Some Thoughts on Clannad

LouieW

I figured that since a bunch of other IJBMers were doing this sort of thing, it might be okay to give some of my thoughts on Clannad since I have been watching the (English dubbed) DVDs as of late. If people would prefer I just post this on some blog somewhere though I could do that instead.

Since I was initially pretty hesitant to watch Clannad because of the more suspect parts of the premise itself those annoying and/or sexist bits seem like the best place to start.

First off, there is the whole overarching plot of one boy solving a lot of girls' problems. I guess one could say that the unfortunate implications of this are offset a bit by the fact that the protagonist Tomoya is clearly flawed (as you see right away with how he acts around his father) and a bit of a prankster. He also gets help from other people and sometimes gives advice instead of just fixing everything by himself.

Still, while I think it is unfair to say that Tomoya is some male savior flying in to rescue helpless girls, it is true that for a good part of the series, Clannad does not exactly stray too far from the "one guy with a bunch of female love interests who seem pretty focused on him" trope found in other works of this genre.

Another less than enjoyable aspect of Clannad is how the feminine traits of the heroines tend to be emphasized over the masculine. Of course, this makes some sense, since well, women tend to be more feminine than men. I guess my issue with this pattern is more that those feminine traits are highlighted too much.

To begin with, generic cuteness is in full force (well, if you can find the character designs cute, some people think they are kind of soulless and weird) and while the main female characters all are considered pretty or cute in the show itself, there are definitely male characters who are meant to be unattractive. Plus, even Tomoyo, the female character who on face breaks with traditional gender norms the most (e.g., she is known for being a good fighter, is athletic, and runs for student council president), has the character quirk of wanting to be more feminine.

All of those less than savory features of characterization in Clannad come to a head in one particular scene when almost all of Tomoya's love interests come to visit him when he is suspended from school. Each one brings a dish and tries to get him to choose her cooking over another girl's. The whole thing just seemed to sum up the inequality between how men and women can sometimes be portrayed in the show and the unreasonable emphasis on traditional feminine practices like cooking as the defining traits of heroines in the story. I suppose my problem there is not that any individual character has such traits, but rather that combined their characterization appears to be somewhat sexist.

Okay, so now that I got that rambling junk out of the way, I suppose it is time to mention what might make Clannad worth watching. For me personally, it is the show's focus on and good depiction of family.

Now, when I say that Clannad depicts family well, I do not mean that it necessarily supports "traditional family values" or that it favors good family structures over bad ones. It definitely seems like a stretch to say it is that kind of propaganda. Instead, what makes Clannad's handling of family great in my view is how it does a good job of both showing the importance of family and sending the message that family comes in many forms.

Yep, that probably sounds pretty cheesy, but I have to think it is true. The families shown in Clannad are more than just the common Mom/Dad/Child variant. Some of them include friendships that are so strong that they become like family bonds. Others are weak or non-existent at first and come to be enriched through people acting out their love for one another. The latter type of familial relationship pops up in the series a number of times with siblings. The way that Fuko, Tomoyo, and to some extent (Youhei) Sunohara grow in that respect struck me as being particularly fascinating.

Blah blah blah, Clannad has an ending theme called Big Dango Family and it likes to show tons of familial relationships. Why does that matter? Well, you might not buy what I have to say here, but one of my favorite parts of Clannad is how it brings up how crucial having a good family can be for one's own well-being. Merely sticking together for the sake of biology is not enough. Sometimes substitutes for traditional families may actually work better than the genuine article.

I am not sure if that sounded convincing at all, but if you want another reason to watch the show, I guess I have one. From what I can tell, Clannad is pretty unique in that it features an active male protagonist in a show targeted towards men who largely does not have to beat people up to solve problems, but who is not some perfect Gary Stu either. His progression through the series also supports the idea that everyone has the potential to do good; he starts out as some loser with a bad homelife and little respect for other people and undergoes a pretty neat transformation.

Anyway, the sexist stuff might bug you enough to make any of those supposedly good points not matter or it might not. 

Nova

That... sounds way more sexist than I had imagined.

Demongodofchaos

Sounds rather exaggerated, to be honest.

 

I don't know, I never cared for that, as much as i cared for the cast's interactions with each other.

LouieW

Nova,

Well, I did kind of emphasize those parts, so maybe I was a bit unfair about the sexism stuff. I mean, I think that stuff definitely is present, but it might not overwhelm the other, arguably more positive aspects of the show. Honestly, I go back and forth between those views from time to time myself.

