.
  • An official blooper reel for the English dub was posted on YouTube, and highlights included: Prairie Dog calling Serval "Madam Buttsniff," Lucky Beast saying yeet and fam, half the cast abusing the Big Chungus meme to no end, all the jokes about Princess's English voice actress Amanda Lee, and Princess referencing various memetic songs such as I'm On a Boat and Despacito.
• Genius Bonus: Northern White-Faced Owl and Eurasian Eagle Owl were formerly birds, which are unable to taste the capsaicin in peppers. This explains why, when they try curry for the first time, they are utterly freaked out and wonder if they didn't eat something poisonous; it's a sharp, intense taste they couldn't even experience before.
  Northern White-Faced Owl: Is this even safe to eat?!
  • Hippo being the first Friend other than Serval to talk to Kaban is a reference to Egyptian mythology, where newborns are greeted by Tawaret.
  • Serval and Kaban trapped in the huge Cerulean refers to Ra in a cat or serval form cutting open Apep.
• Friendly Fandoms: Since the crossover event with Tezuka Productions when Unico was added◊ as a DLC Guest Character on February 18th, 2021 complete with a Little Bit Beastly design◊. The Japanese fanbase has immediately gotten along with fans of the Unico series. Notably fans of Sanrio Animation's The Fantastic Adventures of Unico and Unico in the Island of Magic with the former film celebrating its 40th anniversary.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The anime was, out of universe, a last-ditch effort to get people to notice the franchise and characters. This worked up until season 2 came about, which had a Troubled Production, Creative Differences, and is largely regarded as a step down in quality from the first, burying the franchise again.
  • The anime's incredible success became this once Kadokawa Pictures responded to creative differences regarding the yet-to-air second season by firing the director, then taking the entire original staff off the project, including the voice actors, who had nothing to do with the dispute.
  • Fandom jokes crossing Kemomo Friends with Metal Gear Solid V took a sour turn when Tatsuki was given the boot and the snowclones of Kaz's rants became eerily prophetic.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight: The anime's surprise popularity has given the franchise new life, with the anime itself acknowledging that the last ditch rescue effort of Japari Park worked.
• Inferred Holocaust: Early episodes implied this with the effects of neglect on the structures of the abandoned park, and while later episodes confirm it to some degree what happened is only revealed in the guides, and even then is an exercise for the viewer.
• Les Yay:
  • The all-female cast, tendency to introduce characters in pairs, and pleasant tone makes yuri shipping easy in general, but a few cases stand out.
  • Beaver and Prairie Dog's episode was all about how well they complement each other, and ends with them moving in together. There was even a bit with them thinking about how amazing the other was while blushing. Not to mention that 'traditional greeting'...
  • Serval at one point suggests that she and Kaban could live together, specifically suggesting it'd be like Beaver and Prairie Dog.
    • Serval and Mirai had a similar relationship, but, in this case, Kaban is a Friend as well.
  • Margay deserves a special mention, being completely gung ho for PPP, making comprehensible Margay noises, and then nosebleeds and faints from meeting PPP up close for the first time. Even in the manga, she's known for shipping other girls.
  • Giant Panda and Red Panda are like a couple living together.
• Memetic Mutation: The spread of which likely contributed to awareness of the series.
  • The Zebra Friend was never shown clearly, so she is often depicted as a faceless zebra-patterned slug-shaped thing. (Danbooru gave the slug-shaped thing its own tag, separate from the Zebra Friend, calling it the Savanna Striped Giant Slug.)
  • The opening scene, and particularly Kaban's "Don't eat me!", is subject to a number of parodies.
  • Serval's "Su~goi!!" (Amazing!!) whenever she sees something new or interesting.
  • "You're a friend who is good at X". The exact quote is never used in the anime, though.
  • Serval's dumb smile from episode 1, simply known as "that face◊" in Japan, became inexplicably popular after it was used in the banner of the fan blog "Kemono Friends channel". In fact, it became so popular that it became an expression for the Good Smile Figma Serval◊ under the name "gentle smiling face".
  • Serval's "Myanmyanmyanmyanminmi~" from Episode 5 ended up getting a huge following for just how cute it sounded, leading to an entire genre of videos featuring it under the tag "Church of Minmi". This later became an ascended meme when the line was included in the Kemono Friends Alarm Clock app.
  • /// CERULEAN ASSAULT IN PROGRESS /// ^note The main track for Cerulean encounters/tension resembles music from the PAYDAY 2 soundtrack (particularly Infinite Ammo by Le Castle Vania). Cue crossover jokes. There is also a fan-made mashup of said song with Infinite Ammo.
  • The Friend habit of calling Lucky Beast "Boss" often has fans interposing the other Boss, both Big Boss and the original. This resulted in Metal Gear parodies being made.
  • The news of Grape-Kun, a Humboldt penguin courting a cardboard cut-out of Hululu (herself based off of a Humboldt) is shaping up to be this, especially when one learns that Grape-kun was flatout jilted by his previous girlfriend. Even more so, complete with a sad outpouring, when the (quite elderly) Grape-kun passed away from old age, with comments about him "finally being with his waifu" being common. He even makes it onto one of the PPP CD covers, with Hululu!
  • With Raccoon's (Arai) status of Hero of Another Story, she and Fennec are often shown appearing in various movie scenes in fan works.
  • The controversy over Tatsuki getting the boot from production quickly made the hashtag #NoTatsukiNoTanoshii ("tanoshii" meaning "fun" in Japanese) run viral in the fandom.
  • Tomoe^note A popular modification of Kyururu, called Tomoe, became really popular in the late stages of Season 2. Fans tried to give her a unique adventure with Dog as her companion, often making what if stories about the pair as they roam around Japari Park.
