blog好き

Jul 04 2009

Categories: clannad, episodic review
Tagged: clannad

47 Comments »

I thought that it would be best if it was always like this.

I love these Another World sideshows from Clannad. Tomoyo’s could have been a three episode arc (surely, if Kyoto can spend a minimum of four episodes on Endless Eight, they could at least give us three for Tomoyo), and Kyou’s should have been split into a Ryou and a Kyou episode. But, beggars can’t be choosers. I’m just happy to see Kyou’s arc with all that sweet tsundere goodness.

(One thing I don’t like about these specials is that all the other haremettes seemed to have been beamed off the face of the earth. They should at least show Kotomi-chan in passing or add in a quick Ninja Master Fuko skit. Did I just advocate for more Fuko screentime? My bad. It won’t happen again.)

(Andohbytheway, if I were Keima, this would be where I would go, “I can see the ending!” Not hard to figure out where they were going with this arc, even if you haven’t read the visual novel.)

Ryou delivers the first salvo, confessing to Tomoya. I think if Tomoya never stopped Nagisa, this would have been the most logical scenario– at the very least, Kyou and Tomoyo would have had an epic cat fight to determine which arc to go on.

(In that scenario, Kyou would definitely be “tastes great” with Tomoyo being “less filling”.)

I like how shots of a depressed Kyou is interspersed with Ryou’s awkward declaration. But I couldn’t stop noticing two things: one, Tomoya has his hand in his pocket the whole time. Just looks like a really unnatural pose for a time like that, but at least I can make pocket rocket references. Two, is Taiga hiding in the locker behind them?

Kyoto Animation is to waterworks what the Romans were to aqueducts.

A melancholy Kyou is fine too.

I still think Kyou’s arc should have been part of After Story… her story should have been about Kyou trying to be rebound girl after Nagisa passes. If only because I want Kyou to sit Ushio down and explain to her why her teacher and dad are humping like rabbits.

(Do you think Kyou is to kindergarden what Sawa-chan is to high school? I say yes.)

Kyoto’s background are pretty in their own sense. They also use the background to good effect. Though probably not a good thing for a Kyou OVA is I’m writing about backgrounds and not praising Kyou for epic amounts of moe. Remember how lovely dovely Tomoyo was at the start of hers? To the point that it spiked everyone’s blood sugar?

The “Ryou and Tomoya” are hanging out and having an awkward time montage. The two look more like brother and sister (or at least Elysee and Keima) than boyfriend and girlfriend. But wouldn’t it have been the ultimate move if the montage was actually 24 minutes long and featured Ryou and Tomoya biking to a public pool, catching goldfish at a summer festival, playing with firecrackers, looking at stars, fishing, hitting a few balls at a batting cage, going to see a movie, and doing karaoke? And then followed by another 24 minute montage of Kyou and Tomoya repeating said events? I would watch this… especially if either Ryou or Kyou were wearing a red dress.

I mean… you would pet your girlfriend, but not like this.

(Ryou is always so red, I assume it’s her natural skin tone. Though now I want a spin-off series with Ryou, Mikuru, and Mio where they work as fashion models for Sawa-chan’s modeling agency. Fuko and Yui would be their Lenny and Squiggy-ish friends.)

“No matter what, I won’t give up on our relationship!”

Usually, when a girl in anime says that, isn’t that a signal to run? Or maybe I’m watching too much yandere anime and not enough shoujo anime?

Classic 80s movie move in showing the empty space vacated by someone special.

Gawd awful outfit on Tomoya. It looks like he stole the sweater from his dad.

Melancholy of Kyou Fujibayashi… as we learned from Beverly Hills 90210, no alliance of women concerning a single guy ever, ever works out. Though I like the concept of twins fighting over the same person… can we work this into Higurashi (better handled than how it was before at least)? Or Maria+Holic?

(One thing to note… the use of light as this episode progresses.)

OMG! It’s Taki’s dog! (Minus the angel wing accessory.) But… still… it’s Taki’s dog! It all makes sense now… with his endless charm, his weird yet effective logic, his endless stamina… Akira Takizawa’s true identity is Sunohara! Think about it. Who else would come up with a harebrained scheme of using NEETs to save Japan? And Sunohara is almost a dead ringer for Taki after Sunohara dyes his hair… and if Sunohara were Taki, it explains why Taki would wipe his memory: to forget about all those unpleasant Sunohara-based memories. We’ll know for sure if at any point during the Eden of the East movies if Taki says “with a toilet seat cover.” Plus, wouldn’t it be awesome if Juiz were really a grown-up Mei? She’s secretly supporting her hopeless brother from the shadows like how she has always done. If she can convince Sanae to go on a day-to with Sunohara, she can convince immigration to let Taki through.

