We will, as you can plainly see, participate in CCY’s Twelve Moments deal for the next twelve days. These will no doubt be less “formal” than our usual fare — assuming that lacing 4chan memes and the f-word throughout “serious” analysis constitutes formality in the first place (I have my doubts) — but for me, emotional response is criticism, too, so it’s all in a day’s work. Or it’s all in twelve days’ work, with a possible super special secret surprise at the end.

Incidentally, my first moment hails from a show that’s actually airing right now. I’m pretty sure it’s the only one that meets that criterion.

Clannad quite evidently deals with the idea of family, in a broad sense. It’s even in the title, sort of; Wikipedia mentions that “Jun Maeda, the main scenario writer of Clannad [the visual novel], believed that the title meant ‘family’ or ‘clan’ in Irish.” Maeda may have been a bit off, and normally I’m inclined to say that we should take things as they are even if they’re later identified as authorial “mistakes,” but I’m not sure how much there is to gain from looking at Clannad using the Irish band of the same name as a lens. If someone wants to try it, let me know how it turns out.

In any case, we don’t have to strain our logic muscles to get familial themes out of Clannad; in fact, most of the plot is predicated on these themes. We’ve got Tomoya and his dad, Nagisa and her parents, and, later (though actually pretty early on, if I remember correctly), Tomoya and the Furukawas — not to mention that the arcs and/or side-arcs of Kyou, Kotomi, Fuuko, Tomoyo, Sunohara, and Miyazawa all involve families of some shape or form, and encompass considerably more characters than the six I’ve limited myself to here out of convenience. And, hell, we can even call Misae’s landlady situation family-like; she’s motherly enough at times, both when counseling Tomoyo and suplexing Sunohara.

The family themes do not abate in After Story, which throws into the fray a question I’ve found myself asking more than once: high school romance is all well and good, but what happens when your average anime teenagers have to grow up and make lives for themselves? Tomoya finds himself thrust suddenly and without warning into adulthood (isn’t that how it always happens?), awkwardly in love with a sickly girl for whom he must be able to provide if he hopes to spend his life with her. It’s suddenly a problem that Tomoya never devoted himself to school or settled on any goals before graduation, and this is made all the more obvious when he runs into old friends who are doing things with themselves; Kyou and Ryou, for example, are living the college life. Even with its coma-ghosts and shapeshifting cats and such, Clannad (channeling the spirit of the Tomoyo Chapter OVA, maybe) suddenly feels much more real in its second season. It makes me wonder if the second half of the last episode of KyoAni’s Kanon wouldn’t have made for a righteously epic series in itself; I would’ve liked to see the consequences of Yuuichi’s life choices in as much detail as I’m seeing Tomoya’s adulthood unfold now.

My twelfth greatest anime moment of 2008 (though I have a very hard time calling one better than another, so visualize them as horizontal rather than vertical, if you like) is one of the many “answers” to the question posed above that drive After Story forward. Being a certified adult, Tomoya realizes that the time will come to take his relationship with Nagisa beyond the awkward hand-holding stage — and, being an upstanding young gentleman, or something, he decides to solicit the permission of Akio Furukawa, the greatest dad ever. Thus, in the tenth episode of After Story, Tomoya asks for unbridled access to Nagisa during a heated game of catch.

Akio’s response is very…well, Akio: he catches the baseball, throws it, catches it again, and pithily tells Tomoya that it’s really Nagisa’s call, in the end.

There are two ways of looking at Akio’s response here, as I see it. On the one hand, he’s granting Tomoya his approval in a most Akio-esque fashion; if he really didn’t want Tomoya with his daughter in the long run, I don’t doubt that the bounds of his character would’ve allowed him to be rather straightforward about it. In this sense, it’s a great victory for Tomoya; in a show in which families are so important, Tomoya and Nagisa eloping and running away to a faraway town would’ve been positively jarring, not to mention that it doesn’t seem to be the kind of thing either character would do, leaving that option more or less off the table.

On the other hand, Akio’s particular response could be taken to reinforce Nagisa’s position as the familial center of gravity of Clannad — remember, rather than condoning or condemning Tomoya outright, he relinquishes responsibility for the response to Tomoya’s request to Nagisa. It’s true that Tomoya is the protagonist of the show, insofar as he’s the ren-ai guy offered his choice of the women he helps in some way, but families don’t exactly form and grow around him; in fact, as After Story stands right now, he still isn’t in contact with his father. He does serve as a catalyst for forming and strengthening family bonds, based on how each of the show’s plot arcs turn out, but he finds a family for himself largely thanks to Nagisa. If Tomoya is the upstanding knight, the effector of positive change, Nagisa is the matriarch to whom he is sworn. It’s Nagisa’s family that grows, in the end; Tomoya joins as a live-in love interest, a pre-son-in-law, and the members of his harem — his harem — join as friends.

Tomoya gains a family, certainly, but it’s not exactly his family; he severs ties with his family in favor of becoming part of Nagisa’s. The family dynamic working as it does contributes to there being far, far more to Nagisa than the usual moe. Tomoya might be the outwardly stronger of the two, but Nagisa possesses an emotional endurance Tomoya lacks. I’m convinced that they don’t end up together because he saves her; they end up together because she saves him. It’s an utterly enjoyable turning of harem convention upon its head, by my reckoning, and that brief scene in the tenth episode underscores it nicely.