In some respects, I suppose Clannad is part of a genre that is inherently sexist (the aforementioned "one guy with a bunch of female love interests who seem pretty focused on him"), which probably flows from the fact that it is based on a romance-based visual novel. Still, I think it could be argued that Clannad is great for something in that genre, especially since it is constrained by how the series sets out to try to tie together "routes" that might seem to not fit together well.

In any event, the plot does kind of switch later on to focusing on the main male and female protagonists, so maybe it would be better if the other heroines did not show any interest in the main male character at all. I am not really sure. I guess this seems weird, but I feel like Clannad may be a show that has quite a few redeeming qualities despite its premise or it may just be a show that can appeal to people who otherwise do not care for series that emphasize romance and such.

DonZabu

Have you seen After Story? Tell us what you think about that.

LouieW

DonZabu,

I have, but right now I am rewatching it dubbed, so I figure I might as well comment on it when I am done with that.

I am glad that it sounds like you find my rambling to be at least interesting enough to want to hear a bit more of it though.

LouieW

Yeah, so since I managed to finish watching the "~After Story~" dub, I figured it might be worth adding a bit to this.

The sexism stuff that I found annoying in the first season seems like a logical place to start. Honestly, I have to think the second season is generally a vast improvement in that area. As After Story focuses on the main couple of the series, significantly less attention is given to the other love interests introduced earlier. This makes the first half of the season seem much less like "one guy with a bunch of female love interests who seem pretty focused on him" than one guy in a serious relationship who happens to have a number of female friends.

The characterization of those female friends has largely not changed much, so if you thought the overemphasis of feminine traits (or traditionally female career goals) was annoying before, it might still bug you. That being said, given how much less attention those former love interests receive and how they are mostly depicted as friends, I think the situation is a lot less problematic.

The first half of the second season still features the main protagonist helping people out, but only two out of the three people in question are female and the way Tomoya lends a hand is not as direct as it is in the first season. I think this ends up making those arcs come off as less sexist.

Unfortunately, despite that progress in terms of the annoying gender role stuff, After Story adds a couple of other problems. If you liked how Tomoya was one of the rare protagonists on a show targeted towards men who does not beat people up to solve problems, you might be disappointed. He gets in a few, somewhat lengthy fights during the second season and is arguably portrayed as being justified each time he does.

Moreover, this might be over-analyzing those scenes, but the show seems much more willing to show male characters showing damage/getting hurt in fights than female ones. Female characters are either so strong that they never ever get a scratch or so weak that no one dares hit them. However, it should be noted that later on something like that double standard is not applied when Tomoya, Mei, and Nagisa work for the soccer club and look equally worn out and sweaty.

In terms of other things that might bother you in After Story, Sunohara's arc stands out to me. On face it seems a bit weird, which might be due to values dissonance, how it does not end up developing the character in question as much as some of the other arcs do, how it relies on a web of lies, or a combination of the three. Plus, the arc takes the cake as far as awkward scenes go, so if awkwardness makes you cringe (and not in a good way), you might have trouble sitting through that particular handful of episodes.

As for the other half of After Story, some people might take issue with how the main female lead is rather physically weak and suffers from something like the Soap Opera Disease. The flip-side to this is that in the first season Tomoya mostly helps her and the other female protagonists accomplish their goals while in the second season, she plays a key role in helping Tomoya overcome his problems. Tomoya openly acknowledges this and that recognition is pretty important to the plot.  

After Story really takes the family theme developed in the first season and runs with it. Its treatment of fatherhood and Tomoya's relationship with his father seem particularly impressive, partly because I really have not seen that kind of positive, yet realistic depiction of fatherhood in any other anime series before.

Tomoya's relationship with his father is obviously not perfect, even after some character development, but there is a definite sense of closure by the end of the series and I feel like that kind of nuance is often missing from stories of this type. Tomoya himself is also much more likely to show emotion and weakness in After Story, which ends up making him seem more multidimensional than in the first season.

So basically, I think the second season of Clannad avoids a lot of the problems of the first. As is said in the commentary on one of the DVDs, the first season seems somewhat disjointed because of the nature of the source material (i.e., it being a romance visual novels with multiple routes) while the second one is much more focused. Even so, there are some issues with the show that I find pretty hard to ignore and some might dismiss the series as being overly melodramatic and confusing. For example, it might just be that I am a bit thick, but I definitely had some trouble following the illusionary world stuff peppered throughout the series. I guess it is kind of a copout to say your mileage may vary, but yeah that pretty much sums it up.