[Akito Kinomoto]

Originally Posted by Kaioshin Sama

I actually made a .txt about this topic for just this sort of occassion, but then I forgot to carry it over to my new Windows install. It's okay cause it would probably just enrage people anyway.

Talk about dedication.

I'll just keep it brief since I've talked about this at length already.

Spoiler for Clannad spoilers:

Clannad After Story has an extremely strong narrative towards the end about accepting ones losses in life (in this case Tomoya's accepting Nagisa's loss and moving on to be a good father to Ushio) but then promptly skewers it by following up with a needlessly cynical episode about Ushio dying in the same manner that her mother did and then in turn following that up with a storyline about both Nagisa AND Ushio being ressurected through magical circumstances, hence turning the message from something like a sobering and mature, "You should accept that bad things happen in life and try to savour the good aspects", to something more like a fantastical and absurd, "It's okay if you're wife and daughter die, because if you just grieve long and hard enough they'll be returned to you via the power of magic".

I still to this day do not know why they did that. It's probably the actual greatest tragedy of that show

Well then,

Spoiler for Just in case:

I can certainly agree that it spit on the very message it was trying/was about to convey, but honestly I'd just call that bad writing from an attempt to force one more tearjerker instead of the actual point of the show. As in, nearly everything from the previous season up until episode 18 of After Story was subtly building the irony for the "previous" theme while Ushio's death and the "it was all a dream" card had all the subtlety of a rampaging elephant.

And nah, the biggest tragedy of the show was Sanae's bread. More seriously, what happened at the end is something that I'll never let this series live down no matter how much of a Clannad fanatic I am.