Surely it is fun. I was thinking how these “interesting” side stories be placed aside as OVAs or extra episodes. We all like to enjoy such snippets, and viewing it after the main plot has been well done would greatly alleviate one’s appraisal of the anime’s ability to entertain.

@Shin

[ID SOJOURNER]

It haunts you day and night.

Indeed. CLANNAD’s charm, in my opinion, lies in its elusive profoundness of life’s ephemerality (with cute girls). Thus, the side characters plus the illusion world are essential in inoculating such an sensation into its audience.

I just simply think that it was weakly executed in certain ways and that hindered my catharsis.

It is a bit hard for me to express my thoughts without getting tl;dr so I apologise for not elaborating.

Hmm… that does make more sense to me now. I’m not sure, but my first thought was that developing the heroines was less about developing Tomoya, but more about setting us up as viewers for the development that was to come. They’re the parables that prepare us for the main illustration. Does that maximize the effectiveness of the central plot? No, I suppose it probably doesn’t. Again, I think this makes some sense given the anime’s structural compromise, whether it’s a valid “excuse” or not — they were never intended to directly connect to the main plot, only to be side-stories that supported it. However, I don’t personally feel that it significantly diminished or deterred from the moral or message. Perhaps it’s because I keep reminding myself that this is, in fact, a compromise to deliver more of the source material, and not an attempt to totally re-imagine the story in a single linear plot. This is something that I got used to in the 2006 Kanon adaptation, and is largely the same here. So in other words, maybe I’m more “okay with it” because I understand the compromise they made (and why they made it), whereas if I ignored that knowledge and just took the show as it is, I may find myself wondering “why did we need so many of those side-stories, again?”

I suppose this really points to the difference between an attempt at “animating the game” versus “adapting the game’s story for animation”. And I have to say that I sort of feel for directors and story planners these days because there is no satisfying everyone in this regard. The approach Kyoto Animation took on these adaptations has been to try to be as true as possible to the original game so that those who had played the games would appreciate it. And I think they’ve been largely successful in that regard, as nearly anyone familiar with the games seems quite thrilled by the adaptations (minor preference issues aside). But does this make for a good anime when you judge it strictly on its own merits? Possibly less so. With a show like Clannad, you pretty much have to add the disclaimer that “it’s a good adaptation of the game”. Nearly any oddity can be explained by “well, that’s just because it was like in the game”. So it seems to me that it’s an anime that was meant first and foremost for game fans (or fans of these sorts of games in general), because they are the ones most able to keep “the compromise” in mind at all times. When you judge the plot on its own with no regard for the game, I can see how it may seem less cohesive.

That being said, I would also say that I’m not so “radical” in regards to the “plot above all” view of storytelling (and that everything else is just gawking and ogling at pretty pictures like idiots). Plot is important, but so is immersion, and symbolism, and emotion, and colour, and musical cues, and so many other things. If one engages their mind in understanding the more abstract rather than the more concrete (or perhaps in understanding their own reactions to what they see and how it applies to their own lives), they are still active participants in the viewing process. Basically, plot isn’t the only avenue for intellectual engagement, it’s simply the most obvious of the aspects in a story. What ultimately matters most is simply that you are always thinking, and always learning. People often use expressions like “it’s the sort of show where you turn off your brain and just watch” — that is the problem, and it’s actually not because “the plot doesn’t give you anything to think about”.

Anyway, interesting discussion.

You always have something interesting to contribute. Props!

Dreams will remain dreams if you keep on dreaming.

TED talk on happiness by Harvard psychology professor.