Tomoya Okazaki Quotes

Everything in Clannad starts here, at the bottom of the hill, and it is worth being exact about what Tomoya offers Nagisa, because it is not much. She has asked whether a person can still love a place once everything in it changes. He does not answer the question. He tells her to go and find new things, which is the advice of a boy who has given up on his own life and can only recommend distraction. That the show frames it as the first step of a long climb is the writers agreeing with him more than he agrees with himself. After Story will return to the same hill and the same question, with the town itself changing and Tomoya learning what Nagisa meant, and the callback lands because this first answer was so thin. A better line here would have made the ending redundant.

Sanae has just served him a rice cracker bread, apologized for it being a failure, and fled in tears, and the hope Tomoya expresses is about to be answered by Akio proposing he rename himself Galactic Okazaki. As a joke it is the show introducing the Furukawas as the comedy family. As a line from this character it is heavier. Tomoya's own father drinks, and the two of them have not had a conversation in years, so the hope for a normal father is the wish of a boy whose home has none, and the Furukawa bakery becomes the place he spends most of the series precisely because nobody in it is normal. Clannad's method is to smuggle its subject in under a gag, and this is the first instance. He is not hoping for normal. He is hoping for a father at all.

Nagisa's play has just been performed, and the two of them are back in the empty school at night, where Tomoya finds the class-monitor sign he put up months earlier as a joke. The line is small on purpose. Twenty-one episodes earlier he was a delinquent who arrived late by design and told a girl he had never met to go and find fun things elsewhere; this is the full extent of what has changed in him, and the show is right not to inflate it. What it sets up is the confession a minute later, which is one of the few love declarations in anime that arrives after the character has already changed rather than as the thing that changes him. The order matters. Clannad is a story about the slow accumulation of small ties, and this sentence is the ledger being read aloud before the balance is spent.

The confession is the end of the first season, and it is worth saying plainly that it is the least interesting scene in a series whose real story has not started yet. The visual novel it adapts had multiple heroines, and the anime spent its middle third giving Fuko, Kotomi and Tomoyo their routes in miniature before settling on Nagisa; the effect is that the declaration feels less like a choice than a schedule. What earns it is After Story, which takes the promise of every day and makes it literal, through a wedding, a job, a birth and a death. Read on its own the line is any anime confession. Read with the second season in view, the phrase every day of my life is the plainest statement of what the show is about, which is that a life is made of ordinary days and a person can lose them.

Nagisa has just closed her play about the girl and the robot in the empty world by singing the Big Dango Family song, and Tomoya's review is the honest one. The play she performed is the Illusionary World story, the same one the series has been cutting away to since episode one, and the anime is quietly telling the audience that its own frame narrative has been a school play all along. What makes the line work is that he is right and it does not matter. She wanted to sing it. In After Story the same song will be the lullaby of the household, and the show's final theme, so his critique of the ending is filed here as the first thing the series proves him wrong about. It also fixes what the two of them are: he tells her the truth, she does what she wanted anyway, and both of them count that as affection.