I’m late to the Clannad End party, by the way, because I like the widescreen. I feel as though I’ve completed some sort of long journey in getting to the end; considering how many episodes it’s taken, maybe I have. What started out as an experiment in broadening my viewing horizons hasn’t quite convinced me to watch the TV adaptations of Kanon or Air but on its own I think Clannad ~After Story~ is pretty special. Despite my initial reservations, occasional frustration and lingering (minor) criticisms of the ending I honestly think it’s outstanding. I know quite a few people have got an even bigger emotional kick out of this but remember I was never into bishoujo series in the first place.
Looking back, I’ve written A LOT about Clannad. It’s pure escapism. It’s funny and emotional at the same time. It’s sweet and fluffy, like cake. It’s fantasy, even though those aspects didn’t always work for me. It was high school romcom but showed wonderful single-mindedness in going for a Nagisa End, throwing in a superlative bonus episode to cover the bases before launching into its second half proper and finally earning my respect. Even though I’ve not played the VN (yet) I somehow think that the ending was better than even the dedicated fans gave it credit for.
It wasn’t something I was in a hurry to finish because I’d heard how things get really tear-jerking after the whole Nagisa pregnancy thing; I decided the best thing to do was to stock up on tea/coffee/beer and a selection of snacks then burn through the latter episodes in one sitting. The marathoning approach worked well in that it helped me get immersed in the story and of course prevented the ;_; being inflicted on me for a longer period.
I’m glad I sat through the high school-centric first season because the payoff in the second season was so rewarding. It was heartbreaking, sure, but I thought the way in which history repeated itself with Tomoya and Nagisa taking after their respective parents gave a wonderful feeling of togetherness and continuity; it highlighted how everyone is connected and wrapped up the overall Family theme with a delicately-tied bow. People die and familiar places change but you shouldn’t let the losses get in the way of seeing the bits in beween: life, love, friendship and all that stuff.
To go off at a quick tangent, I don’t follow traditional Christian beliefs any more. My science-based education and my habit of questioning everything (not to mention wariness of organised religions) has given me a half-spiritual, half-scientific acknowledgment similar to the Gaia hypothesis in thinking of the entire planet as a cohesive whole. By this I mean that I see human beings as connected to the world and each other in ways that neither science nor religion can fully explain.
The best thing to do I think is to take care of the things we can perceive and understand on an everyday level and let Nature, Him Upstairs or whatever you choose to call it, take care of you. Clannad’s final message was a simple statement that the bonds between friends and especially family are what holds society together, but holds us together as individuals too. It’s sappy and sentimental I know, but if you have an aversion to sentimentality you’d have steered clear of this story in the first place, right?
The ending has been notoriously contentious. Does my acceptance and satisfaction of it therefore mean I’m misunderstanding things? I felt the way in which the ending was handled was really fitting, beyond episode 22 taking some sharp and unexpected turns. If you think of the Clannad TV show as a stand-alone piece that doesn’t need prior experience of the VN to fully appreciate, it does beg the question “does a story fail if it requires a user manual to understand it?” Yep, RahXephon, I’m looking at you too here.
Although Clannad features a lot of true-to-life situations and issues, it’s still a fantasy story: you should expect the unexpected and accept that miracles can happen when people wish for them. Fuuko’s awakening led to some great comedic scenes but her revival was miraculous in itself and as such served as a reminder that the city in which the story is set isn’t the Real World; it was as if the writers were reiterating this fact ahead of time in bringing her back.
I can see two ways to appreciate the ending more. Firstly, it’s not usually possible to satisfactorily condense a multi-threaded narrative into a single-threaded storyline, unless you tell the alternative stories separately (as was the case with Tomoyo’s episode, and soon, Kyou’s). In Clannad ~After Story~ the idea of going back and telling the story again, with significant changes to the plot, is actually part of the narrative itself so it’s an opportunity that I think couldn’t be passed up. Such a reset is not just a depiction of a VN player reaching the Bad End and going back to play it again and read the Good End: in the case of Clannad that’s actually what’s happening to the characters.
The fact that Tomoya goes back and lives his life again, as it were, is a remarkably faithful recreation of the visual novel’s structure; the fact that jumping back in time is something that occurs within the story, rather than being just an aspect of the VN’s gameplay as is usually the case, makes this possible. As a transition from branching VN story to a linear televised one, it succeeds for me. Is it a success as a stand-alone story though?
The whole of Clannad was for me Tomoya’s rites of passage into adulthood. He fell in love and learned how to care about those around him in the first season, then grew up into a responsible working parent who reconciled with his father in the second; some of these episodes were indeed heartbreaking and tragic, but were lessons he needed to learn in order to enjoy, and value, what he had in the end. In a way, he had to earn his happiness – raising a family of his own – to literally nurture the seeds of his parents’ generation and make the circle complete.
The problem with going back and doing things all over again is that it suggests disregarding the experiences of the first chain of events, and the character development that results. What makes the happy ending so powerful is that we have already seen Tomoya lose his wife, then go on to miss five years of life shared with his daughter and ultimately experience losing her too: I saw how bad things could be, and as a result appreciated the good ending all the more. If Tomoya lived a happy life with Nagisa and Ushio, he’d have to have some recollection of the first ‘life’ and its unhappy ending to appreciate the second as much as the viewer does.