(And the way the police officer chuckled at the size of Taki’s Johnny… well… the pieces are fitting. The pieces are fitting.)

Palatable sexual tension between the two, probably the most so I’ve felt from Clannad since the gym storage shed experience. Probably not a coincidence that both feature Kyou, who is just begging Tomoya to lick off her rough tsuntsun exterior to find her sweet gooey deredere filling.

(Also probably not a coincidence that I wrote that last line the way I wrote that last line.)

(But I hate their outfits, unless it was like 8AM, and they were just finished jogging around the neighborhood.)

She’s been melancholy until she finds out that Tomoya hasn’t kissed Ryou yet. Chance! So she suggests kissing practice. Uh, I lean closer to my HDTV.

“Kissing practice with me… just think of me as Ryou. We’re twins, so the feeling’s the same.”

A. Wait let’s not make a reckless statement like that without proof; I want charts, graphs, the whole shebang on this topic. Softness, texture, taste, moistness of a Kyou versus a Ryou kiss. And why stop there? Let’s toss in Tomoyo, Nagisa, Kotomi-chan, Sanae, Misao, and Mio while we’re at it.

B. Wait, how does Kyou know that? Has she kissed herself and Ryou?

C. Wait, how does Tomoya not make a, “Why stop there? There’s more things I want to practice” line?

D. Double your pleasure; double your fun; with Doublemint™ gum!

Pick A, B, C, or D, and that’s my comment for the line. Thank you; come again.

I liked the almost 20 seconds of silence from Tomoya afterwards and the palatable anticipation emulating from Kyou. I just hope that when they finally kiss, there would be giant energy monsters wrecking a school in the background.

I have -100 odds that Botan will show up and stop their kiss, -200 odds that Ryou would show up, and -300 odds that Kyou would push Tomoya away at the last second with a “Just kidding!”. Of course, there’s no way Tomoya would abort. You know he wants it. He wants it as badly as LeBron wants a championship.

Just wondering if Nagisa ever got this close to Tomoya.

… and Kyou chickens out! “It’s practice, so it’s bad if we actually did it.” This sounds like a shtick from Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei: I’m in despair because if we did it in practice, it’s not practice anymore!

Deredere Kyou is awesome. I’d put her up against any other challenger haremette, and I think she’ll win. She has just the right proportion of tsuntsun and deredere. The only thing she’s missing is a Sawa-chan Meido Fuku Mark II (the one that makes its debut in volume 3 of the manga as opposed to the Mark I in the anime) in her wardrobe rotation.

She looks like Tomoya leaving the pachinko parlor after Ushio dies. Also notice how her hair is covering her eyes. And, again, hands in pockets.

Feel kinda cheated we didn’t get a sobbing Ryou running up to Tomoya going, “Why? Why? Why?” Definitely felt cheated knives and sharp objects weren’t involved. “You kissed onee-chan before me! DIE! DIE! DIE!” Okay, maybe a good thing I’m not a fiction writer: I’d be gilting the lily waaaaaay too much. Still, it would be fun seeing Ryou trying to stab Kyou as Kyou defended herself with a dictionary with Botan looking confused in the background.

(The funny thing is that everyone is gasping and gossiping about them kissing. Is this 1809 and not 2009? To get the same kind of reaction in the gossip pipe in high school today, I’d imagine it has to be more like, “Did hear Kyou and Tomoya leaked out a freaky sex tape that involved barnacles?”)

Hair covering eyes of normally eye-visible characters (i.e. not anonymous male leads in visual novels) generally mean something non-noble is going to go down. I’m wondering if Kyou is doing to seduce Sunohara (to make it seem like she’s a slut) or if she’s going to kill Sunohara (since her killing Sunohara would be a bigger story than kissing Tomoya). Frankly, I’m okay with both. But I think I’d take the “both” option in that she starts to seduce Sunohara, ties him up, and then kills him by snipping his Johnny. I swear, this is an original thought and premise! It’s at least as original as a love triangle involving two sisters…

Is Ryou so desperate that she’s completely ignoring the rumors? I can’t imagine Kyou coming clean and confessing to Ryou that she tried to seduce Tomoya. Awkward. I wanted to hear what was said.

