CLANNAD - Tomoyo Sakagami Route & Character Discussion

Key Discussion
#1

Discussion of Tomoyo’s character and story arc in CLANNAD. If you want to talk about her character in Tomoyo After feel free to do so but not without adding [spoiler] tags. Also add a spoiler tag when discussing the other character routes in CLANNAD and when you’re discussing other Visual Novels for comparisons. Her birthday is the 14th of October.

This topic also hosted CLANNAD Bookclub discussion from this post onward, and was referenced in our Tomoyo Route Podcast.

What would you rate this route?

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0 voters

Tomoyo After: ～It's a Wonderful Life～ General Discussion
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#2

What an utterly terrible character.
Little miss god damn perfect, so annoying.

#3

She’s worst girl in the anime.

I liked her character, but they could’ve done so much better with her. Kyou was better and her route was one episode too. :confused:

#4

Contrary to @Kanon and @Purple, I think Tomoyo was the best girl in Clannad. I was already thinking that by the end of Season 1 of the anime, the OVA solidified her position, the visual novel even further, and Tomoyo After cemented it. I can’t really put my finger on why. I just really like her character.

Tomoya x Tomoyo also happens to be my favorite Key couple, so there’s that.

4 Likes
#5

Naturally, I’m going to disagree with Kanon and Purple, and remind everyone that Tomoyo is one of the 3 worthwhile heroines in Clannad (Tomoyo, Yukine, Misae) and is also the heroine of Key’s greatest VN.
I watched Clannad after reading the VN, but I had no problems with the anime’s adaption of early Tomoyo route, and the OVA was great. It was just a shorter version of the VN, but nothing too noticeable was removed.

I think the reason why I liked her route more than any other, is that Tomoya actually felt like a character to me. Maybe it was the time skip or something that did it, but in the other routes (ignoring Yukine’s and Sunohara’s) I just felt like Tomoya was nothing but narration with a personality. Tomoya and Tomoyo related to each other, so Tomoya naturally came into the spotlight a bit more.

Tomoyo After was a story about a small but close family… which is both an expansion on Clannad’s themes, and a fitting theme considering the background of the returning Clannad characters.
It was the most well written Key VN. There were no excess routes dragging the story down like in Clannad or Litbus. It was just a quick journey with likable characters and some good life lessons.

2 Likes
#6

Tomoyo is my favorite Clannad heroine. Strong, beautiful and with her eyes firmly fixed on a goal.
She’s very honest and dependable. Her interactions with Tomoya and Sunohara were interesting and funny. Unlike most girls in Clannad, Tomoyo did not depend on Tomoya’s help. She did not require to be ‘saved’. She was already done with her sad past, and was working on creating a wonderful future for herself.

I have mentioned before that Clannad was the second Key Anime I’ve watched, Angel Beats being the first. I’ve been looking for more Angel-Beats-level feels when I discovered Clannad. Unfortunately, while the first season of Clannad was entertaining, the amount of feels and drama couldn’t quite compare, so I was a bit disappointed. Tomoyo’s route OVA was the first part of Clannad to make me think “YES! That’s what I’ve been looking for!”. It was a beautiful and emotioinal story.

Tomoyo and Tomoya are very alike. You could say that Tomoyo is a ‘success’ version of Tomoya. An example of what Tomoya could be like if he managed to put his life in order.
Like Tomoya, she had become a delinquent due to family issues. She used violence as a means of dealing with her anger as her heart grew cold and indifferent. However, the same family that made her suffer was also what saved her.

To be fair, she got lucky. It was her courageous younger brother Takafumi who miraculously repaired her dysfunctional family.

Ironically, unlike with other girls, Tomoya was the one to cause new problems for Tomoyo instead of solving existing ones. While Tomoyo had already put her delinquent past behind her and became an ambitious honor student, Tomoya was still a delinquent with a bad reputation. He became a hindrance to her, endangering her precious dream. They became a “Beauty and the Beast” pair and their love was put on a harsh trial.
But in the end, it was Tomoyo who called the shots and decided how the two of them would face their problems.

I strongly believe that Tomoyo can understand Tomoya better than any other character in the series. Due to their similar pasts, she can become a guiding light and a symbol of hope for him.

7 Likes
#7

Yep, KyoAni made her like sub-character in TV anime. Much more better in her route OVA though. Far better than Kyou OVA. You should play both routes on origianl Clannad Galgame, they’re all supreme.

#8

To be fair, they covered about half of her route in the Anime during the common segments between Kotomi and Nagisa’s routes. The OVA covered the rest.

#9

I so adore Tomoyo. Nothing much to say that other members haven’t already said.

Between the cool personality, her strenght and her reliability, makes her a great choice for a favorite Clannad girl, besides Kotomi and Yukine (IMHO)

#10

im just going by my impression of her in the anime, ofc shed be better in the vn
im not gonna read it tho until they release a good tl

#11

Biz: “Waah muh site activity”

Tomoyo is a shameless god damn mary sue in every way and it’s fucking horrible.

