Youhei Sunohara Quotes

Sunohara is talking about basketball. Nagisa, primed by Tomoya, thinks he is confessing his love, and the scene runs on the gap, with Sunohara getting more sincere and Nagisa getting more sympathetic until she announces that Tomoya is her boyfriend. As comedy it is the show's best sustained bit. It is also, and this is the part a listicle misses, the first time Nagisa says out loud that she and Tomoya are together, seven episodes before the actual confession, and she says it to protect a boy from heartbreak he is not suffering. Sunohara is the friend Clannad refuses to take seriously and then, in After Story, gives one of its hardest scenes, when he is the only person who will hit Tomoya for what he has become. The pathetic need in this line is a joke that the second season declines to keep as one.

The rugby club beat Sunohara up in his first year and got him thrown off the soccer team, and this is his standing vow, made in the dormitory as the rugby players stroll past, and answered by Tomoya promising to stab him well. The joke is that Sunohara will never do it and everybody knows it, including him. What the line establishes is the pair's whole dynamic: one delinquent who talks and one who does not, both of them in school every day without being in it. The reason to keep the vow in mind is After Story, where Tomoya's own graduation passes with nothing paid back and nothing resolved, and Sunohara's empty threat turns out to have been the more honest account of what leaving school is like. Nobody in Clannad settles a score. They just stop being there.