“Why the heck” I’m not in love with Kyou, maybe?

It must be “The Kyoto Touch” or something. It seems sometimes that everything Kyoto Animation lays their hands on turns to moe. Or gold.

Maybe both.

This magic seems to continue with Clannad, which has recieved pretty universal praise, more so than Kanon or maybe even Haruhi. Naturally, there are still naysayers both of the legitimate and the “it’s cool to hate” kind, but among fans of visual novel / harem anime, Clannad seems to be top-notch, and it’s even snared some of the lighter, slice-of-life fans with a surprising amount of humor for a show of this type.

It’s funny to see something like this happen, because to be honest, for all the praise about how Clannad is different, it’s surprisingly similar to the tried-and-true formula that we’ve seen from Key. I think what really ensnares people, and why I enjoy this show, is not how it really brings much incredibly new to the genre, but rather how it manages to mix together many solid concepts in a way that pushes the buttons of pretty much any viewer that comes within fifty miles of the target audience. It’s pretty much a jack of all trades to me – it’s not a masterpiece, but it spans enough character and plot archetypes that it’s an enjoyable and entertaining watch.

I should note two things here, one being that “pushing buttons” doesn’t always refer to physical turn-ons, and two, that I don’t mean to be saying anything wholly negative about Clannad. I think that the characters are incredibly entertaining and enjoyable, and the story is passable and not completely the “sad girl in stuff” fare that many dislike, but anyone who’s hailing this as the second coming of…the first thing you thought was incredibly godly, is overshooting the mark a bit.

I think I just lost about three-fourths of my readers to this picture

Let me present public target number one: Kyou Fujibayashi.

Yes, I’ll admit. Her locked-in-the-storage-room scene left me mentally frozen; you couldn’t have derailed my train of thought any harder than if you took it and chucked it off a cliff using a rocket launcher. Oh God, hot, etc. And it was done a bit more tastefully than the Alternate Universe Eroge equivalent (replete with Makoto Itou), although I’m sure the doujin artists will be jumping on this like angry KimiKiss fans bashing Mao…uh…that is…very furiously. And yes, that music background rocked my soul.

But anyone who’s thinking that Kyou isn’t covered under, as Shirukii puts it, “Key’s retard moe umbrella”, I believe is all wet.

Shut up, I know Kyou is the only one I gave two pics

You see that? That’s the tsundere switch flipping on and off. Tsundere’s been there, done that; I don’t mind them so much as characters, but I don’t think that they’re anything revolutionary in terms of harem / VN shows. Maybe Kyou’s not a retard but she’s every bit as catering to the fans as Fuuko or Kotomi. Maybe I’m not into covering my shy characters in a flimsy “tough exterior” shell but tsunderes, at least in relatively typical cases like Kyou, don’t exactly fall far from the moe tree.

Kyou’s got an edge up in the fact she’s selfless so far in sacrificing her love life in favor of her twin sister Ryou, at least. But I think, maybe I’m just disillusioned, but this just seems a bit of a set-up for the standard “you’re not supposed to love me!” of what her ending probably shapes up to be. Not that you’d get to see it, because she is so getting set-up for the Nayuki Club, something that bugs me immensely.

All she needs is some glasses, a new hairstyle, and some blue-haired girl who wants to kill Tomoya

Kotomi got pretty hammered from her arc already, which was described around places as functionally emotional but not wholly touching. Her ‘childhood friend’ act may not have been expected from a character like her, and she may have developed into a mildly stronger character by the end of things, but still, man, how come I don’t know any shy, socially-clumsy genius girls that happened to have been my friend from years ago? Disbelief off the scale right there.

I think for me she’s much the same as Kyou in that yeah, she’s a character that sends the cute and/or attractive meter off the charts, but in terms of being a surprisingly fresh and enjoyable character, not so much. She’s even getting shoved into the background and demoted to token lines, from the looks of things. That’s not a shock; KyoAni seems to be getting better at not shoving characters into the damn hospital once they’re done with them, and the decentralization of what seems to be the Tomoyo slash Kyou slash Nagisa arcs is promising…if not for the sense that they’re doing it to cram for time. It’s a veritable revolving door going on, with Kyou heading out as Tomoyo heads in.

STARFISH PARADOX

I probably don’t need to go over Fuuko, because she seems to be the only character who doesn’t really recieve a lot of love. Realistically, this should probably mean that I like her a lot because I am too cool to like the characters everyone else does (insert pretentious pout) but I’ll have to agree with the masses here, in that her random appearances are a bit off-putting.

