Things fall apart (Unless Sanae is gluing it together)! Kawaii Ushio! Clannad After Story 17!

Does this post have enough titles? WARNING: You are about to be overloaded with Ushio. Everything she does is cute. I don’t know if I’ll say anything interesting, I’m planning to, but this is a glorified post to put up lots of pictures of Ushio.

First of all All Hail Kyoto Animations! Without their unique story telling abilities I probably would have hopped off the Clannad train a long time ago, but their ability to portray characters through subtle distances and looks is fantastic. Even though this episode lacked a lot of dialogue I really felt like a lot was said. This episode alone has renewed my hope that the second season of Haruhi can be as brilliant as the first. Kyoto’s attention to detail gets mad props from me.

From the outset of the episode we get a look at a Tomoya who is broken, drinking, smoking, and working too hard. The unshaven beard is a throwback to his dad I think, however, there are some people helping Tomoya that I’m pretty sure his dad didn’t have.

The key player is Sanae who doesn’t let Tomoya close himself off from the rest of the world. I’m pretty sure no one would fall into any sort of depression if they had Sanae to keep them from doing it. Thus she gets us into the meat of the story.

Tomoya is a father who hasn’t been taking care of his kid. This kind of went without saying, I’m pretty sure we all kind of knew that he would be incapable of doing anything for awhile and Sanae is much more mature than either of the men in this series. We didn’t see Akio this episode and I’m pretty sure he’s still broken up about everything, he might even be mad at Tomoya, but I’m pretty sure his absence intentional. Ugh, enough words, Ushio pictures:

I’m having a hard time understanding how anyone could be depressed around Ushio (Alright I guess I can still understand it). I’m sorry but did this remind anyone else of the Nunally face plant. I have been forever ruined by the motivational poster of Nunally falling on the stairs.

Poor Nunally… I mean Ushio.

Still she seems to be a pretty normal kid despite losing her mother. This is pretty miraculous and for the short time Tomoya is with other people like Sanae and Ushio we can see his old helpful personality return. I’m really rather relieved that he hasn’t completely fallen apart and he isn’t taking things out on Ushio. He has the potential to be a good dad and even though Sanae kind of forced him into spending the weekend with his kid, he hasn’t majorly screwed up. More Ushio is Kuwaii pics:

You know, I really think things are going to be alright. Knowing Clannad there will be more drama ahead for the characters to deal with, but right now I’m riding the wave of hope this episode created for Tomoya. I’ll continue to hope he won’t completely self destruct and that Ushio can have a happy childhood despite Nagisa being gone. Sanae has already picked up a lot of the slack and was as mature as we all knew her capable, but for Ushio to really be ok she needs Tomoya, her father. So they’re going on a trip and you know what, despite their awkwardness, they’ll learn a lot from each other. The mistake Tomoya’s father made was bearing all of the burden himself, because both Tomoya and Ushio have lost something irreplaceable by Nagisa’s death, only together can they really work through it and move on.

I took way more pictures then this, but I resisted slightly.

I always thought that was Nagisa skipping, it is so much more cute now! Wait was it Nagisa…? Was Ushio skipping just a throwback to make us think of her even more? Geeze they didn’t have to their character designs look almost identical to me.