All that 'officially' exists of this anime is about 30 seconds of young, hunky swimmers. That's it; the anime isn't real. It doesn't even have a name. The clip is a promotional thing for the Kyoto Animation studio, but that hasn't stopped anyone from falling in love with the idea of the anime according to The Daily Dot.
"The swimming anime," as fans have dubbed it, has existed for less than a week and already Tumblr is ablaze with the type of love and devotion that you'd think a real anime might inspire. I mean really: scroll through that.
The Daily Dot writes:
In the 2 days since the 30-second spot landed on YouTube, Tumblr has been in a frenzy of yearning for what it has dubbed "the swimming anime." Tumblr fans have given the nameless boys in the videos character identities and backstories, they've picked favorite relationship pairings, drawn fanart, made GIFs, created character roleplaying blogs, confessionals, and Texts from Last Night parodies. They've written fanfic.
Holy cow. Don't underestimate Tumblr, their love knows no limits. Overtly, you'd think this speaks to a real and fervent group of fans that would gladly watch this type of anime if someone made it for them.
But that might also just be reading into it too much: people like to go on Tumblr to have fun, and it might be more accurate to call this just a meme.
It would be pretty amazing for the anime to get picked up based on bizarre fan hype alone though. If you agree, welp—there's a petition for you.
Fake anime series inspires real fans on Tumblr [The Daily Dot]