Riddle Me This, KyoAni

No, really.

By the way, guess who’s operating on a seriously slow connection she’s stealing from the Motel 6 across the street?

Anyway, I have to say that some aspects of Clannad~After Story~ disappointed me. This is kind of weird to say, since I actually haven’t been keeping up with it since episode nine or so, since I knew it was going to rip my heart out and merrily stomp on it. Then light it on fire. And then throw the ashes into a garbage compacter. And then toss some C4 on that shit and blow it sky high. Err, as I was saying…

No, I haven’t been actually watching it, because I’m not sure my emotional well-being could withstand it, and, frankly, while I meant to catch up with it during my break, I didn’t want to try to explain to my friends why I was sobbing madly into my keyboard. Because if I said it was because of anime, they might call a shrink or my mom or something. But I have been following it via other people’s blogs, so I know I can be a pain in the ass about this.

One of the things I really like to see in anime is epilogues which show us the characters a few years removed, and, therefore, a few years older. I really enjoy seeing how the characters look after aging a bit – its interesting to see how different they look; honestly, this is something I like doing in real life, too, looking at my friends pictures from when they were younger and seeing how they’ve changed. So one of the things that had me excited about the After Story was seeing everyone looking older.

But KyoAni totally screwed it up! No one looked older! Nagisa didn’t look any older until after she was dead and we saw the photo of her on the table! What the hell is up with that shit?!

Ok, look, I’m willing to accept Fuuko not looking much older – she was in a coma for a while, after all, and that will stunt your growth (although I would’ve liked to see her looking older). Her behavior still being fairly young jives with this, since she was conked out and missed actually mentally and emotionally going through the last parts of puberty. But Tomoya? Really? You went through losing your wife, and you don’t look at all aged? Fat chance. Same goes for Nagisa’s parents; yeah, they were already adults, but adults don’t suddenly stop aging.

As for other characters, Kyou did look older after her initial appearances. And Misae definitely aged from her flashbacks. And Mei looks a lot older in her final appearance! I was pretty impressed with that. All of which proves KyoAni was just being a lazy bum with everyone else.

I’m just being cranky and nitpicky, honestly. I was just really looking forward to seeing everyone as an adult – its really fun. One of the things I loved about Simoun was how they showed everyone as an adult and in their lives as adults. And while Digimon 02’s epilogue was so many flavors of stupid, it was still cool to see the kids all grown up.

To deviate slightly, I suspect some of my feelings about this has to do with the fact that you can’t stay forever young, and that, ultimately, there’s something tragic to remain as such. The only way to stay young forever is to die young – you will never age, you can never change, you will always be remembered as you were when you were twenty or fifteen or however young you were. And its sad, because you don’t get the opportunity to bloom into an adult. I feel bizarrely strongly about this, so it might be bleeding over into my feelings regarding shows which fail to let their characters age naturally.

Anyway, I’m done with my demented rambling. At least Nagisa looked older when they resurrected her.

Now I have to go brave the living room, where my deranged friends are all screaming incessantly at the television because of some college basketball game. Please rescue me from these psychos.

EDIT: Oh my hell, the basketball game just went into a sixth overtime. I might have to go toss myself in the drink.