Shameful Otaku Secret!

[Clannad has a landing page now]

As much as I make fun, I should clarify that I do indeed enjoy the cavalcade-of-tragedy series that come from Key/Visual Art’s and Kyoto Animation. Air especially was great, and if you can stomach all that syrupy sadness, Kanon isn’t bad either. But as much as it’s fascinating to witness their ability to manipulate you into an emotional reaction, it’s also infuriating at times — especially when it works.

I place Kanon neatly in the emotional pornography genre: like those single-syllable-titled rags you see at the store when you go to buy booze, Kanon exists to create a particular response and then makes you feel dirty after you’ve achieved said response. And unfortunately, unlike Juggs, Kanon only works once.

So what does this have to do with Clannad? Pretty much everything. After being so transparently manipulated twice, you’d be hard pressed to come into a third Key/Kyoto “moe soap opera” series without some sort of skepticism and emotional hardening against the coming assault of tragedy, even if you want to be moved by it.

It didn’t help that Clannad’s first story arc involved the exact same coma trick that helped resolve Kanon’s final arc — and combined it with the drawn-out inevitability of the Makoto storyline.

So Clannad had a hard row to hoe to begin with, and deservedly so. You want me to tear up like a little girl again? Work for it, bitches.

However, Clannad has tried to assert its own identity by being a more light-hearted counterpart to Kanon that eases up on the never-ending pain, and even some later episodes have been purely funny rather than tragic.

To bring this boat up to speed, I’ll attempt to sum up episodes 1-12: Tomoya Okazaki is a lovable delinquent-slacker, and his current mission in life is to help the ultra-moe Nagisa restart the theater club in their final year of high school. Well, that’s really about all you need to know.

Nagisa’s parents provide great comic relief, but if we again follow the pattern, most comic relief will become hollow laughter once we discover the rape or cancer or grizzly attack that caused them to be that way.

The Tomoya-Nagisa pairing provides a bit more of a tag-team effect in the established methodology of helping one fucked-up girl at a time, and that would provide welcome relief if Tomoya didn’t basically ignore Nagisa in order to achieve his happy-bunny goals. A real girl would understandably become insanely jealous and feel completely unimportant, but Nagisa obviously has problems. Well. Everyone in these shows has problems.

Moving on to the not-quite-real-time blog of damnation…

- otou-san out!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 17th, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Clannad, drama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.