I was shuffling some old notes today. As you may notice from pad-anime.txt.diff, large chunks of notes periodically disappear (they are marked with "-" and colored brown). That means they go to an private archive. So, today, I moved a couple of links to make the pad more readable, including one to Lawson, who was gone for years now. Curiously enough, Wayback Machine captured it.

I’m surprised with how utterly normal the heroines are. They have their personality quirks, of course, but I don’t get the feeling any of them are walking around with the weight of the world on their shoulders. In particular, Nagisa has turned out to be a sensible character. She’s shy, but not pathologically so. And, as far as Key characters go, she’s pretty transparent. What you see is what you get. Of course, I fully expect this to change.

I’m also surprised with how utterly pointless the show is. And I don’t mean that in a negative sense; I actually find it fairly engaging. However, I’ve yet to get a handle on what sort of story the show is trying to tell. A number of plot threads have been introduced and touched on thus far, but the only one that’s gotten much attention has been Nagisa’s continuing efforts to establish a theater club. And I can’t quite decide yet if that’s an ancillary plot thread or a central element of her scenario. I suppose it provides an avenue for which Nagisa and Tomoya can get to know each other better, at least.

Of course, the Kanon remake probably got off to a similar start. It’s just that, in that particular case, I already knew where all the individual storylines were going, so I understood how all the bits and pieces introduced early on contributed to the big picture. With Clannad, however, I’m completely clueless. I’m playing connect the dots.

Which is probably why I find the show engaging. I’m anxious to see what becomes of the story as all those bits and pieces continue piling up.

What a style. The artile is titled "First Kiss", I wonder why. The archive also caught WAH's comment:

I’m thinking in Clannad it’s a case of the main guy being more fucked up than any of the girls.

My pad had the link tagged with ``Girls are "normal"'', so clearly we read the same thing, but you can see why WAH was called "the roiling cauldron of hate".

By the way, the same section had links to Concrete Badger with a tag "fluff, sounds good", and Epic Win. The days when I stil read Martin and when Orion still posted. It was whole five years ago now.

P.S. I only lasted one episode before a suspension and a quiet cancellation.