Shameful Otaku Secret!

A Problematic Matter / 3 on 3

Like I said, I’m really pretty glad the Kotomi storyline has drawn to a close. I’m also glad they did it with a minimum of teary-eyed horror, though the resolution still seemed somewhat less than satisfying to me. Now Kotomi is a regular blue-haired companion to the Fujibayashi twins, nearly indistinguishable save for her little round hair ties. Two episodes went by while I was traveling for work, and look what they’ve done. Some of my expectations for this show have been turned on their head, and that really pleases me.

Heretofore-incidental character Youhei Sunohara, ostensibly Tomoya’s best friend, drives these two episodes with a visiting little sister and a crazy-ass plan to get Nagisa’s theatre club hopes rejuvenated by playing basketball. Is it really important why? I suppose maybe a little, though it is an obvious plot contrivance. See, there’s only one advisor, and I guess he’s not allowed to endorse two clubs, and the (erstwhile) music club is hoping for him to sponsor a choir club because this girl Rie can’t hold a violin bow after a car crash, so they’re putting threatening notes in Nagisa’s desk.

Really?

That’s what I mean by plot contrivance. However, it does allow Sunohara to get indignant about the girl taking advantage of her “handicap” for pity. And that drives him to prove that a handicap means nothing. Hence, a basketball game featuring a player who’s unable to lift his shooting arm.

Of course, this leads to trouble with Tomoya, who not only doesn’t want to do it, he doesn’t want the girls (including Sunohara’s sister, who doesn’t really think her older brother is that cool) to know about his little issue.

Can I just say, while I have this opportunity, that it’s the dumbest problem I’ve ever heard of? For something that causes Tomoya to pretty much pack it in and give up on life, why can’t they even animate it? Because it would just look as dumb as it sounds. Seriously, is there no other injury that could hinder his basketball forever and still be hidden from Nagisa? Bone spur? Scoliosis? Herpes?

I digress. Usually.

In addition to the charge toward Tomoya’s self-evaluating of his aimless life, an awful lot of developments went down. First, he stands up to the judo club bullying the younger but all-too-similarly named Tomoyo into joining, and that makes her think that maybe he’s not all that bad after all. In fact, she’s… interested.

And she’s not the only one. Kyou, exasperated with the sheer number of girls around Tomoya, uses her trademark bossiness to not only question his heterosexuality (it’s about time), but throttle him into eating lunch with her and her sister. She even gets the beginnings of a girl-fight going with Tomoyo. But is it for her own sake, or is it the personality-challenged Ryou who digs the delinquent? Who knows, but Kyou has gone from intolerable bitch to kind of cute in a single episode, so there’s a development for you.

In one of the few genuinely funny situations up to this point, Sunohara spent a whole episode thinking that Nagisa and Tomoya were dating, while Nagisa spent that same time thinking that Sunohara was gay for Tomoya. More importantly than its humor though, that was really the first time I can think of Tomoya actually acting in a way that I’d imagine a so-called “delinquent” might: his best friend has a crush on a girl so he tells the girl said friend is gay? Snap! And to shamelessly freak out Nagisa, to the point where she explodes her feelings (albeit in a strange way)?

Add to that his endless fucking with Sunohara and his sister, and you get a guy who appears to have a real hobby in social engineering of sitcom mishaps. I like this cold-ass Tomoya much more than the endlessly helpful one. Or at the very least, I believe him more.

To sum up the basketball match, for all intents and purpose a time filler until the very end: Kyou, Sunohara, and Tomoya take on the freshmen team until it becomes apparent they’re not bad. Then the varsity players, who know Tomoya’s secret, come out and proceed to clean house. Tomoya, while being knocked to the floor, sinks a miracle game-winning desperation basket while bouncing around an internal monologue on what a pathetic failure he is. But does it net them the advisor? We don’t know.

What We’ve Learned

I think the most important thing that’s happened in these two episodes has been the development of Tomoya as a character. While it’s getting late in the game, I’m glad he’s not just another empty vessel like Yuichi from Kanon, and it’s nice to see him act like a fuckup instead of just having to trust the shorthand of untucked shirt and habitual tardiness. And when actually called out about the girl thing, he seems to think about it a little. Could it be that he’s that much of a drag-ass that he can’t be bothered to like a girl? Who knows. Next episode’s preview looks to go even further into the what’s-eating-Tomoya subject, and I for one look forward to it.

Animation

Episode 15 starts with the robot and girl in the empty world, something we haven’t seen for quite a few episodes. And if you’re like me, it reminded you why the people animating this show are hot shit. I’ve been trying to catch up on Shakugan No Shana Second (by JC Staff), and it’s a really great-looking show that has consistently impressed, but five seconds of Kyoto’s Clannad pretty well dropped my jaw. That carried through to the rest of the episode, where I noticed that these guys never bounce a static image up and down for walking, and really don’t take many other shortcuts either. They almost animate too much hair and clothes. It’s like they’re showing off. High-class problems to have, eh?