[21:21:03] How do I henshin with this?: Yet to prove that she’s a Mary Sue?
[21:21:04] Nick: right now, your line can be substituted by just about anything
[21:21:20] Nick: like “Tomoyo is an alien from mars that plans to destroy the Earth”
[21:21:20] How do I henshin with this?: The character
[21:21:25] How do I henshin with this?: Who is good at everything
[21:21:31] How do I henshin with this?: And main conflict of the route is
[21:21:36] Nick: I’m not seeing it in your post
[21:21:39] How do I henshin with this?: ‘She’s too ‘perfect’ for a deliquent like him’
[21:21:42] How do I henshin with this?: Isn’t a Mary Sue
[21:21:53] How do I henshin with this?: Where the fuck is the Bait of Babylon
[21:21:58] How do I henshin with this?: Because you have several right now
[21:22:07] Bizkitdoh: I give up.
[21:22:15] Nick: yup, so do I
[21:22:46] How do I henshin with this?: They
[21:22:48] Nick: people gonna be hurt if I go on from here
[21:22:49] How do I henshin with this?: LITERALLY
[21:22:58] How do I henshin with this?: Use her ability to be good at anything
[21:23:05] How do I henshin with this?: To gain her popularity in the school
[21:23:11] How do I henshin with this?: Being good at anything
[21:23:17] How do I henshin with this?: Is the premier Mary Sue trait

#12

From what I read of her route I didn’t really get this vibe honestly. I think the relationship being chopped up in the anime really slayed her in it. I found myself far more interested and invested in an actual difficult and realistic situation in the route that I’d sympathized and related with quite well, despite some conversations being very poorly TLed. I’d not found it tropey really. The VN doesn’t feel that way at all as a whole, honestly… Where as the anime is like, really anime…? Just my jumbled thoughts.

#13

I never said the route itself was badly written. Just the character.

#14

Well I mean even her character presentation and the events that occur within the route… I just didn’t feel like it wasn’t natural. She feels like a very real character to me outside the sick combo skills. Tropes usually represent something bizarre… She felt genuine. I think that makes her a pretty good character that’s very fitting in a story like Clannad.

#15

“This girl who wins at everything she does sure felt real and geniune to me”
ok

#16

People don’t succeed in real life alongside troubles?
ok

#17

Now that you have provided an explanation to support your statement, we can finally get started.

I’m afraid I can’t agree with the “everything” part.
In japanese media, it is assumed that a person with “good reflexes” is automatically good at sports. Tomoyo happens to have exceptionally good reflexes, her forte being combat. Therefore, it is established that Tomoyo is good at sports. And that’s it. She’s not good at “everything”, just sports.

Her grades are a different matter. It’s something she’s been working hard for for years(?). She aims to be the student council president and in her understanding, the student council president must have good grades. She wasn’t born a genius like Kotomi. She really worked hard for her grades. Again, we’re talking about her goal here. Is it really that weird for her to reach it?

This conflict was never about ‘perfection’. Let’s remember the setting. Tomoyo and Tomoya are attending a prestigious school where kids are expected to get really good grades (or be good at a particular sports). Tomoyo meets those expectations by having good grades. Tomoya doesn’t.
Tomoya and Sunohara are pretty much the only delinquents in the school. Most teachers and students already consider them trash.

Many teachers and parents everywhere strongly believe that good kids will go bad if they hang out with bad kids. Tomoya is considered a bad influence for Tomoyo. The anime changed an important detail here: The main aggressor who kept preaching that Tomoya and Tomoyo should stay apart was not a jealous elitist student, but a teacher in the VN.

Also note that Tomoya and Tomoyo are in their final year of high school. After that, those kids will be entering society.
So Tomoyo is headed for a high-class society where she’s expected to get a good job and have a successfull career. Tomoya on the other hand has nothing to show for himself. He is expected to become a low-class individual due to his mediocre grades. He won’t get well-paid jobs.
So the issue of those two dating has become a clash of ‘classes’. People around them think it’s wrong for the same reason that a princess shouldn’t marry a peasant. It’s a problem caused by their expected positions in society, not the difference in skills. “Honor student dating delinquent.” That’s the conflict of Tomoyo’s route.

For these, and several other reasons, I do not believe Tomoyo to be a “Mary Sue” character.

1 Like
#18

It’s really hard to tell what the conversation is about due to the lack of context in that quotes Skype text, and I have no idea what a Mary Sue is (rush typing. Not enough time to google.) but if you are talking about what traits Tomoyo had, I think the main focus of it all was that she was essentially the same as Tomoya, but with more experience.
She had family issues that she struggled with immensely, and she ended up forced into a situation where she had to choose between the thing she is working hard to achieve, or the first person she’d met who understood her. Tomoyo was a delinquent who decided to work hard for her broken family after her little brother’s sacrifice. Tomoya was a delinquent who chose not to work because he’d given up on family and had no one to inspire him.
To the rest of society they were opposites, and to the two involved, society is what mattered at the time. This is what Tomoyo’s route tells of.

It’s not an original concept (not much is nowadays) but it’s fitting for Clannad as a whole.

You said Tomoyo is good at everything, but that’s wrong. She has to put all her time towards a single goal, and throw away her original identity, all in an attempt to repair the broken part of her life.

6 Likes
#19

I guess we should clarify the term “Mary Sue” which is the center of the current discussion.

According to Wikipedia,

Do we all agree on this definition?

#20

Given the explanations posted, I think Tomoyo is as much of a Mary Sue as Clannad is an VN that ended with a “Deus Ex Machina”

Somehow that commentary on the VN is somewhat uncomfortable :S