You may not think of Clannad as exhibiting the design flair of a late eighties/early nineties Disney film, what with its huge-eyed Key style, willingness to hit where it hurts, bare modicum of interpretive ambiguity and such. But then, perhaps you’ve never seen Disney’s short adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” which, strangely, was the first thing that came to mind when I considered the visual flavor of After Story’s twenty-first episode.

“Little Match Girl” lacks the pastels of Clannad. But it does have snow — and, while Clannad isn’t known for its snow like Kanon is, the prevalence of cold in “Little Match Girl” serves to make an enemy of the setting, and Tomoya, we know by now, is always willing to brand his setting a mortal foe. When he does so, the city has a way of losing all its color in response.

(I apologize for the tiny “Little Match Girl” screencaps; I was working with a very low-quality file. Given that it’s not even seven minutes long, you could easily just watch the thing yourself if you want elaboration upon my examples.)

Equally uninviting, and equally dangerous, perhaps; there are times when Tomoya’s city really does seem bent on his demise. As I’ve mentioned, this could result in Clannad being a satisfying little tragedy (like “Little Match Girl”), provided KyoAni doesn’t…well, let’s just wait and see.

Now here’s an interesting contrast. In both cases, we have a young girl finished off by the elements (or presumably so, in Ushio’s case; the cold certainly doesn’t help, I assume), but while the titular match-selling girl finds herself out in the cold due to neglect, Ushio is carried into the arms of the elements by her father, who, for some reason, thought it’d be a good idea to honor his daughter’s wishes to go on a trip even though she was dangerously ill. Nagisa pulled through as a child; is it unreasonable to assume that Ushio might have, under the right conditions? Tomoya seems to be his own worst enemy, through no real fault of his own; after all, he impregnated Nagisa (she wanted a child, true, but he could’ve insisted on adoption), and it was the pregnancy that led to her death — I’d call it low mimetic tragedy if I didn’t expect the ending to neuter it.

“Little Match Girl” also makes use of the idea of lights (in its case, flames) as connections to “another world”…

…though the other world in that case is very obviously illusory. The girl dies in spite of all the food and warmth she conjures from the depths of her match-flames, and I figure that makes the story all the more potent. Will Clannad’s other world prove equally intangible? I doubt it.

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.

I’m willing to put my money where my mouth is, however occasionally (give me a break; I’m poor). Aria, of all things, is certainly worth it. And it’s a good thing I bought it, too, since viruses recently ate my Windows, forcing me to do a clean install of the OS, which rendered my CrystalNova-subbed AVIs somewhat nonexistent (and contributed to this post taking so long to write).

But this post isn’t about the tragic nature of somewhere in the ballpark of 200 gigs of music and video slaughtered upon the altar of Windows and Symantec Antivirus’s combined inability to do anything useful. It’s about romance (the lovesome kind) among the central characters of Aria the Animation. “What romance?” you ask, to which I reply, “Exactly.”

Let me preface by saying that I haven’t experienced any branch of the Aria franchise other than the Animation (and deliberately so), so I’m not sure how what happens in the Animation relates to later seasons or the source manga; I’m looking at the show as an independent, self-contained entity, at least plot-wise. And I’m aware that the show gives us enough building blocks to interpret romance if we want to — in fact, I want to begin by addressing the most obvious of said building blocks. First, we’ve got this situation:

Why not Akatsuki and Alicia, when the former so frequently voices his alleged infatuation with the latter? If you’ve seen the show, think back to the number of scenes in which both Alicia and Akatsuki are present, and compare that to the number of scenes in which Akatsuki and Akari are present. I’d wager that Akatsuki has more screen time alone with Akari than he has with Alicia in the presence of third, fourth, and fifth wheels. I like to think Akatsuki uses Alicia as an excuse to get to Akari, being too inelegant for a more direct approach, and the beauty of the explicit situation is that it neither confirms nor denies this, allowing overenthusiastic fans such as myself to interpret things in whatever way makes them happy.

Whether you’d rather see Akatsuki with Akari or Alicia, the notable thing here is that his relationships with both are so thoroughly Victorian that romance never seems to cross the characters’ minds. This is not the case with Aika, who apparently has what we might call a thing for diminutive Harry Potter lookalike Al.

