That’s an interesting angle I’d admittedly never considered. I agree with many others that Tomoya and Tomoyo have great chemistry. I like the back and forth banter they engage in. As far as personalities go, they are on similar wavelengths, so there’s plenty of witty snark and teasing to throw around there. On the same token, though, up until the student council comes into the picture, the ups and downs in their romance are related to workplace commitments that aren’t directly related to their connection as people. While Nagisa and Tomoya do have realistic moments where they disagree or think differently on issues, Tomoya and Tomoyo could be argued as being too in sync as far as their day-to-day conversations go, with not enough of their disagreements and slight emotional snarls that come with a day-to-day romance.
@Pepe and @DangoDaikazoku I do agree with both of you that their relationship might be a little too “easy” and romanticized. I don’t have a decent counterpoint to the easy critique (aside from maybe saying Tomoyo’s denseness is a crutch to stand on to the point where she either isn’t aware/doesn’t even consider or care enough to sweat the small stuff, which is admittedly kinda weak/too convenient), but I would say the romanticized part of it comes from their social statuses, which I think creates an “us vs them” sort of effect, which eventually fails.
As for the Tomoya x Nagisa part, again, I didn’t get far into the route because I was kind of trying to talk to and be friendly with everyone at the same time and just wanted to see the early interactions the first time I played before picking a specific route to start with. The problem I’m having with Nagisa is ironically exactly what someone in this thread had mentioned in this thread, which is that they felt the VN was pushing them to like Tomoyo, but I feel like its even worse in Nagisa’s case. Its practically immediately screaming at you for the first hour “Please help this poor girl with her dream because she’s frail and super unsure of herself!” While Tomoyo does air on the side of too easy, I get the vibe that Nagisa (so far) is a bit too sympathetic.
I do fully intend to see Nagisa’s route through, and would love to find out I’m wrong; I’m sure I’ll have plenty to say regardless. Overall, I think the diversity of characters is the primarily reason I’m loving Clannad so far, especially with the extra time and layers that come with reading a VN, as opposed to watching the anime.
This route is shit and so is Tomoyo
First of all this route handles it’s length poorly. it’s way too long and filled with filler most of the time.
Second the romance is not really my thing in this one, personal preferences i guess.
Okay so Tomoyo came to this school to save sakura tress and see them again with her brother.
She had been working hard till she met Tomoya and then she starts to ignore her responsibilities, i can tolerate how oblivious she was till she became student council president but after that…
using the announcement system for her own selfish reasons and keep abandoning her work to see Tomoya. Tell me Tomoyo you wanted to save those sakura tress didn’t you? Then why are you ignoring your duites!! those tress aren’t gonna be saved if you keep sitting idly, your brother almost lost his life for your family. Don’t you wanna work hard like you did at first to save those sakura tress.
She becomes literally selfish forgetting about her goal and not caring what could happen.
Also if my memory serves me right we get the whole flashback of how Takafumi got into an accident and her family was reformed but when it’s asked that why does she wants to save the sakura trees she gives one line “I Just want to see one more time together with my brother” .
Come on writers i get ‘less words carry better’ is a thing but this won’t work here, this isn’t an anime where i could see her face and how emotional she’s feeling. This is a visual novel where words are valued most. So because i couldn’t feel that this was important to her, this goal of saving the trees was important to her i couldn’t connect with it.
There are instances where it’s good though. the bad end especially where she just gives up everything and follows tomoya the only one she has left as she couldn’t possibly face her family now. The breakup is a strong one too but i think it wold have been better if tomoya had tried one last time and told her “Hey you can’t get your goal like this, get your head straight and start taking your responsibilities” before opting to break up. Tomoya didn’t do something bad but he didn’t do something worth parsing too.
I hope you enjoyed your stay at the Key Café. We’re not exactly talking about a medium that’s known for being concise here. Don’t agree with you about the filler part—all the time Tomoyo and Tomoya spent hanging out with Sunohara is possibly my favorite part of this route. The three make a great group and I enjoyed their time together just as much as they did. You can’t really expect the route to be jam-packed with feels from start to finish; the route is more than just the climax, but that seems to be the only part you care about.
Please forgive the high school girl for not being a strict workaholic 24/7. This is one of her major internal conflicts: she has something she needs to do but she’s distracted by her infatuation for Tomoya. That’s exactly why she breaks up with him, because she recognizes that their relationship is preventing her from saving the trees.