I can accept both of these arguments but that does depend on some things that I’m taking on faith until a rewatch confirms them. Firstly, Tomoya has to have those memories of the events in episodes 16-21. Secondly, the fact that both Nagisa and Ushio survive in episode 22 must be due to Tomoya experiencing the Bad End to its tragic conclusion, and drawing something from it, be it wisdom or enough of those little orbs of light. That way they make sense and make the Manly Tears (both from Tomoya and from me as I watched it) worthwhile.
I think the Orb Collection idea, Nagisa’s and Ushio’s connection with the town and the degree to which Tomoya remembered Nagisa’s and Ushio’s deaths in the first instance, could have been explained more clearly. Kotomi revisiting the parallel universes idea was another foreshadowing of future unexpectedness (as were Fuuko’s awakening and those periodic Light Orbs) but when the story had played down its fantastical elements in favour of slice-of-life and comedy for a fair while I can sympathise with those who were taken by surprise when redemption seemed heaven-sent.
I don’t have a particular like or dislike for dark or serious storytelling; what I do appreciate is a contrast. A sweet story with serious undercurrents perhaps, or doing the rollercoaster ride through despair but assuring us that it turns out okay in the end. It feels life-affirming and uplifting, but is still able to deal with hard-hitting issues along the way: Clannad did just that, and that’s what made it great.
I have to confess that I wasn’t really looking forward to the ending of After Story myself, I knew what was coming and the rather spiritual “reboot” of Nagisa didn’t seem like the kind of thing that I’d either enjoy or be able to accept on its own merits.
However, by the time that final episode proper came about I was all but begging Nagisa to come back as much as Tomoya was, and I think that speaks volumes for the way Clannad managed to expertly manipulate my emotions into making that implausible happy ending seem like the only way forward for both the story and the viewer, so I ended up grabbing it with both hands and welcoming it for what it was.
I’ll fully admit that I didn’t enjoy After Story from beginning to end (I always derived more enjoyment from the light-hearted stuff the series brought to the table), but I have a lot of respect for how it handled things – Nagisa’s death didn’t move me as much as I know it did some but it was technically beautifully realised, and the episode where Tomoya realises his similarities to his father in so many ways simply reduced me to tears, before of course that heart-breakingly sad ending before the “resurrection”. It was very deliberate, linear and methodical about how it did things (as you might expect of a series based on a visual novel), but it did those things so well that it never really acts as a negative against After Story.
>>The whole of Clannad was for me Tomoya’s rites of passage into adulthood.
THIS. You see, I think that’s the most important part – no matter what the reset trivialized (inasmuch as it does trivialize), the development doesn’t go away. Or at least I see that as the most significant, irrefutable part.
You’re in an interesting position of having seen Clannad before Air or Kanon. I’d like to hear your opinion of those two in relation to Clannad, of course. Oh, what’s that, you still don’t want to watch Kanon? Lelangir vi Britannia commands you….
For me the show was shackled by the fact that it WAS linear (OVAs aside). There was nothing they could do about that. And they tried their damnedest to make it work. But we the viewers are watching one episode after another as they brought them to us. We have to judge based on that.
In other words when they cut back to the birth scene I had the cynical reaction at first. A Deus Ex Machina, albeit a stunning one, beginning with Girl and Robot, then that light blob and the stuff floating behind it, slow, moody, patient, magic going on under the surface. I absolutely love how they tried to make it work. Though they couldn’t, I think it’s one of KyoAmi’s finest moments.
(Just watched the first half of ep22 again. Damn, that’s good!)
To be fair I should have played closer attention to moments which had bounced off me the first time. They were setting up for the Deus Ex Machina and I hadn’t realized it. With a rewatch I wonder if my opinion will improve … Um, probably.
That’s a LOT of writings just on Clannad…anyway, I would second lelangir’s recommendation on Kanon (haven’t watched AIR). Not sure if TOEI’s version is better or worse than KyoAni’s version but I was very happy with KyoAni’s one. I was face-palming all the way in the beginning, since its ‘uguuu am i cute’ antics really wasn’t my thing, but it does get better. I’d say the individual arcs in Kanon were much more powerful than Kotomi’s and Fuuko’s in Clannad (and the others kinda didn’t get any…which is a shame, Kyou and Tomoyo being my favourites). Bah o well…
@Hanners: I was the opposite, funnily enough – I grew tired of the comedy and actually welcomed the plot progression! It does manipulate the viewer I guess, but it did that so effectively I have to admire the execution. I could tell that this was what the story was trying to do, but I enjoyed the experience anyway. Wonderful escapism, this.
@lelangir: maybe I was immune to the fanboying and whatnot, but that partial blindness did help me see it in a slightly different way to that of most people. Clannad was excellent (eventually) but I think I’ll need a bit more convincing before taking on the other two. Can either of them match this in the character development and storytelling? If so I’ll give them a shot.
@Peter S: I rewatched #22 when getting the screenies, and it all came back to me. It was a tough adaptation I think but KyoAni did such a great job…now I have to watch the movie and play the VN! I’m planning on a rewatch of this series when the DVDs come out, anyway.
@gaguri: there’s two Kanons?! 0_o
Since this sums up my initial impression of Clannad, maybe I’d like Kanon after all!
As for Kyou and Tomoyo, I thought they were great characters too. Tomoyo After still wows me so hopefully Kyou’s episode will do her character justice in the same way. Fingers crossed, eh? ^_^