I’m not sure if it’s because they sort of demean her touching ending, or if because they’re interrupting otherwise serious moments, or oh my God is that canned footage from KyoAni? … but it doesn’t work for me. Again, it’s kind of a “OK, we put her in the show again, can you forgive us for Mai and Shiori now?” on KyoAni’s behalf. Cute antics (Hitode Heeeeeato~!), amusing character, but a little too Completely Not Ayu for me.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner

Ryou, Kyou’s sister, is the character that I’ve been rooting for since episode one, but you couldn’t stamp her as the “shy girl with a crush on the hero” any harder than if Tomoyo mistook her for Sunohara and chased her all over the place with a stamp that says “shy girls with a crush on the hero.”

(So, I’m not going into an English major…)

I have hopes for her just because technically she and Kyou are in opposite situations; Kyou is the one that doesn’t want to back off despite her statement that Ryou should be the one with Tomoya, and Ryou is the one that is having second thoughts despite Kyou laying a gold-lined path for her. I’m sure if I tried hard I could make a snarky jab about how this is rather typical too, but I have a blind spot for those who give up on their affection, since we don’t see that played seriously (example of non-serious: Shuffle’s “There’s always polygamy”) as much in this kind of show.

Dan-gao?

Nagisa, contrary to my earlier (way, way earlier) predictions, is actually one of the stronger characters of this show. She’s kind of the confidence equivalent of tsundere, which is really a lot better than it sounds: she has the shy, weak girl character to lure you into shoving her into a personality pigeonhole, but don’t doubt her: she’ll fight back better than any other character in the show, with a form of emotional courage very rarely seen in the female heroine. She could probably (and is probably) teaching Tomoya a few things.

The reason why I’m not hailing her as the golden girl of this show is, again, that the remainder of this show is really her judgment day to win: it’s obvious she’s the “destined girl” but how she works with both this and whatever unnamed tragedy she has to face (likely involving whatever incredibly well-rendered “alternate universe” they keep throwing at us every now and then) will determine whether she falls into the personality pitfall or not.

After all, how refreshing would it be if Nagisa really was a relatively normal girl with no huge conflict, and Tomoya was the one with problems all along? (His father has to come into play sometime…)

Somewhere way back there the original point of this post was to prove that the characters of Clannad, while not all “retard moe” like some have criticized past Key works to be, all fit into different flavors of moe; some more refined than others, but otherwise all containing at least a degree of redundancy with past works. I think it devolved a bit into simple ad hominem attacks in the middle there, though, so let me get back onto track with the last girl to cover, Tomoyo.

I’m fairly certain this crossover was worth 7 pages of gouging my eyes out at Danbooru

Tomoyo, I think, is my favorite character of the show, because she really is one of the stronger character of this show, more than what Kyou can claim and close to what Nagisa can pull off. She’s really naive, in a sense, to the whole idea of boy x girl (and for the sake of bi Ryou, girl x girl) romance, and to the kind of personal image that she projects. She really personifies a lot of this show in both mocking and embracing the tropes of harem / VN anime, in the same way that a counterculture teenager would.

Clannad has the locked-in-a-room-together scenes, yet it emphasizes the laughs and the emotional development of Kyou over the dirty aspects; although a couple pans of Kyou didn’t hurt apparently. Tomoyo wakes up Tomoya in the morning like any self-serving childhood friend (this is where I contemplate making the Harem Show (Root-Beer) Drinking Game. Anyone else done it or is it good future post material?), yet she does it…intending just to get him to school on time. I can’t decide if KyoAni is laughing at us or with us.

Tomoyo’s density with regards to Sunohara touching her body, and walking home with Tomoya, and everything, is to the point that I almost wonder if she is serious about it all. I mean, it’s too far gone to be an act, but…it’s almost like “anti-moe moe”, to incite a few readers. She’s the kind of character that viewers tired of typical moe would get into for being so “different”, and that’s what worries me. I’m one of those people, and I think her character is refreshing, but I can’t help but getting that feeling of being outmaneuvered, that “thinking what you’re thinking I’m thinking” sense. Again, I reserve judgment as she and Kyou get wrapped up (their arcs, unfortunately) before Nagisa gets her turn to take center stage.

Unless, there’s another ace up the sleeve? Until then, I’ll have fun with this show, as a work with characters that are enjoyable and definitely adorable, but not all shining examples of how well-rounded characters should be done (although, we are looking at a 50% ratio with luck). Key sure knows their business sense, making characters just strong enough to tingle the nerves of the visual novel connoisseur, yet more than weak enough to appeal to the base fanbase. Sometime I wish they were less that way, but somehow I feel I’m one of the people who would enjoy being part of the base anyway. There’s a time for heavy moe, a time for zero moe, and a time for a rich blend of moe, which Clannad has proven.

-CCY

I bet a lot of you think I sound like this

(Not entirely biased about Ryou, a.k.a Tsukasa Misaka, nope, not at all. Remember, I hate ’cause I love.)

(Random thought of the day: How come no one else has read 1984 and had the phrase “Onii-chan is watching you” – would that be Onii-chan ga miteiru? – pop into their head. It’s so comic when you translate it into another language and give it siscon overtones.)