Ikuyo Kita's Middle Finger / Omnidirectional Middle Finger

About

Ikuyo Kita's Middle Finger, occasionally called the "omnidirectional middle finger" (Japanese: 全方位中指, Zenhoui Nakayubi) or described with emojis as 😌🖕, refers to a series of parody illustrations inspired by the 3rd ending credit sequence for the anime Bocchi the Rock!, in which the character Ikuyo Kita looks like she's giving a middle finger in various directions. Led by anonymous users' comments on Niconico, her images became popular among the anime's fandom, and inspired lots of fan art.

Origin

In the 8th episode of the anime series Bocchi The Rock!, the ending credits include a 3rd post-credit clip featuring chibi Kessoku Band members and their song "Nani ga Warui" (なにが悪い, lit. "What Is Wrong With"). On December 4th, 2022, Aniplex published the end credits on its official YouTube channel (shown below).

Spread

On the same day, Niconico users shared an unofficial copy of the video.^[1] They soon began mentioning in comments that Ikuyo looks as if she is sticking up her middle finger and then pointing it in all directions between 0:56-1:00. Niconico's video was flooded with comments, joking, "This is the result of learning Rock from Kikuri-san!" or "Ikuyo finally understands what ROCK is." After many users reacted to the supposed middle finger, screencaps or highlight clips of the video were shared on Twitter, spreading this recognition beyond the video-sharing service (shown below).

Around a week after the video's premiere, its presence grew enough to be parodied in fan illustrations of Ikuyo sticking up her middle finger, particularly on SNS and Pixiv. Internet users referred to that scene with various names, but the online illustrator community most frequently tagged those artworks under "Omnidirectional Middle Finger" (全方位中指).^[2] Among these posts, a December 14th post showing Ikuyo giving a censored middle finger posted by Twitter user Samana (さまな, @aum_mat0320) received notable attention online, receiving more than 87,800 likes and 24,100 retweets in two days (shown below).

On the same day, Bukb Okawa, the author of Pop Team Epic, uploaded a parody of the scene, attracting more visibility to the original clip of Ikuyo's middle finger. His tweet earned 15,800 retweets and 72,000 likes by the following day (shown below).

Aki Hamaji, the creator of the manga (shown below), and Haruka Suzuki, the director of the original clip,^[3], reacted to Bukb's tweet with the 😌🖕emojis. The director also added that what she held up was the "forefinger."^[4] Taiwanese online media, Yahoo Games Taiwan and 4Gamers covered this topic on December 15th.^[5][6]

😌🖕

— はまじあき🎸アニメ放送中📺 (@hamazi__) December 14, 2022

Various Examples

Search Interest

Unavailable

External References