Smacks of desperation. I mean… it’s Sunohara!!!

(You know how if you waited to take a QB in a fantasy draft, and then suddenly all the good QBs were gone? So now you’re trying to talk yourself into drafting the likes of Tavaris Jackson, Kyle Orton, and Alex Smith? Nonetheless, that’s still a level up from talking yourself into Sunohara. It’s Sunohara!!! Kyou should have just confessed to Nagisa instead.)

Kyou has the “I’m ruined for marriage” shiver to her that Mikuru had the first time she was costume raped and that Mio had after the first concert.

“It’s weird. Do you really like me? Kyou, don’t you like Tomoya?”

Sunohara… the voice of reason. Where am I? Did I cross the vanilla sky?

“You should only thing about Ryou. Stop thinking of smothering my nakkid body in chocolate syrup. Ney?”

Almost two thousand words… and I’m not even halfway through. Egads. Not sure what is more impressive: you still reading this post, or Ryou not going stabby after seeing Kyou try to seduce Sunohara as a way of dealing with her feelings for Tomoya. This would have been a great multi-epsiode arc. But, no, Kyoto is too busy endlessly animating Endless Eight.

(Can we please get a “Please eat my bento!” line from Ryou? That was her best line ever.)

Pretty! Kyoto always does shadows well, but isn’t this the same location where Tomoya dumped Tomoyo? And it’s the same crepe bar, since Tomoyo was cleaning crepe off of Tomoya’s thigh at that point. It happened like that bench down there. Still amazing that a supposedly rebellious youth like Tomoya would be tamed into enjoying a sweet, innocent ice cream cone like this. Can you imagine Onizuka doing something like this? Of course not.

(Or at least can we get a “Please lick my cone!”)

“Please say my name!”

If Kyou weren’t around, I’d be a Ryou fan. Just that… well… there are a lot of awesome haremettes in Clannad, and Nagisa gets picked. It’s like the 2001 NBA draft where Pau Gasol, Joe Johnson, Tony Parker, Jason Richardson, Shane Battier, and Gilbert Arenas were all available, yet somehow Kwame Brown was the number one overall pick.

Really hoping that Tomoya would screw up and call her Kyou… and he almost does!

Ryou’s high water mark.

I like how as soon as Ryou leaves, it starts raining and turns uber gloomy. Fortunately, I heard hot pot with pork is an excellent dish for times like these.

Kyou… standing by herself… in the rain. Seems like a more fitting scene for a Sonozaki than a Fujibayashi.

Love the staging of this scene. So what if it’s a bit gimmicky with the rain and the sad flowers. Though, as a small suggestion, and the only one I would make, is if the narrator went, “The wheel of fate is turning!”

“Don’t treat me so nicely… because I’m an idiot, if you’re so nice to me, I’ll misunderstand.”

“I was scared…. I was scared of confessing.”

(We need a meme for that magically moment when a tsundere goes from being a tsundere to a deretsun.)

Also like the juxtaposition of the current scene with scenes of a happier path. Damn, why don’t more harem leads grow a spine and go with the “all of the above” ending?

“Bye bye.”

Pain and sadness.

(Not from Kyou. From me. I want to hug her too!)

“Well, those twins are a tough problem.”

“If you were me, what would you do?”

“That’s obvious! I’d get both!”

Sunohara… the voice of reason. Where am I? Did I cross the vanilla sky?

(I will repeat that joke 15,499 more times.)

I find myself agreeing with Sunohara… “If you delay, it’ll only make the hurt worse.” “What the fuck is wrong with you? You have a high class problem!!!”

Sunohara… the voice of reason. Where am I? Did I cross the vanilla sky?

(When it’s all said and done, Sunohara has been a good friend. He’s been more or less dependable, and he’s always thinking of his friends first and foremost. I’d rather have a wingman like him than Itsuki or Jun. Okay, maybe not that much of a competition.)

She knows she’s getting dumped. Based on everything I know about anime, she’ll either try to seduce Tomoya to keep him or lunge at him with a hidden, concealed dagger so onee-chan can’t have him. This be a lesson to us all… a relationship that starts with a girl confessing her love, but the guy responds with a “You know, I never thought of you as girlfriend material, but since I have nothing better to do, I’ll still do you” line is probably not the best way to start a relationship. Especially if that causes the girl to break down and cry like a mom of a lottery pick at the NBA draft.

