Kanon is a reference to Pachelbel’s Canon in D, but there’s no reference to it at all in the VN. A canon is a piece that contains multiple instances of the same melody playing at different points. It could be taken to mean that time flows on and things change, while a lot of things remain the same as they were before. Yuuichi had noticed that a lot of things had both changed and stayed the same. The girls he knew seven years ago had grown up, but most of them had not changed personality-wise. Sayuri said it best in the anime: ‘[The song] repeats the same melody and crescendos gradually, peacefully, and beautifully. It would be nice if life changed like that: slowly, but surely, while being seemingly unchanged from day to day.’
[quote=“Pepe, post:1, topic:709”]
(This may be kind of obvious but I don’t want to jump to conclusions having not played the VN)
[/quote] Same here. This is why I am not going to discuss the meaning behind AIR until I have read through it.
Clannad is Gaelic for ‘family’, which is an underlying theme throughout the novel. The relationship between Tomoya and his father, Nagisa and her parents, Fuko and her older sister, Tomoyo and her brother, Kyou and her sister Ryou, Kotomi and her parents, and even Ushio and her parents were all important parts of each character. After Story really talks about the difficulties of keeping family together in the midst of hardship, and was told really effectively. (The Past Path also did that with Atsuko’s route, although it was not as well-executed as After Story.)
The meanings for a lot of visual novels’ titles are quite convoluted. It may seem like the developer just decided to pick a random English word that sounded cool and ran with it, but that’s not always the case.