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I complained earlier that I found KANON repetitive and sexist and creepy. A couple days ago, a friend told me about playing the visual novel, and that's when I realized where my problems with the series came from. In the game, all the girls' arcs are *separate*. Yuichi only experiences *one* of the storylines in the game, and which one is up to the player. In the anime, Yuichi experiences four of the arcs and bits and pieces of Nayuki's, and that's why the story seems so repetitive in hitting the same beats (troubled girl longs for Yuichi, then vanishes from the series once her arc is over). It isn't sexist to do it once, but doing it four times in a row gives that impression. Also, the game's arcs are meant to be separate as opposed to sequential. Mai, Amano, Shiori and others vanish once the visual novel's plot for them is used up, except the game gets to end there while the anime has to go on without them.
This probably shows how KANON was meant as a game with five separate routes, not an anime with five overlapping plots. That's why the show is so fragmented, why its characters fade in and out, why the emotional beats are repetitive and why the ending is arbitrary and confusing.
Also, I think when they cast a popular actor as Yuichi, they had to design the character to fit the voice. But that meant Yuichi looks too old for the childlike girls in this series. Probably not intentional, but still rather creepy. I thought KANON was a clumsy piece of work, but I guess part of it is that it was never meant to work as an anime series. It was a game and the material didn't always benefit from the adaptation.
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