Xebek’s Blog

Tomoya looks back on his life, questioning if he should have ever met Nagisa in the first place.

Impressions:

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Wow… I did NOT expect that to happen. That is the one thing that I didn’t see coming. I thought they would incorporate the miracle talk into this episode, but I thought it would go towards saving Ushio who would be in the hospital. Normally, I would dislike a turn of events like this. Having someone be alive who they just spent a lot of content on showing the results of her death, kind of seems to undo a lot of the series. However it seems that it’s a tragic enough event to happen showing it once, that I don’t mind having the miracle kind of reset things. I found the way they tied in the alternate world very interesting. The girl definitely seems to be Ushio, as a flash of her sleeping kind of appeared when Fuuko found Ushio. Tomoya being the robot, it does shed some light on the metaphor. It was a rather deep connection, and I’d have to watch it again to fully understand, but as it stands now I think it helped give some depth to the story. I do have to say that I found the scene where Tomoya realized that he should have met Nagisa very beautiful. The way she walked by him but the metaphor of the other world showed him or kind of revealed how much he loves her and that he should meet her. Running up and hugging her like that was great.

I think the quote Nagisa said at the end was important to kind of explaining how or why this miracle happened. She said, “If perhaps this town has the same will as that of the people’s hearts, and if we should bring happiness to those who live in this town, if such feelings should exist, then perhaps the town brought about this miracle.”They kept talking several times throughout the series about how the town kind of had a life force of its own. I think that some of that talk, about how the two of them were in this town together, was important to this quote and the miracle that happened in it.

Of course, like the last season the “final” episode isn’t really the last one, as there is an extra episode that seems like it is effectively a prequel, or at least really delving into the time when Tomoya and Nagisa first met. It should be interesting to see. It would have been nice though if they had done an epilogue though. Seeing the quick shots of everyone grown up in this episode was cool, but it would be a lot of fun for an extra episode to have them all meet. I can easily see it happening, Ushio could innocently insult Sunohara or something and so on.

Final Words:

I never could have anticipated this series being so emotional, so tragic and serious and just so good overall. I was expecting to like it. As I loved the previous season, I loved Kanon, and they have very similar feels to it. However the first season didn’t really give off a vibe of there being this very deep and complex emotional side of characters. The first season concluded with an event that wasn’t’ all that emotional, especially compared to similar series like Kanon. It was alright, it had some interesting individual stories of characters, but overall it lacked an important overall plot. It just seemed to be a collection of mini stories focusing on every character other then the main ones. What After Story effectively was, was the Tomoya and Nagisa story. While the entire rest of the series dealt with side characters, this season finally gave some focus to them and in comparison, Tomoya’s arc just blew everything else out of the water. Nothing else even came close to the amount of drama and character development this gave. Clannad is NOTHING without this After Story season. With After Story, Clannad overall has just shot up in my rankings of favorite anime and has officially the saddest anime moment of any anime I’ve ever seen.

I’m still in awe at what this series has done for me. I became so emotionally involved in what was happening to these characters that I didn’t’ care about anything else. They spent their time getting you to really know these characters and then BOOM they throw in some of the most tragic events that can ever happen to a person. Overall the things Tomoya deals with are just miles ahead of the problems others have. This is about blaming himself for Nagisa’s death, realizing the sacrifices his father made for him, seeing that he needs to become a father, finally having happiness after one of the most tragic events to happen to someone, having the person you love who is responsible for making something of your life die, then have that happiness on the brink of being taken away as well. The actual emotions and things going on in Tomoya’s head, you could rally feel them and I think the show portrayed very realistically how someone in that situation may react. Of course it’s easy to point out and say he should just step up and so on, but realistically it’s nowhere near that easy and this show demonstrated that nicely.

One thing I found myself being conflicted on was wanting to see more of the other characters like Sunohara, Kyou, Ryou, Kotomi and Tomoyo. I wanted to see some of them after the five year or so gap. While they did show Fuuko and Kyou, they didn’t really give Kyou a lot of time and Fuuko was out of the loop enough that her appearance didn’t make a huge difference. However, while I kind of wanted to see them and what time has made of them, at the same time that’s the exact opposite of what I had been wishing for throughout the entire series. I made several comments to myself and on the site that I wanted them to stop with these side stories and focus on Tomoya, then when they finally did a part of me wanted to see them. However, overall I have to say that the final segment was much better without them. They had the entire series to be focused on. This was finally Tomoya’s time for some very deep and psychological advancement and development, and cluttering it up with the other characters would have taken away from that.