I mean, that’s exactly why she does it. Right after hearing about her brother, she shouldn’t even need to say explicitly why she’s saving the trees.
I used to be in a place where I hated happy endings too. That ending is so shallow I can’t agree that it’s better at all. There’s no growth on the part of anybody in that; Tomoyo utterly fails in all she holds dear and only serves as a tragic love interest.
Tomoyo is the one who grows the most in this route. That’s not to say Tomoya is only an observer here, but Tomoyo really does choose her own path.
Don’t forget that ultimately, Clannad is all about family. It’s right in the name. The game isn’t just a simple love story; there’s highs and lows, fun times and difficult times for each character. The characters grow even if things don’t always work out perfectly for them. If a regular love story or an overly melodramatic tragedy is what you’re searching for, you may be better served by a generic romance novel you may find at a department.
That’s objective for every person. We all have different type of fillers we like. i liked kappei’s route filler but didn’t like tomoyo. i can overlook filler as long as the feels(emotional part) are good And honestly every route in clannad suffers from this even after story at the starting 4-5 hours. But tomoyo is the worst it literally drags on forever, making us experience characters relationship is good but there’s a limit on how much bullshit you can add, it shouldn’t be 10 hour filler and 2 hour feels. The magical recipe is balancing the filler and feels proportion.
It’s because it’s shallow that it’s good writing. it’s supposed to make you feel shallow that’s what a bad ending is.And i don’t hate happy endings.
Sorry but after 60 minutes of Tomoyo cooking and tomoya having lewd fantasies. i couldn’t stand that they gave this important part only 15 minutes of screentime 
Tomoya is her boyfriend. The one who knows how important her goal is to her. So it’s his responsibility to at least try to support her, surely there was a better option than just breaking up.
She didn’t had to be a workaholic all the time but ignoring her duties when called is bad nonetheless.
She would have ignored those two girls who called her in school for work if tomoya didn’t told her to go and she also did that on founders festival. Who says council presidents don’t have free time, she should have some time to spend with him.
You see Tomoyo has to prove her worth to society if she wants it to help her in saving the tress. Her position of president is not something you can take half-assedly. Only if you do your duties and and remain a dignified stature is when people will follow you.
Remember Tomoyo chose it so she has to be prepared for the difficulties.
Only hard work bears fruit after all.
Ha ha ha ha…
This is exactly the irony of this route and I will repeat it again and again until everyone in the world realizes this.
You’re exactly right! Tomoyo does act like an idiot, and she does shirk her duties all because of her love for Tomoya. And the worst part? Absolutely nobody in the game blames her. The rest of the school blames Tomoya. Even Tomoya blames himself. Tomoyo absolutely fails to see the problem, as well. The even worse part is, surprise surprise, even when it comes to the readers, many fail to blame Tomoyo! This is, and the route points this out, because of how amazing she is, people fail to see her flaws. When a star shines brightly enough, you don’t see the craters and dark holes in it.
Now, years after, I think I’ve calmed down a bit, and I don’t think she is wholly to blame; I, too, blame Tomoya for not supporting her more (and just beating himself about it), and I blame the student council for not seeing Tomoyo’s flaws either. But, at the end of it, I am convinced that the writer intended it to be such. I think that Maeda intended her to be a flawed character, and intended literally every character in the story to be blind to her flaws, thus making the breakup even more soul-crushing but the reunion even more cathartic.
As they say in my industry “It’s not a bug, it’s a feature”
This is a funny sentence… Tomoyo became selfish by forgetting about her goal?
Tomoyo never became selfish; she always was selfish. Her goal of saving the Sakura trees is both an inconvenience for the development of Hikarizaka and a very selfish usage of her position’s apparent power.
It’s contextual. There’s an implication that, if her struggling family came together to see those trees once upon a time, and if Tomoyo is trying to keep those trees around, then her family is still very much fragile. Saying “I want to see them one more time” is the same as saying “I want my family to be together for one more day.”
The goal itself, of saving the trees, is some twisted contrivance Tomoyo has formed to keep her life and her emotions stable. Without it she’d just be a delinquent like Tomoya.
I wrote a giant blog post about exactly this topic—Maeda is a manipulator of filler. To quote myself:
He still follows the Tactics formula, but he includes a patterned comedy-drama-comedy-drama structure, with the initial drama being a warm-up of sorts, and latter drama being the big emotional one. Sometimes there will be a handful of smaller dramas before the big concluding one, and sometimes he’ll only include one. The frequency and amount of dramas dictates the atmosphere of the story, slow & chill or rocky & stressful being the two extremes. This style of short conflict allows Maeda to control the pacing of his story easily without having to alter other parts of the story to match.
