First, a story. When I was at college at CWRU, possibly the most famous student at the school was DARTH-SCSI. DARTH-SCSI hosted an enormous porn server on the network, with the legend saying that it was hosted one of the computers in the Olin lab. He was so infamous that even though he graduated in 2002, there was “DARTH-SCSI Appreciation Day” during orientation even in 2006, long after anyone who would’ve been at school at the same time as he would have graduated.

this picture is entirely so that i can tag this post with "gilfs"

Why am I telling this story? Well, Gonzo has had an annoying habit of making small changes to the anime that the adapt from other sources. While they are small or subtle, they can start to add up and blow up later on. My personal favorite example is from Welcome to the NHK. In the manga, Sato becomes obsessed with loli porn. In the anime, it’s just porn. In the manga, the fact that he fills up hundreds of gigs of hard drive space with loli porn makes him pathetic and despicable. But as the tale of DARTH-SCSI shows, having the same amount of porn porn doesn’t make you a freak. It makes you a legend.

(My second favorite example is how Romeo is supposed to be this playa with an entourage in the Shakespeare version of Romeo and Juliet, while Gonzo makes him emotional and sensitive. That change seems insignificant until you realize that a big aspect of the fact that Romeo is smitten with Juliet comes from the fact that this is such twue wuv that it’s managed to ensnare even a lothario like Romeo. Also, the reason that this is only my second favorite example is because then I don’t get to tell a story about pr0n.)

So what does this have to do with KyoAni? For a long time, I’d thought that the success of a Kyoto Animation anime depended on their ability to adapt their source material. The more straightforward and faithful the adaptation, and the better the source material, the better the anime would turn out. Their Full Metal Panic anime turned out pretty well for this reason, while Kira Star Lucky Chuta Lucky Star was obnoxious. While we’re at it, Haruhi falls into the “good” camp, although with reservations as the whole fractured chronology really felt like a way for them to fill out the season. While auteur theory is full of holes (like that it ignores the fact that film is an industrially produced commodity), nor is it particularly appropriate to use with television, which is centered more on writers and producers, it feels appropriate to classify KyoAni as meteurs en scenes, rather than auteurs; their job is to put things in place

Clannad is turning into a Gonzo-fest. It’s partially sloppy adaptation and partially the difficulty level of adapting such a non-linear game as Clannad. The game of Clannad first has you play through and get a Nagisa bad end, then play through once through each of the other character’s storylines, and then you can finally get the good Nagisa ending. The idea here is basically that your first attempt at having a family fails, so you go through other people’s experiences of family, after which you can finally have a happy family ending.

As I briefly alluded to in my Toei Kanon review, KyoAni sticks one story after another, which has the unfortunate side effect of marginalizing the fact that the story is really supposed to be about Tomoya and Nagisa being a family. The Gonzo-fication part arises from the fact that this adds little bits of cruft to the story that cause time bombs later on. KyoAni is basically left with two options: they can include Nagisa in all of the storylines with Tomoya’s harem (another unfortunate side effect, as the visual novel structure would allow you to interact with just one character at the expense of the others), or they can leave her out like they would in a visual novel path. They chose to include her.

This creates a pair of problems. The first is that Nagisa now has a big circle of friends. It’s hard to have the devastating scene where Nagisa fails to graduate, since the reason it is devastating is because the only person she interacted with at school was Tomoya, so now she’s all alone. The second problem is that either the effects of all of these new interactions need to either be ignored or incorporated into the story. The latter is really too much of a butterfly effect problem, so instead we have to deal with the former and its time bombs.

Finally, there’s the problem that the massive scope of Clannad really marginalizes Nagisa and by extension, her relationship with Tomoya. Why and how exactly are they going out when all we ever really seem to see is Tomoya’s interactions with everyone BUT her? And at the same time, it feels incredibly weird that the story needs to basically require Nagisa to overlook this fact or else we’re back at the butterfly effect issue.

Personally, I don’t really think that Clannad is really adaptable to the standard linear visual novel anime format. The Toei movie version understood this (and only had a small amount of runtime to work with anyway), and made sure to focus on the gist of the game. It’s less “faithful” in the sense that they had to cut out massive amounts of the game and ignore most of the characters, but this allows it to be “faithful” by actually capturing the spirit of the game.

Also, go away Fuuko and Kotomi.