I was pretty damn sad when CLANNAD ended a couple of months ago, as it’s one of my favorite series now. I kinda forgot about what they did with the first season, and how they bundled an extra episode with the DVDs, so I was pretty excited when I heard they were doing the same with the After Story DVDs. Last time, they decided to cover the later half of the Tomoyo arc, and with this episode, they covered Kyou’s arc, which I’ve played through in the visual novel, so I was interested to see how they’d run with it, and they actually surpassed my expectations.

Now, excuse me while I steal Moonlily’s way of expressing her thoughts on individual episodes.

What Happened: Ryou Fujibayashi has decided to come clean with her feelings about Tomoya in hopes to start a relationship with him. Tomoya accepts in hopes that he’ll get to know her better, and the two begin to spend their time as a couple together. Things begin to go great, as Tomoya learns more about his new girlfriend, and gains a new sense of happiness just by being with her.

Normally I don't like Ryou, but I don't think even I could resist those puppy dog eyes.

However, things haven’t been going so great for Ryou’s sister, Kyou. Tomoya runs into her while strolling around town, and the two decide to spend a bit of time chatting together. Kyou asks Tomoya if he’s ever kissed Ryou yet, and to her surprise, he hasn’t. She offers free kissing practice with her, and despite them never actually touching lips, this sparks quite a bit of gossip around the school. To try and put out the rumor that she’s dating Tomoya, Kyou attempts to date Sunohara with a false confession, but this only leads to Sunohara exposing Kyou’s true feelings for Tomoya.

I wish I was Tomoya. ='(

Eventually, Tomoya begins to accept that it isn’t Ryou that he loves, but Kyou instead. Much drama ensues, and Tomoya is forced to confess his feelings to a short-haired Kyou, and like anyone would guess, they become a happy couple in the end, and Ryou doesn’t harbor any ill feelings towards Tomoya.

What I Thought: The episode starts where the intersecting path of Kyou’s and Ryou’s arc initially begins. Kyou’s arc will get you a light, if you decide to go for her, and Ryou’s arc is considered a BAD END, while Kyou’s is what really should happen. The original CLANNAD anime series established that Ryou and Kyou both had some feelings for Tomoya, but considering the canon path is with Nagisa, it couldn’t really go any further than that. That’s what we have these Another World episodes for, though.

Kyou is a slut.

Like I mentioned before, I’ve played (read, rather) through this entire arc, so I wanted to see what they’d change. Luckily, most of the changes were for the better. Certain scenes have entirely different atmospheres to help foreshadow what it could mean, or to just lend a hand to the overall mood, something that was mostly absent from the visual novel. KyoAni used lots of shading and weather elements in a lot of the scenes and gave the entire arc a much darker, yet fitting mood. This really made this episode for me, because you could tell when shit was hitting the fan.

Sunohara; a true bro.

One thing that bothered me though, was that it all felt a bit rushed. I don’t know why they felt compelled to stick to the standard TV air time, but they did, and that sacrified meaning for the scene where Tomoya has to confess to Kyou, considering that kinda just popped out of nowhere. However, compared to how long and drawn out this entire thing can be in the visual novel(a majority of the Kyou arc there can only be summarized as “lots of awkward”), I felt that the anime version was superior. Sure, rushed, but it felt better and I wasn’t bored most of the time.

I'm having trouble deciding whether I love her more with or without long hair.

Despite that, though, it was incredibly powerful. It’s definitely one of those episodes that just has you on the edge of your seat, just bathing in the suspense of the events that unfold in the episode. I was worried that KyoAni had forgotten completely how to pull off believable and well-done drama after K-ON!, but it only took another episode of CLANNAD to make me realize that was all wrong.

In the end, it was a definitely a great final return to the series I loved and followed so diligently.

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The show’s premise is nothing new; four girls in a school environment decide to hang out together through some contrived means and once they do, the show gives us a look into their day to day affairs as they try to gel into a cohesive group of friends. This concept is nothing new and it shouldn’t be a hard concept to pull off well. Ichigo Mashimaro managed to work up some light and fluffy entertainment, Hidamari Sketch endeared us to its characters through the way the interactions are handled to form that cohesive unit, and Lucky Star’s characters had traits that allowed their personalities to bounce off one another to humorous effect. If we are to declare that all of these shows are comparable to K-ON! (and I would say they are), then we can go ahead and use those shows as a metric with which to measure how well K-ON! is able to deliver upon the life and fluffy entertainment. As you might guess from this post’s title, I don’t think the show measures up too well. But that’s putting it too lightly. Disappointing is probably the most accurate way of phrasing it.

K-ON! starts off with a decent set of ingredients needed for executing its premise, but the manner in which the ingredients are mixed together results in a complete mess with flaws that are just too glaringly obvious. The characters turn out to be nothing more than one-dimensional archetypes (with Mio being the only exception, but only because she’s a plot device, see Baka-Raptor’s explanation), the plot elements are subject to a healthy dose of recycling, and even the soundtrack is pretty dull.

Just based on these criticisms, the series would appear to be headed for disaster, but up until “Fuwa Fuwa Time’s” performance, the series manages to maintain a level of decency that is tolerable because the gags that they used still retained some degree of originality. It isn’t until episode eight where the show takes the plunge into complete ineptitude. As I described in the post, the girls’ attempts at advertising their club were clumsily done because anyone of sound mind would see that they were merely sabotaging themselves and I failed to see the humor behind it.

And then there’s Azusa. Good old Azusa. Right away, her addition to the cast left no doubt in the my mind that she would be little more than a Mio clone, subject to the whimsies and abuses that the other members would heap on her and I was annoyed at the fact that my guess turned out to be correct. A arrival of a new character creates possibilities for the show to expand its horizons except we get none of that. Gags are recycled with a new victim in mind and the same goes for the plot. Upon watching the preview for episode 10, I couldn’t help but shake my head in disbelief when I realized that they were going to effectively reuse the earlier beach house episode with too few variations to make it interesting. Furthermore, the dialogue during that episode worked as a textbook demonstration of tell, not show and it was clear that the producers took the lazy way out of showing the audience how much fun Azusa had. And finally, there was that clumsy attempt at drama which does very little for the series at this stage of the game other than to make one character completely unsympathetic.

We’re on the brink of the final episode (technically speaking) and there’s virtually no chance that the show can redeem itself. The last “real” episode came off as being unconvincing in terms of illustrating how far the girls have come along as a club and as a group of friends (they do say it straight out though, which is again, irritating). The characters are flat and show very little development during the course of the show, and above all, the show felt like it was juiced up on a sort of moe Red Bull drink. That pretty much ensures the show’s astounding lack of quality and leaves only the songs as this show’s saving grace, which, to be honest, does not make it worth your while to sit through if you’re only in it for the fluffy music. While we have been disappointed by shows like Munto, K-ON! has managed to be Kyoto Animation’s lowest point yet. Let us hope, then, that this is but a desperate ploy to increase their cash flow to fund better shows rather than a symptom of their inability to produce polished, enjoyable series.

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