I’ve thought for a while about “What does AIR mean to me” and I guess, more than anything, it means chasing your own happiness.
Many people think that the theme of AIR is all about mothers and our relationship with them. On the outset, yes, that is the case, but I feel the more concrete theme of AIR is happiness, and how we should find our own happiness, and not let our own insecurities or fears hamper our own goal of happiness. It was made pretty glaringly obvious in the last few words of the VN, but I tried thinking about how it applies to every route.
With Minagi it was how her fear of harming her own mother got in the way of her own happiness to be accepted. With Kano, it was how her former guilt for having Hijiri take care of her prevented her from seeking her own happiness. For Misuzu’s route it was actually Yukito realizing how he has forgot his own goal and what truly made him happy, and how he was too afraid of the curse to push through with it. For Summer route, we were shown how Kanna was prevented from obtaining her own happiness due to her being persecuted, which is seen as nothing but ill fate. In AIR, we see Misuzu in the same situation as Kanna, where she could not obtain her own happiness due to the curse, until it was achieved by Haruko, with the help of Sora. And how Haruko had always simply been too afraid to chase her happiness of being with Misuzu in fear of eventually losing her.
To cut it short, what AIR has taught me that I shouldn’t fear the consequences of something that will bring about my own happiness. We worry about too many things in this world, like how things might affect our career, or how our choices may be seen by society, thus preventing us from reaching our own happiness sometimes. We become blinded to what truly makes us happy, and we need to still keep that awareness, no matter the consequences. This being something I learned from AIR, I genuinely hope that I can apply it to my real life.