In the last minute, Tomoya has said exactly one word, “Fujibayashi,” and that’s all that it really took.

Love the juxtaposition that Kyoto uses throughout this episode. Ryou, for whatever reason, is madly in love with Tomoya, maybe more so than Kyou. Kyou, though, in her own weird tsundere way, can’t employ enough bravery to share her feelings with Tomoya, so when she found out that Ryou likes Tomoya, she uses her little sister to absolve herself of her own feelings. The problem is… well… it didn’t work. Her feelings didn’t die, and instead they turned painful seeing the man she loves with another woman. Even though she loves this other woman, it’s still… well… not her.

However, I wonder if Ryou used this to her advantage as well. She knows that Kyou likes Tomoya already, even if Kyou can’t admit it. By telling Kyou that she loves Tomoya, it puts Kyou in a difficult position. Most likely, Ryou figures, Kyou would abdicate Tomoya… and that’s exactly what Kyou did. It’s interesting. I think I’ve watched anime stretch romantic triangles less appealing than this one over more episodes. I would have loved to have 6 episode arcs of all the Clannad haremettes.

(Still shaking my head at all the screentime wasted on Fuko.)

“Ill be a replacement for Kyou! I’ll be more assertive like onee-chan! I’ll make my hair long… and study cooking… I’ll become the girl that Tomoya wants!”

Wow… wow… just wow.

That’s definitely a “Goodbye” kiss and not a “If you pick me, you can see me nakkid in the gym storage room by 7PM” kiss. Trust me. I know the difference.

It’s almost impossible to have a twins anime without, at some point, the twins switching places to cause confusion. (Though nothing tops Maria+Holic in this department.) But I saw this scene, noticed the lack of a lacy hair band, and I knew. See, fashion is important to anime. Now if Kyou showed up wearing a mini-top hat, I would have been really confused. As confused as Haruhi would be if Itsuki had confessed to her.

“The one I love… is your older sister!”

Kyou finally metamorphosizes. (Yes, that’s going to be my tsundere to deretsun term.) In the end, Kyou and Tomoya finally got what they wanted, though they put Ryou through the ringer for it. I wonder if the brief moments of happiness for Ryou were enough… she seemed to have gotten the short end of the stick in terms of being used by both Kyou (as an excuse to hide her own insecurity over Tomoya) and Tomoya (as a surrogate for Nagisa Kyou).

(I definitely prefer long-haired Kyou… mmm… but this isn’t bad either. Do I need to find a Hair Style Czar next?)

(And, by my count, which is by no means exact or official, it took 15,500 licks to get to the center, candy-filled tsundere interior of Kyou.)

It’s beginning to dawn on me that there’s less than five minutes of Clannad left. I feel the same way I feel during the last few minutes of Cheers, when Sam kicks Norm out of the bar and turns off the lights one final time. I think, ten years from now, Clannad and not Haruhi will be remembered as Kyoto’s defining work much like how even though Sailor Moon is more popular, Utena is considered Kunihiko Ikuhara’s defining work.

Clannad is a complete work, and it translated great into an episodic anime. Sure, not everything turned out exactly like they should, but Kyoto did a great job in incorporating all the stories together in one continuous tale rather than separate reboots. The animation… the music… the voice acting… top notch. Great series. I will miss Sunohara getting beaten up. I will miss all the Sanae bread jokes. I will miss Kotomi-chan’s violin. I will miss Tomoyo’s sad girl in snow. I will miss Fuko trying to corrupt Ushio. I will miss Ryou’s bento. I will miss Kyou’s thighs. I will miss writing about this show.

“We can only hurt each other.”

No… move to Utah! A happy ending is still possible for everyone!

Definitely a mild “We’ll both confess, and we’ll see who he likes more” scene that really isn’t that scene because Ryou knows that she can’t win. She finally becomes the more sensible one and gives up Tomoya so that at least she can move on and Kyou and Tomoya can be happy. Though I still would have gone with the Maria-Sunohara Theorem: score all the heroines.

(Really like Kyoto’s choice of colors this episode. The hues just match the mood.)

Wait, two seconds ago, Kyou had long hair! Long after a cut, she has short hair? Wha– ?

“I love you, Tomoya.”

