02.06
…come on. Why isn’t there a car hitting one of them? It happened on Kanon. Why can’t it happen here?
Oh yeah, I’m supposed to be doing this.
*shoves Brandy and Fluoxetine into mouth*
Let’s ride.
Episode 2: The First Step To Walking Away From This Mess
Following on from the last episode, Tomoya is walking around town after acting like a spastic sissy at the mere appearance of his dad. By contrived coincidence, Nagisa is right by, practicing out lines for a play she wants to do. And because this is Clannad, a spotlight shines around her while she bellows out the following:
“If you’d like, I’ll take you to a special place in time. A place where all your wishes come true.”
Nagisa, wide-eyed and chipper as ever, gushes about how she wants to start up a new version of the drama club. And to compliment the sappiness, cherry blossoms fall in the background.
Hey, KyoAni, you know there’s this thing called subtlety, right? Not all emotional scenes need to look like something that would make Hummel figurines look gritty.
In between our supposed plot, we get round two in our series of mockingly pretentious moments between a red-haired girl and her pet robot. And just like last time, here’s another pseudo-profound statement.
“The girl’s life was very lonely. There was no one else besides the girl, but that was only natural. Nothing is born here. Neither does anything die. That’s the kind of world this is. That body was for me. Do I just have to wish it? To be born here? The one warm spot in this world, before I realized it, that’s what I was seeking.”
In less than a minute, you manage to make the scenes between Anakin and C3PO from the Phantom Menace seem natural and well-written. Bravo, KyoAni, bravo.
Back to the story, Tomoya contemplates about the drama club only to get run over by Kyou’s moped. She yells at him, goes off on a tangent about how he should be grateful for not having to pay for damages, and off she goes. To avoid the griping for at least a sentence or two, I have to admit this moment actually helps characterize Kyou and make her stick out from the rest of the girls. Sure, being the school bitch isn’t exactly an original trope, but it’s still a step above the generic cuteness that Nagisa and Ryou have going for them.
And speaking of being generic, enter Sunohara as he decides to make his fellow pussies proud by fighting Tomoyo again. At the grudge match, blondie makes a poorly worded analogy about being a pitcher and how anyone “could easily have his balls hit,” which gets soundly mocked by Tomoya. In order to relieve us of Sunohara’s chode rage, Tomoyo kicks him in an action unseen since last Saturday’s episode of Power Rangers, and proceeds to throw him down a trash chute. After making an offhand statement about feeling nostalgic, Tomoyo leaves off for Tomoya to walk into girl #5.
As he walks through the halls, random people talk about a ghost in the form of a rather odd girl, initiating this show’s first and most AAGH!-worthy arc. You’d think we’d soon see this plot device show up, but no. Instead, Tomoya goes to library and finds a barefooted purple-haired girl who cuts pages out of books.
While accordions take over the BGM, our protagonist does the old meet-and-greet with Kotomi Ichinose, the quiet, smart girl of the show. After a few blank-eyed expressions and an awkward conservation about lunch, Tomoya goes off to talk to Ryou again to establish context in what the hell was going on. But just as it gets established, in comes the flying dictionary as Kyou acts like a bitch for the umpteenth time. Through miscommunication, people somehow get confused and think she likes it both ways. And end scene.
As you may have guessed, none of these scenes flow into each other at all. It feels like the writers took a series of vaguely-connected two-minute scripts and pasted them together. Hell, it would be forgivable if the characters didn’t have the screen presence of an empty chair.
With random purple-hair girl hijinks over, Tomoya walks outside to find Nagisa sweeping the floor with a broom for some reason. So this supposedly prestigious school can’t even afford janitors. Huh.
At a conveniently empty classroom, the two plan out their path to starting out a club. Nagisa has a fit over Tomoya wanting to get people to join for her body. Tomoya quickly diverts into a putdown about how he doesn’t give two shits about being in the club and how Nagisa should learn how to take charge. In her poorly-implemented leadership, Nagisa gets nostalgia rage and decides to make a poster featuring her favorite little critters, the Dango family. Despite being a relatively important theme throughout the show, the Dangos never really get much explanation beyond “multi-colored balls that Nagisa likes”, so there’s no clear real-world equivalent I can use for them. Teletubbies, perhaps? Without a moment’s notice, she randomly goes “Tonkatsu!”, which is apparently a way to cheer herself up.
Hey, Sentai Filmworks, a dub means you’re supposed to translate this, not leave it in like a bad fansub. While taking the 4Kids route and calling a rice ball a doughnut is mental, it’s just as bad if you called it an onigiri instead. Christ, with this and the Ginga Okazaki joke from last episode, it seems that the days of Ted Woolsey are long gone.
After Nagisa’s bout with Japanese food Tourette’s, Tomoya accidentally stumbles into another suspiciously barren classroom, occupied with no one but a green-haired girl with a knife and a starfish. Upon making contact, green-haired girl runs off to the door and inexplicably orgasms. No, I’m not joking.
STAR GET!
Tomoya sees sense and forces the little girl to give him the knife, noting how she’s already cut herself by accident like the dolt she is. After that, we get a few rounds of “…is this girl a product of generations of great-grandparental incest?”, consisting of her pantomiming a basketball dribble and giving high-fives, only to be relieved by more Sunohara. And apparently, he hasn’t been injured at all since the last time we saw him, rendering his fight with Tomoyo absolutely pointless and irrelevant to this episode’s plot.
Sunohara makes fun of Tomoya for being a club-obsessed pussy and leaves scene again. Since she has literally nothing better to do than to be around Tomoya whenever dramatic tension is at its high, Nagisa overhears the conversation and wonders how sincere her friend actually is in supporting her drama club.
Don’t you have something better to do than handle your balls in the middle of the afternoon, Tomoya?
At home, our main character tries his hand at making knockoff toys by painting dangos. Mr. Okazaki comes in, prompting another sissy fit from our humble protagonist. Even from a simple question, Tomoya does the whiny “WHAT AM I?” speech while punching the wall. Then he runs off while talking to himself again. And just like last time, he finds Nagisa… sweeping the ground again.
Nagisa gets excited at seeing Tomoya’s attempt of shameless copyright infringement, and soon wishes to become processed food by gushing about how it would be amazing to be a dango. Tomoya decides to pull out a random backstory subplot about how he used to play basketball. Before he can finish, Nagisa decides that she wants to play with him at the court after school, because hearing about backstories automatically changes her plans. Then again, does this girl have any aspirations besides “Stalk Tomoya”, “Sweep ground”, and “Discover cure for Japanese Food Tourette’s”?
At the dorm, Tomoya keeps staring out into space before deciding to go outside. And as he gets to the school, he sees our ditz of the show drenched in water and holding a basketball. Since no one has phones of any sort, Nagisa didn’t get the message that Tomoya didn’t want to go. And since she also couldn’t be bothered to just go to his dorm to check where he was, she decided that the best decision was stand out in the rain without even an umbrella covering her. I think those dangos are warping her brain.
Nagisa tries to teach Tomoya how to make a pass, only to realize that he has a gimp shoulder. Our dear protagonist has another angst moment about how he can’t play basketball because of a fight with his dad. Back in the past, a confrontation between the two led to his shoulder getting injured so he can’t play basketball. Ever again.
Oh, and Nagisa collapses at that exact moment. The end!
Originally posted on Wednesday, June 29, 2011.