[LWC 63] Curmudgeon Be Not?

Clap for Clannad

↩[LWC 62]

Recently disseminating upon my much overdue backlog of shows to watch from which I mightily digressed came yet another companion to the beloved Kanon. Yes, that would be correct – I Rewatched Clannad. And if unnecessary capitalization is not annoying enough, I enjoyed Clannad, Again – or perhaps even more so this time around.

What made it different this time? Well, beforehand I think I pseudo-dropped it, skimming through the last episode, scoffing at the pitiful attempt at the father-daughter catharsis; I was wrong, so wrong. Could it also be that I wasn’t, if you will, an anime blogger at the time? That contributes, surely, so perhaps I was not looking in the right places, or not really looking at all.

The Clannadization

Not unlike Lawson, I’m not at all hesitant to call this with haste my favorite Key adaptation. Kanon did pay attention to detail, yet where weakness was lacking, pacing balanced things out – we can’t have too much good. Similarly, Clannad did have its pacing issues, as it’s going to be inevitably difficult to try and conclude four to five arcs in the span of 22 episodes, but I liked how the theatre club theme was introduced in the very beginning and pervaded its way into each of the girl’s arcs. But it does seem like the first arc is always the longest, counting the obligatory exposition, to around twelve episodes, nearly half the show, again. It’s a shame Fuko’s story was perhaps my least favorite, though it followed up with Kotomi’s whose exposure I pleasured the most; a Noto role done exceptionally well (or what the heck; at least it was one of my favorites.)

Kanon was terribly biased by, and perhaps contingent upon, the Kyon/Lesser-Kyon continuum, whereas there is no such congruence here, unless you think Okazaki really is some strange doppelganger. And while there isn’t a strict Kyon continuum, always present is a Keytinuum, or at least the set of proverbial archetypes that propel the story, not that constituent elements of a story being redundant is a bad thing, though. The noteworthy variation between this and Kanon, as I perceive it, was its characters and the execution of their personalities. There was some interesting dynamics between Okazaki and Nagisa – no, not those dynamics – but, rather, the way their narratives and positions interlaced with one another. Okazaki was the effective narrator (albeit Kyon-esque at times), perhaps main character, while you could likewise argue that Nagisa was the main character, though not narrator. Being the main girl, it was obvious that her arc was resolved at the very end, but this differed from Kanon because it’s final arc involved that mutually exclusive Nayuki/Ayu path, whereas Nagisa’s story was a self-contained struggle. The point is that the story as a whole could be viewed through Okazaki or Nagisa. Their stories were related, intertwined, yet autonomous. Perhaps that is the largest facet of its ability to be viewed multiple times and multiple angles.

Obligatory in several ways

“Polynarrations” may not be the most complex of film devices (not that I know anything about film), but it lends to that question of “whose story was it?” Both: that may be the “proper” answer, yet the disparate positions were also intriguing. “Delinquent” meets Unholy Incarnation of Moe creates peculiar relationships; sure, there was development in Nagisa, who evolved to a more extroverted person from her larval stage as the quiet, insecure nobody, but it’s that alleged evolution via Okazaki’s eyes and the lens of the viewer that brings to the fore the question of the position of the viewer.

Okazaki was a delinquent, such that he lived up to the self-fulfilling prophecy that was forcibly shouldered onto him. Viewers had to constantly deal with his annoying, self-degrading commentary. Maybe he was too honest, maybe it was an alibi? What is potentially disturbing about the social ether that surrounds Okazaki is its convenience, how the placement of particularities doesn’t resonate with what a “delinquent” should perchance to be. Right off the bat we discover that the class rep has a crush on The Delinquent; seemingly an odd relationship, since her attraction has little basis unless she’s really shallow or even more sympathetic.

But all this further emphasizes the point that it’s simply hard to understand someone you’re not. I’m not a delinquent…or so I think, I’ve never had a harem in my life, and you can go on and on about the dissimilarities between a fictive person and the complexity of your real self. There lies the position of the viewer, the latent empathy present in all stories. But I think this kind of empathy and establishment of a viewer-subject relation is linear, a one-way thing – but that’s exactly how the ambiguity of the subject in observation varies the overall sonority of the experience.

Secondary Elements

Who are they talking to again?

It’s most likely because Clannad wasn’t a romance, first and foremost – it was about personal struggles that used potential couples as conduits that mobilized pathos. I don’t think romance as simply romance can go very far; cases where romance is used as a means have deeper implications – i.e. Kare Kano, H&C, 08^th MS Team, Fruits Basket, RahXephon, and so forth – in contrast to romance as an ends – i.e. Fushigi Yuugi, Bokura ga Ita, Kannazuki no Miko, Onegai Sensei, and so forth (these claims are largely unsubstantiated). Of course a well-rounded sampling is hard to produce, but aren’t we all inclined to avoid classifiably bad anime?

While what Clannad was about is debatable (hence thus 900 words), there’s a difference between what it was and how it was. Genre-Wars is a common recurrence (maybe proverbial?) these days in the blogosphere, though it’s always entertaining to play a bit of that genre-war.

IKnight said a while ago on a comment I can’t link to: “I’m beginning to develop a theory that often the secondary and tertiary elements of a show impress me most. Like you, I like ’slife’ (as I think I’ll refer to slice-of-life from now on) when it crops up in non-slife shows.” Perhaps Clannad was primarily ‘slife with a bit of romance – because though many arcs involved romance (otherwise unrequited or lost in childhood memories), essentially, Nagisa’s arc was the only romantic one. The difference between “involving romance” and “romantic” came off initially as just good old fashion sophistry, though the subtle differences were and are noteworthy in their own right: and circuitously back to the more or less original inquiry, romance (both types) employed as a propagator of story is then a means, allocating attention not to the superficiality of the romance itself but to the richer meaning behind Key elements (pun intended!) like family, belonging, compassion, and so forth and so on.

Random Thoughts, etc.

I have mixed feelings about Okazaki’s father. Was he there merely as a character device? – a caricature, per se? I can’t even really tell if there’s much of any development in his own personality, though we do see Okazaki gradually (yes, very gradually at that) come to some inner, Freudian homeostasis, though I should stop using the word “Freudian”. Nonetheless, his role was “effective”, interesting, surely different from the normal role of parents in anime. On that note, I’m wondering if the total lack of Okazaki’s mother had any significance. She wasn’t even presented as a figment of his childhood memory (birth-related death?), thus she had even less of a connotative value.

In the case of parents, many parallels and subsequent questions can be struck up between Nagisa and Okazaki – insofar as Okazaki’s birth was the cause of his mother’s death, why did he not feel like a burden to his father or the cause of his troubles? – or did he? Nagisa chose the route of such burden, blaming herself for her parent’s lost dream, though Akio’s somewhat clichéd maneuvering (that very excellent catharsis) set up quite the safety net.

Ryou was a weak character, in my opinion. She was probably essential in the visual novel that I have not read (played? I don’t even know what a visual novel really is…), though Kyoani was probably not entitled to remove her completely (I could get plenty of similar kicks from Tsukasa alone).