Time 4 a little backstory
I first discovered Key (in a sense) when I first saw a YouTube review of the anime adaptation of Clannad. After some time had passed and (at the time) had watched Toradora, Anohana and other animes that had romance, slice of life and some drama in them, I figured I’d give Clannad a shot especially since there was so much praise for it. I soon begin to see what everyone else had seen in it. As the episodes passed by, I started seeing myself in some of the characters like Okazaki and through all the character arcs, I also started seeing some important morals in life that I had either forgotten or didn’t feel like I could apply them properly. Sometimes fiction can come off high-handedly when trying to convey those kind of morals and can seem like disingenuous platitudes.
Even before I finished it, I felt like Clannad did narrative morals better than most I have seen up until that point. I felt the themes organically became part of the narrative & characters. If this makes any sense whatsoever, I also felt while watching Clannad that, for the first time, someone wasn’t just making art to make people cry like they’d stepped on a spiked lego brick; it was as if Maeda and the writers were aware that there might be people watching with their own problems, so they used some portions of the narrative to pass down some wisdom and morals they were taught or learned. Either way, that plus the stellar emotional storytelling is what drew me further into Key’s works (I was only vaguely aware that they had existed at the time). After watching Clannad (and a lot of other stuff related to it I experienced that I’ll likely make a monolithic post about in another topic), it changed a lot of things for me, including to an extent how I view expressing emotions and the importance of family.
After many tears, I decided that I simply couldn’t have enough of an anime kicking me in the emotional balls repeatedly and watched Angel Beats, Little Busters, Kanon and Charlotte (briefly tried Air). Despite not ever loving them as much as I had Clannad, I still have a special place in my heart for each of them and had grown a love of Key’s works. It was once I had played the Visual Novels of Clannad and Planetarian that I realized the stories this company created had immense and profound impacts on me as a person, so I became the Key/Clannad fanboy I am now.
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