Clannad: Episode 13
Garden of Memories
For the lowdown on Clannad and my masochistic following of it, I provide this overview link.
We’re currently wallowing in the late-middle of Kotomi the teenage genius’s storyline. Her birthday is coming, and while Fuku the coma child mysteriously appeared at an action claw machine, she failed to win Kotomi the giant stuffed aardvark from Kanon. Obviously a major disappointment — Kotomi is clearly the equivalent of Kanon’s Mai, who is one up on her for having actually received that aardvark in a bloody demonic showdown. If you haven’t seen Kanon, trust me, it sounds more interesting than it was, regardless of the inclusion of a giant stuffed aardvark.
Story
The flashbacks to Kotomi’s childhood continue, leading to her super-genius parents dying in either a plane crash or a time-travel accident made to look like a plane crash or something to that effect. Turns out her only friend as a kid was Tomoya, and he didn’t even remember that.
Man. This is where Key’s male characters’ detachment always gets them: they never remember their childhood, making reality a miracle parcel of tragedy tied up with the string of repression, just waiting to be opened around say episode 23.
But that’s not all he did wrong: after her parents died, Kotomi was forced to spend her birthday alone thanks to Tomoya’s conspicuous absence. I’m guessing we’re not going to learn what kept him until we learn what that catastrophe in his past might have been.
To fix things in the present, where Kotomi is so depressed with her life she’s fleeing to the USA to sell herself into prostitution, Tomoya launches a genius plan to keep her suffering in Japan: he’s doing her gardening. Fucking brilliant, kiddo. Nagisa and the twins come up with their own plan to give her the violin from Episode 11’s ear-shattering recital, but are run over by a motorcycle in the process, which breaks the thing into three pieces and one more-than-obvious symbol of Kotomi’s jacked-up life. I swear I only made up one part of that paragraph.
Technical Breakdown
Not much to say, the quality has been maintained. Kyoto continues to prove that they are the ultimate new-school bad-asses in TV anime, even if they are currently on my shit list for removing most of the staff from series two of Haruhi Suzumiya in order to churn out this drivel.
Clannad seems to have the biggest heads and the biggest eyes in the whole of the medium, and seriously the shortest school skirts ever to deny fanservice in history (not that I’m really complaining, it just defies physics). However, after going away for a while, I find the character design to be a little anonymous and overly reliant on hairdos.
What We’ve Learned
We now know that Tomoya is more like Kanon’s Yuuichi than previously thought, and that something terrible must lurk in his past. We know that Kotomi could actually play the violin when she was little, which is why I say that all comic relief in this show (like her horrible recital) is really just the harbinger of more pain.
I for one have also realized that Nagisa is far more integral to the good Samaritan process than most people are going to give her credit for, especially Tomoya. He thinks he can and should do everything for everyone on his own, but he can’t. And ironically, it’s her painfully pathetic and unrequited romantic feelings for him that enable him to proceed on his Life’s Platonic Purpose. I think Nagisa is the one who needs to grow balls in this series because obviously Tomoya has none.
So what’s next: Can Tomoya fix the garden in time? Will the violin be repaired? Can a birthday party keep Kotomi in Japan? And most importantly, can we resolve this wholly uninteresting storyline quickly and move on?
- otou-san out!
January 18th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
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