The notable thing about Aika x Al (Alka, if you will — though I won’t) is that it only comes to the foreground in the last episode, and only briefly. It shows up earlier, but at that point most of us are probably too distracted by President Aria as a superhero to pay much attention; it’s relegated to the periphery in favor of the second half of the eighth episode’s predominant comedy. Al may be a far more explicit object of affection than Akatsuki (who doesn’t seem to be an object of affection at all), but he has far less screen time to make up for it.

And with that, we’ve touched on pretty much every situation of potential romance involving the central characters¹. Not that two situations necessarily comprise a paltry representation of romance in a thirteen-episode series, but one hardly involves enough romance to justify calling it romantic, and the other probably gets less attention than half the show’s unnamed minor characters.

One might argue that it’s difficult to slice life and come away with so little romance, but I’m not trying to question Aria’s slice of life credentials. It’s enough for me that the show indicates a budding romantic situation with Aika and Al, even if it promptly refuses to delve into said situation. It’s there, whether we see it or not, and I don’t particularly need to see it; that’s what extrapolation and imagination are for. What I’m interested in is the very fact that we don’t see any more romance in Aria than we do.

This is one of those cases in which I’d like to provide possible explanations by deferring to people more intelligent than I am. Unfortunately, there don’t seem to be hordes upon hordes of critics (or anibloggers, for that matter — correct me if I’m wrong) writing about the absence of romance in literature or film, so I’m left with my own speculation and what insight can be gleaned from distant but potentially related topics.

It’s possible that what I’ve been branding a seemingly deliberate absence of romance isn’t an absence at all; perhaps it’s Aria’s way of portraying the uncertainty of romantic love in the hands of the young and inexperienced. I have to admit that the technique of leaving romance up for debate in some cases and dangling it around the periphery in others seems more palatable to me these days than…well, the usual:

(Unprecedented Clannad spoilers ahead…spoilers are a given in these parts, I know, but this is a post about an entirely unrelated show, so consider yourself warned.)

Not that Clannad isn’t a good show in its own right. I quite enjoy it, in fact. But after 32 episodes (that full-of-concentrated-win Tomoyo divergence excluded, of course), Nagisa and Tomoya still have such a hard time holding hands — no, not even that; they have such a hard time saying nice things to each other? In keeping with the theme of hard times, I’m having a hard time buying it at this point, especially considering that Nagisa and Tomoya have been officially boyfriend/girlfriend (um, reverse-respectively) since the end of the first season. I’ll take Al, Akari, and/or Alicia’s obliviousness, Aika’s tsunderiffic reticence, and Akatsuki’s dubious tactics over an entire cast that demonstrates symptoms of Shrinking Violitis wherever romance rears its sometimes-ugly head.

Of course, that’s a matter of preference. Your mileage may vary (I’ll spare you the TV Tropes link this time), and besides, my first inclination was to call the state of romance in Aria a lack, so let’s get back to that. I’ve got one last maneuver to pull on that front before retreating. I’m not at all confident in my ability to make a coherent point out of it, though, if it’s even relevant at all, so let me lay it out for you and we’ll see what happens.

What I’m referring to here is absence causation, the idea that absence can be the cause to an effect. The Stanford website elaborates in this convenient resource:

Absences are said to be transcendent entities. They are nothings, non-occurrences, and hence are not in the world. Thus Mellor says, “For the ‘C’ and ‘E’ in a true causal ‘E because C’ need not assert the existence of particulars. They may deny it… They are negative existential statements, made true by the non-existence of such particulars,…” (1995, p. 132) Here Mellor is arguing that, in the case where rock-climbing Don does not die because he does not fall, Don’s non-falling and non-dying are causally related, without there being any events or other immanent entities to relate.

Makes sense, I suppose, but you may wonder what all that has to do with Aria. Let’s assume that our cause is Aria’s general absence of romantic development among the central characters. We’re not saying that there aren’t romantic situations in Aria (since there are), but that we don’t see much of the obvious one, that the other one may have nothing to do with romance, and that we aren’t privy to much forward motion on either front. Aria the text lacks romance even if it lets on that Aqua the setting doesn’t. The effect, then, would be some invocation of feeling or thought in the viewer…which, on second thought, is pretty obvious, so let’s also consider the related effect of character development.