And… cue Ana. Both Kyou’s and Tomoyo’s moments just makes Nagisa’s confession seem bland and vanilla. (Ah screw it, I know I made a Nagisa / vanilla ice cream joke before. So what?) One thing about Clannad is that the women of this series have a lot of resolve. Nagisa had a lot of resolve to have Ushio. Ushio had a lot of resolve to be with her father. Tomoyo had a lot of resolve to want to be by Tomoya’s side. And Kyou has a lot of resolve to break her sister’s heart and finally be true to her own happiness.

Sure, Ryou may seem meek, but she’s been really strong in being able to confess to Tomoya, and she shows some great strength in realizing that maybe it’s not for the best if she and Kyou kept hurting each other by pursuing Tomoya.

(I wonder if Ryou will now spy on Kyou and Tomoya much like Takafumi.)

I wrote before on how the true hero of Clannad wasn’t Tomoya but Nagisa… and for both of the Another World stories, the same is true. Kyou was the hero. From the beginning, it wasn’t about Tomoya’s choice to be with Ryou. It was all about Kyou’s choice to run away from herself… and eventually things settle because Kyou decides she wants to stop lying to herself. She had the change of heart. Tomoya never waivered, despite Ryou’s best Sawa-chan Medio Fuku Mark II outfits, in his affections towards the dictionary-tossing, hit-and-run, delicious pig-raising tsundere deretsun.

So the smart ones have figured it out already. Everyone else is probably wondering, “Why deretsun“? Well, it happens to all tsunderes after they metamorphosize. (British spelling!) Tsunderes generally, at first, show a lot of hostility, but still can whip out a delicate, vulnerable sweet side as well. Because they are hostile, the sweetness seems even sweeter. They’re almost like a complex curry in that regard. However, at some point, they switch over to where they are generally sweet and cuddly, but they can whip out a teasing, playful hostile side… that’s even more enhanced as being sugarly in that she’s doing it for old nostalgia’s sake. She wants to be completely deredere, and now she uses her tsuntsun mode as part of her deredere act. Kyou’s just a wonderful example of this.

(Same thing happened to Taiga at the of Toradora!. Once she was proposed to, she still put up token fights, but only used the token fights to try to seem cute.)

Kyou’s cuteness is now off-the-scales. Unable to be measured. Sweet, playful Kyou with a dash of seasoning… now this is the way to end Clannad.

I wonder if Kyoto should be interspersing shots of melancholic Sunohara. I mean, with Kyou around, he’s not going to be hanging around Tomoya much.

“Are you sure you made the right choice in picking me over Ryou? She’s more cuddly…”

I think nothing beats Kyou right now on the cuddability index. She leaped in front of Gitah at the very least.

Still weird seeing her with short hair. Though, for whatever reason, I really, really want to see some nekomimi on her now this way.

Pretty scene. Light, shadows, eyes, crying… Kyoto still dominates these animation production categories. Also reflects how it is kinda the opposite of Tomoyo’s story… instead of sad girl in snow, it’s happy girl in bright sunlight.

(Tomoya’s hands are in his pockets a lot, aren’t they?)

*Gasp*

A kiss scene with Kyou is definitely a great way to go out. I felt like a kiss scene with Nagisa was sorely missing from After Story (come on, at least when they married, the could have smooched a little). And a plethora of kiss scenes were missing from Tomoyo’s story… especially considering how Tomoyo and Tomoya couldn’t keep their hands off of each other in Tomoyo After.

(I wonder if Kyoto will ever go back and do Tomoyo After? The PG-rated version, at least. I wonder if they will do Little Busters. Or Mirai Nikki. Or Full Metal Panic. Or K-On!‘s final year.)

(And, yes, when Kyou said that she would ask in a more “straight-o” way, I thought “fastball.” Damn you Cross Game.)

The “I was just kissed by someone potentially dangerous” face. By the way, this post is pushing 4,000 words and 70 screenshots. I am literally cramping up from the typing; I can only imagine how you feel reading it. (Then again, like you had anything better to do today on July 4th.) I just hope blood isn’t flowing from your eyes at this point. I guess my point is… the only post that I can see myself typing to top this one will be for a Mio fanservice OVA. But that will never happen as per Kyoto’s anti-fanservice initiatives.

Or at least a lovely-dovely Kyou OVA. Or a Kyou follow-up H-game.

Fin.