Well, due to lack of time and some other things, I’m joining a bit late, but I’m still happy to see that many people are commenting on this arc. Anyway, without further ado, here are my thoughts.
This arc stood out a lot compared to the two previous ones. There isn’t as much comedy, but rather a controlled drama and interesting character development from many characters. Also, the approach to this arc was a lot more ambitious than in Takafumi’s, where everything was handled following a more typical plot development.
The main thing I loved from this arc was Tomoyo’s piece of character development. The VN is called Tomoyo After, but up until now we hadn’t seen her as a truly important character. We are shown how even though we might have personal believes, we aren’t always correct and should accept others perspectives. This looks quite simple to many of us, but her reaction to Tomoya and pretty much everyone ignoring her opinion was very childish. This helped consolidating Tomoyo’s image of a very decent person with outstanding morals, but that still hasn’t finished growing up and has a long way to become an adult.
Another thing I saw discussed a lot in your posts is how Tomoya building a school and Kanako rallying the whole town in a matter of one or two days was unrealistic. Well, I’m of the opinion that it’s, indeed, not realistic, however, I’m glad that they did it this way because then there’s a message that can be extracted from this: We shouldn’t abandon ideas just because they seem difficult. We shouldn’t quit as soon as we find difficulties. We have to keep going to achieve our goals.
Now, I think Kanako’s part of this message could still have been conveyed if she had been let some more days for the transition of the villagers attitude to be more smooth, but Tomoya and the school is a different matter. What shocked me from this part is how at the moment they came up with the idea, I just thought “quit. It’s impossible, it’s not just builidng it, it’s finding a teacher, pass quality certifications…”. Nonetheless, when I finished the arc, I was left with a completely different impression: “it wasn’t about granting a future for Tomo. It was about telling the villagers that they can achieve almost everything they can. It was about giving them hope through a demonstration that stupid, difficult things can be done with everyone’s help.”
I’ll link this up to something I heard in a video this last week. It’s about Japanese mentality vs Western mentality. Japanese are taught to prevent problems. Everyone is an expert on not fucking up what they do, that’s why they are so efficient. However, in western countries, we are taught how to solve problems, so we may fuck up, but will end up solving the issues. This might look bad, but it allows for creativity, because if we want to face a project never done before, there’ll be things we won’t be able to prevent, but if we can solve them we’ll be able to be original while giving good results.
The reason I mentioned this is because Tomoya building a school is a clear example of a project never done before by the main characters or the villagers. Therefore, I think this arc had a much greater impact on Japanese readers just because of the way everyone has been raised and taught both at home and at school.
Now, back to some more plain stuff. Emotion wise, this arc delivered. The ending, the promise, the CGs and the music. Everything cranked up the emotions given by this arc. Looking back to Takafumi’s arc, the ending in this one felt vastly superior just because Kanako, who paid an imporant role in Takafumi’s arc ending, hadn’t been given enough development or lines and everything ended up feeling like an sea without a single river disemboguing: it was a good ending, but there was no lead up to it.
Instead, as a whole, this arc felt more compact, more properly knit. It was a story that begun in Tomoya’s house and ended in that village. Many things happened in both places, but nothing felt out of place. Even the transition from one place to the other was smooth.
A final remark I wanted to make is that you could have chosen to have sex with Tomoyo at a given time, but that would have led into a bad endng. I found this H-Scene placement (in the 18+ versions of course) perfect. It’s not plain fanservice. It’s more. It’s making you choose: do you want fanservice? Or are you a decent person that knows that sex at that specific point was a crazy idea, and is determined to solve the problem going on with Tomoyo oposing Tomoya’s idea of building a school?
And now that I mentioned the bad ending, I though I’d give it a paragraph. It was pretty nice to see how not all bad endings end with something explicitly bad. Everyone returns to their previous state, but Takafumi and Kanako are now together, Tomoya has partially developed a great power of will. It could have been more, but who cares about their development. There’s something more important. They are all happy, and that’s what everyone should care about. This is something I’d like to see in other “Bad Endings”. I’d like to see how they are not the main ending written for the VN, but rather an alternative happy ending.
Well, this is it for Tomo’s Arc. There are some things uppon I would have liked to expand, but it would have overlapped with things I have prepared for After Arc and I don’t wan’t to place spoiler tags here. I’ll wait one more week until the finale (unless we are doing a Dungeons and Takafumi’s week, which, by the way, I’d love).