If the story continues to deepen like it has these couple episodes (and it better, there’s really not that much of the show left), then we’re in for a show that finally matches its animation with great character development. Better late than never.

Theory of Everything

Well. Let me just start this off by saying that I’m fairly glad the Kotomi storyline is now over. I just don’t care. Fuko’s arc was rife with emotional dirty tricks, but they worked and the wedding episode was both cute and teary. The Kotomi story has reminded me of every reason why I find these shows so repetitive.

We begin with Tomoya continuing to work in the garden while flashbacks bring us back to the story of her parents dying, her godfather searching for a paper, and her subsequent burning of (what she thought was) said paper.

Tomoya apparently stayed away from her birthday party as a kid because he, in all his shaggy lets-help-people naïveté, invited his “real” friends and they made fun of him — not only for trying to get them to go to a stranger’s house, but for hanging out with icky cootie-infested girls. Bummer I called this incorrectly last week, but that still doesn’t make Clannad vastly different from Kanon, and who knows, I might still be right about great silly tragedy in his past.

Regardless — Who had the last laugh, now that puberty hit (for the rest of them, not so much Tomoya) and he almost exclusively hangs out with girls? He should have told them she was rich. Anyway, young Tomoya regrets not going and heads to her house to apologize, then finds the small fire that’s about to become huge and engulf the sobbing Kotomi, who’s already regretting what she’s done.

In the here and now, Tomoya finds himself falling asleep after a couple all-night gardening jams, only to be awakened by Kotomi, who has finally left her house. She clearly digs him — not in a pathetic way like Nagisa, but in the way only she, a girl smart enough to realize that he’s a wasted effort, possibly could. That no-hope, resigned to big-eyed sadness, total moe kind of crush. And there’s the thematic rub: she always waited for Tomoya-kun to come back (if there was any feasible way I could write that in the mocking tone I hear in my head, I totally would). It’s Yuichi from Kanon all freaking over again. What makes Tomoya, the perpetually dopey onii-chan with his old-school Timex Ironman watch, so appealing? Probably the audience projecting onto him. Your inability to make advances on girls will one day pay off in the form of a doting harem, my delusional otaku brethren!

I digress. Without remorse.

The birthday gift-giving from Nagisa and the twins goes well, with a lame hand-drawn “gift certificate” (you know the type) subbing in for the broken violin until it’s fixed, and an all-too-perfect visit from her godfather. What does he have? A suitcase, presumably with the paper in it. Or not?

If you haven’t seen episode 14, stop. Go bootleg it, and come back to me.

Back? How about that fucking internet, man? They got it all.

I have to say, I find the contents of the suitcase to be the unspoken tragedy of this whole storyline. It would make everything worthwhile if I thought for more than half a second that it was intentional. See, she didn’t want the fucking bear. She just said she did because she thought that’s what she was supposed to say. So her father’s dying wish, and the unlikely passing of the suitcase through Clannad’s entire godforsaken earth culminating (even more unlikely) on her birthday, is a sham. That’s really sad to me, far sadder than any of the cutey-love-fest Fuko arc.

Is that why she cried when she saw the bear? The horrific realization that she had provided her beloved parents with a baseless and false sense of accomplishment at their final moment on this mortal coil?

Or is it me being cynical, and she’s crying for the more obvious happy-sad anime reasons? I try to leave my cynicism at the door with Clannad, and I didn’t actually have a cynical reaction, but between Tomoya’s endless love of helping people and his seeming dearth of actual feelings for people themselves, this thing’s wearing me out.

But, I’ll keep coming back. Because as weak as this story arc seemed to me, it only means that one of these should be better.

What’s Next?

I was placing my chips on tough Tomoyo, whose name is just plain too close to the protagonist’s for my taste. But the next episode preview seemed to lean in Nagisa’s direction. That’s good, I guess. She needs a little more exposition if we’re going to keep following her around until the end, which I imagine we will. But I would especially like to see what the twins’ major malfunction is — especially Kyou, who seems to have her shit together so well she must be burying something.

About the Subs

One thing I have no complaints about, still, is the technical merit of this show, except maybe for Kyoto’s glaring lack of ability with feet.

But something technical that really should get some airtime, essential to our current Western experience, is the fansubbing. My hat is totally off to Static Subs and Eclipse Productions, whose subs I have been watching. You can take fansubs for granted sometimes, but here’s the deal: These cats are throwing this stuff up not only ridiculously fast (almost immediately after the show’s Japanese airing), but they are accurate and enjoyable to watch. As the week goes on, more subs start appearing online and this week I actually took the time to watch a couple. Shop around, as it were. And these guys, surprising as it is with their speed, are just plain great.

Don’t expect localization, and don’t expect ADV’s inevitable North American DVD release in the future to resemble it in any way. It’s very literal, and considering they are providing a service rather than actually licensing and releasing stuff, I think it’s their responsibility not to project interpretation onto the script. So, thanks to you — and really, to all the fansubbers out there. They do it for the love, and they do a great job.

Until next week, uh… keep it moe!

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?