Clannad – Oh gods, it’s gone all harem on us

- We couldn’t be bothered to blog episode 16 as it was criminally arse.

Here at ActiveCore, we have a policy on blogging. If blogging requires even the slighest effort, then don’t do it. To this end, episode 16 of Clannad was skipped due to laziness and the fact that there was really nothing to talk about.

But, for completeness sake, here’s my blog report for episode 16:

They played basketball. The reason why made no sense whatsoever. Eventually, it ended.

That out the way, on to episode 17:

This weeks Clannad was interesting in that it was the show really starting to, erm… show it’s true colours. The style of narrative is taking a definite split from the Kanon and Air territory, and into the realms of more standard harem comedy. So this episode we see our hero Okazaki being pulled back and forth by the three generic pretty girl leads who all seem to fancy him, while he mopes after his friend Nagisa-chan, who fainted at the beginning of the episode from the sheer effort of talking to an adult.

Bless her dumb, pretty girl cotton socks.

So it’s standard harem cliche stuff, with all the things you’d come to expect from that most insipid of television genres – We have the girl coming to Okazaki’s house so he won’t be late to school (which could only have been more cookie-cutter harem if she’d said “Oni-chan! you’ll be late for school!”) , various girls seemingly tripping over eachother so they can make him his lunch and, lastly, getting locked in a gym equipment storage shed with a girl.

(As an aside, the fact that anime characters are forever getting locked inside gym equipment storage sheds with pretty girls seems ludicrous in the extreme. In all the schools I attended in my youth, not *one* of them had doors which could be locked simply by closing them from the outside. You needed to lock it with a key which you got from the teacher, who would never lock the door without checking that nobody was inside. Maybe they just do things differently in Japan…)

..Anyway. Episode 17 is pretty much a failure then. Some of the Clannad comedy is in there, but its sandwiched between so much yucky anime fantasy bullshit – pulled off with little charm or original spin to it – that the whole episode just feels distinctly hollow, cynical and un-Kyo-Ani-ish.

Un-Kyo-Ani-ish is not a word.

So as a change in direction goes, it’s a bit disappointing to me. The Kanon/Air approach to story – with the main character wandering around on his own, spontaneously coming across various people and helping them with their problems like some sort of cross between David Carradine from Kung-Fu and Stairway to Heaven – was certainly flawed and often massively underdeveloped, but at least it was…. unique, somehow.

With the close of the Kotomi story arc, Clannad seems to be sliding into bog-standard harem in a way that is just uninteresting to me. Sure it’s a lot more of an ensemble piece – I know its one man show approach was one of Kanon’s major criticisms – but when that ensemble is made up of boring people re-enacting anime tropes over 20 years old, you can’t help but lose interest.

Seriously, make Haruhi season two already.