The aforelinked source continues:

…The first [response to absence causation] is to deny that absences can be causal. In this vein, Armstrong claims: “Omissions and so forth are not part of the real driving force in nature. Every causal situation develops as it does as a result of the presence of positive factors alone.” (1999, p. 177; see also Beebee 2004a) The theorist who denies absence causation may add some conciliatory codicil to the effect that absences stand in cause-like relations. Thus Dowe (2000, 2001) develops an account of ersatz causation (causation*) to explain away our intuitions that absences can be genuinely causal.

Assuming this position to be correct lets us throw together a few hypotheses to explain how absent romance works here as a unit of meaning. “Ersatz causation” or no, if it’s given that “every causal situation develops as it does as a result of the presence of positive factors alone,” and that Aria’s romantic visual cliff is a negative factor, then the romantic absence cannot be a cause, and therefore there cannot be an effect. That sounds a little suspicious, as the absence in question at least prompted me to think all this through and write this post (which, incidentally, is one of those that keeps growing longer than intended), but that can be explained precisely by the absence’s inability to cause.

I’m starting to think this is all a matter of sematics, but hear me out anyway. Consider the second effect, that of character development. In the general absence of romance, Akari and the gang cannot develop on the romantic front; what few hints the show gives us leave the option of romantic development open, but the show doesn’t delve any further than that. As a result, more screen time is spent on other issues — friendship, for example, or mentorship and sibling-like relationships — at the expense of romantic love. Ultimately, it wasn’t the absence of romance that prompted me to think; it was the uneven distribution of screen time in Aria, a tangible thing, a “positive factor.”

I’m highly suspicious of that approach. Actually, I’m inclined to stab it in the face with Occam’s razor and credit the absence as piquing my interest, as I did in the beginning. But it does bring me to my next point.

The second response to the absence argument is to deny that absences are transcendent. One way to do this would be to accept the existence of negative properties, and think of absences as events in which an object instantiates a negative property. Thus Don’s instantiating non-falling at t0 might be counted an immanent event, and a cause of the further immanent event of his instantiating non-dying at t1.

If that’s to be believed, Aria doesn’t give us an absence of romance, it gives us a tangible “non-romance.” We might say that romance is to non-romance as 1 is to -1, while romance is to the absence of romance as 1 is to 0. I don’t know about all this; it seems unnecessarily complicated. Besides, I don’t think non-romance is a good way of describing what amounts to Aria’s simply not delving into romance.

A second way to deny that absences are transcendent would be to take absence claims as merely a way to describe occurrences, as Hart and Honore recommend: “The corrective here is to realize that negative statements like ‘he did not pull the signal’ are ways of describing the world, just as affirmative statements are, but they describe it by contrast not by comparison as affirmative statements do.” (1985, p. 38) Thus Don’s not falling at t0 may be identified with his clinging to the rock at t0, and Don’s not dying at t1 may be identified with his surviving at t1, which events are indeed causally related.

While this makes it seem like ours is indeed an issue of semantics, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case; I think this simply goes to show that the arguments against absence causation are not as useful in describing the causal relationships in question as absence causation itself. We can’t, after all, say that “absence of romance” and “abundance of everything else” mean the same thing; it’s difficult to have a superficial argument of semantics in a field in which every difference in meaning, however minuscule, changes the game completely.

In retrospect, this absence causation business may not be very useful at all. It’s all very theoretical, and I haven’t used it as a springboard to delve into something practical; maybe I’ll be able to do so in the future. Sometimes it helps, though — or it helps my understanding, anyway — to apply as many concepts and as much terminology to the basic functions of something as possible. And, if nothing else, I think I’ve successfully demonstrated here Aria’s potential to make one think.

Endnotes

¹I realize that there are at least two married couples in the show, but what I’m looking at here is romance as an indicator of character development in the native Aquans we come to know and love. Besides, the couple in episode 7 probably wouldn’t be described as amorous, and we never even see Ai’s sister’s husband in person (though I suppose the baby is evidence enough of their…efficacy).