It could be argued that the entire route is filler; even the drama is meaningless when zoomed in on. The notability of the route comes when you zoom out and look at the entire timeline. All those individual moments are but building blocks placed to manage the structure of the greater narrative.
It’s very much intended. This same idea of a flawed character is present in literally every story Maeda writes (though the degree to which he disguises it varies.) Every route he has lead, every track in Love Song, every episode of anime. It’s all about failure.
A big part of Tomoyo’s character is her search for an idealised version of herself. Her idealised self does everything for a greater good, or for a big emotional purpose, because she’s constantly afraid; she’s afraid of losing people and she’s afraid of looking imperfect…
Realistically however, Tomoyo gets led around by whatever emotion she is feeling at the time. She will do everything in her power to achieve a goal, but her goals change in a heartbeat. One second she’ll be doing everything to keep someone close to her, and the next she’ll be overcome by an “ideal” behaviour or circumstance. It makes sense that she’d be such an unstructured personality when you recognise her unstructured upbringing.
Surely, you’ve noticed that Tomoya is a depressed mess with no sense of self-worth. Of course he’d blame himself for being a bad influence for someone he believes to be an otherwise perfect person. He truly believes he’s the one at fault, just like the people who are pointing fingers at him.
I guess i worded that wrong. I saw Tomoyo’s effort to save the sakura trees as a sort of thanks to her her brother so i didn’t think that only Tomoyo benefited with it. Takafumi had memories of them too so it felt like she was doing it for him at some degree rather than only herself. So not focusing on it after she falls for tomoya feels weird (betraying i think).
I didn’t consider that. In my read of the route as i kept progressing i found Tomoyo more at fault rather than society or Tomoya, guess i was thinking tomoya thought like that too and saw that it wasn’t his fault. Dumb mind of mine.
But i still think the breakup is dumb. It doesn’t seem to me that both characters accomplished much, tomoya remained the same he was and tomoyo… she did save the trees but after all what happened before i only get the feeling “Yeah she did what she was supposed to do, nothing special”.
I think i’m one of those who fail to see any good character points in this.
Never change, takafumi 
hi everyone! i just wanted to ask what happend with nagisa in this ending or it was not shown? thank you all !
This is something I was just talking about with a friend earlier today. What happens to everyone else when you pick a particular route? Sometimes things will just fix themselves, like (LB!) Haruka and Kanata when you pick other routes. I try not to think about it too much, because the Nagisa story is the “canon” one, and that whole thing is kind of ignored by most of the other routes.
thanks!
One important thing about this route is about regrets. Tomoyo looses her time with Tomoya in order to save the sakura trees and it’s when they loose each other that they understand how powerful their love is. I think Maeda teaches us to do what’s important to us and cherish the person we love, and not to do what the society want us to do. And that’s why I loved this route so much even if I was kinda disappointed with Tomoya being a delinquent again and not trying to do his best like in the anime. Anyways Tomoyo is my favourite Clannad girl with Nagisa and she is another character that I can relate myself to.
So far we are 3 for 3 in routes I enjoy for this visual novel. This was a very nice route, but I had to take it at a leisurely pace (which, for me, meant not reading at the speed of light.) Tomoyo’s route is a slow burn route. It has a conflict, and you can feel it coming, it just takes a while to get there. But it is very rewarding once you arrive. Some people have said that the portrayal of the relationship, and Tomoyo herself in regards to the relationship, are inconsistent and unrealistic. I do not think that is true. As a girl who has been head over heels for boyfriends in high school, I have to say they did a pretty good job at capturing the mindset. I was always flip-flopping between looking out for myself and what I want, and doing everything in my little power to make him happy and make the relationship work, even if it directly went against that. Of course, real life high school relationships are often rooted in teenage hormones and bad, immature decision-making, so at the core of it my logic and goals were far more flawed than our anime girl’s much more perfect foundation. But it was still very easy to relate to and, I assure you, very realistic.
As for Tomoyo herself, I found her to be quite pleasant. I’ve always enjoyed the “unlikely” pairing, such as the delinquent with the model student, in this case. I believe her and Tomoya go well together, and I admire Tomoyo herself. The only critique I will give this route is it did not do enough for me. The conflict and resolution was pretty good, but the route did not keep me engaged all the way through. If I had read this route at my normal pace, I would have surely burned out on boredom.