  • 2.6%^note  The percentage of viewers on Nico Nico Douga who gave 2's finale a "very positive" rating. It was around 17,000 out of over 520,000. Note that this is the worst rating ever received for any anime streamed on the website, beating Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V by 0.2%.
• My Real Daddy: Despite the series being a multimedia project as well as the brainchild of Mine Yoshizaki, many fans consider anime director Tatsuki to be the real heart behind Kemono Friends thanks to his introducing the well-known personalities the fans came to love. So much in fact, that when he was fired from the series, people started calling season 2 a Franchise Killer.
• Narm: In the final episode of season 2, Kyururu has to jump over a crack in the ground, a Call-Back to the one he jumped over in episode 1. This is an obvious parallel to the scene where Kaban rescued Serval, showing her Character Development since the first episode... But in Kyururu's case, it's completely ruined by the fact that the crack is so small that he could literally just walk across.
• One-Scene Wonder: Shoebill really only had one scene in which she did anything (split over two episodes), but she's likable, has a good design, and her stare is memorable, so she's very popular.
• Overshadowed by Controversy: The second season was never able to get over all the hubbub brought about due to the Troubled Production, where the director was forced to leave and the voice cast were made to apologize for something that wasn't their fault. To make matters worse, the newer season effectively retcons everything Season 1 built up, with the writing basically saying everything Yaoyorozu created was inferior to the new team's writing. As a result of the near-blatant insults to the cast and worldbuilding that made Kemono Friends such a major hit, fan reception going into the 2nd Season was rock bottom and stayed very low, only really acknowledging it for the new character designs it provided, and it sadly ended up as another example of how not to handle a booming property. Some have even gone so far as to suggest that the manga adaptation of 2 is the proper sequel given its more positive reception, encouraging others who want to continue the story to seek that out instead of the animated version.
• Periphery Demographic: The show aired at Otaku O'Clock, but the director, who had previously worked on shows aimed at children, decided to keep the show suitable for kids (who would presumably be watching it via streaming rather than in the late night timeslot).
• The Scrappy: Kyururu, the protagonist of season 2, was absolutely hated in Japan and overseas for many reasons.
  • Compared to Kaban, he's considerably less polite to the Friends and denies the fact that he's an animal, which goes against the entire theme of Season 1.
  • How he treats Domestic Dog in Episode 9, in which it's revealed that Dog wanted to meet Kyururu simply because she was lonely and wanted to play with a human again. She is extremely friendly to Kyururu, even willing to fight the much more powerful Beast (a tiger) in order to protect him. Yet after she was wounded in battle, Kyururu didn't even acknowledge this, instead praising Serval for scaring off the Beast instead. At the end of the episode, Kyururu casually leaves her behind, most likely meaning that she'll be alone forever.
  • The final episode only added fuel to the fire as not only has Serval completely forgotten about her adventures with Kaban, but it is revealed that Kyururu was already friends with Serval and Caracal all the way back when Japari Park was still open. Many viewers saw this as an attempt to supplant the role of Kaban, a beloved character. However, it was confirmed at the Kemono Friends World event those were different versions of Serval, Caracal, and Kyururu. ^note As revealed in the third guidebook for season one of the anime, there are multiple generations of Friends. The Kyururu we follow in the anime, who is friends with current gen Serval and Caracal, was cloned from a boy who knew the second generation Serval and Caracal. The second generation of Friends corresponds with the Nexon mobile game, before Kaban was introduced to the series. The final episode also showed the original Kyururu with Mirai and Towa, characters who primarily appear in the mobile game.
  • The Kemono Friends World exhibition revealed that Kyururu is a male. This has added fuel of the already burning reception of him and S2 as fans of previous seasons had hoped that he would at least be a girl, according to the old materials prior to the first season. Not to mention that he has become a target of yuri fans and Serval/Kaban shippers.
• Shocking Moments: Episodes 11 and 12 in rapid succession. First, Serval gets taken out by the Black Cerulean. And then Kaban distracts it enough for it to focus its attention on her and appeared to get killed. The events of those episodes were one of the top trending Twitter topics immediately afterwards.
• So Bad, It's Good: Made as it was with almost No Budget, even by anime standards (made by a staff of ten over five-hundred days), the CG is incredibly stiff and cheap. But the designs themselves are beloved, coupled with the writing and voice acting to make it endearing instead of bad. There are even people who think that the CGI adds to the show's charm and would like to see it return in a continuation — it also ended up being an unintentional case of Stylistic Suck, improving the illusion of a low-budget kiddie show. Most fans insist that future projects shouldn't look too polished, despite its overnight success.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Kaban often gets mistaken for a boy by people who don't watch the show and new fans. The show itself doesn't refer to her with obvious pronouns, which doesn't help matters. Tatsuki himself has given a neutral opinion, saying that Kaban as a Friend is female but as a Human is open to intepretation.
  • On the other hand, fairly androgynous Kyururu was thought to be a girl since the show never had any male characters before. Side materials revealed "she" is actually a boy.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Despite airing in a late night time slot, the creators made it so that it could be accessible to children, who would presumably be watching it online. The show eventually reran in a children's timeslot with a new, more kid-friendly opening.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: The show is about cute animal girls and part Iyashikei, part animal fact Edutainment with the occasional action scene. Its character designer even worked on a series kids are familiar with. All signs point to it being Kodomomuke, right? The game it was based on wasn't, being geared towards the moe crowd, and the show likewise aired at Otaku O'Clock. That said, they did do morning re-runs of the first season at a timeslot when kids could watch.

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