With the joyful background music paired with the scene of a baby's first cry, Haruka's nose felt sore.
This kind of perfectly normal scene becomes the most healing sight when you know how the baby's parents reached this moment.
At this point, Haruka didn't think there was any problem yet.
The weak Nagisa Furukawa on the bed, and Tomoya Okazaki shedding tears by her side.
Look, this is our child. Tomoya Okazaki said to his wife, looking at her with a mix of tears and smiles.
At first, Haruka thought his were smiles of joy and tears of being moved.
As she kept watching, she realized something was off.
An excellent animation key frame artist can convey different emotions through the subtlest differences in expression.
Haruka noticed that the male lead, Tomoya Okazaki, wasn't crying because of joy.
It was the expression of someone who couldn't suppress the sorrow in his heart but only wanted to show a smiling face to his wife.
I'll try calling her name.
Ushio. I'm Papa, and this is Mama, Ushio.
She's ignoring me.
Nagisa Furukawa just looked at her husband and daughter with a gentle but exhausted gaze.
Haruka felt something in her heart, and it kept sinking.
She'll grow up fast, for sure. When she enters elementary school, you and I will be there for her. Our whole family must go together.
Nagisa Furukawa smiled and closed her eyes, looking as if she had fallen asleep.
"No way? Shirogane, are you even human? Nagisa Furukawa, she's just asleep, right? It's because she's too tired."
Nagisa. Nagisa. Tomoya Okazaki gripped his wife's hand in grief.
Look, this is Ushio's face.
Haruka took a deep breath, feeling her hands tremble.
The happy background music of "Dango Daikazoku" was still playing, but Haruka felt a sense of distress that couldn't be contained spreading through her heart.
She had followed this anime for forty weeks, almost ten months.
Ten months.
Nagisa Furukawa's hand slipped from Tomoya Okazaki's grasp.
It wasn't a difficult birth. She had burned out.
Giving birth to Ushio was like exhausting Nagisa Furukawa's already weak, flickering candlelight-like life force.
The scene shifted back to the first episode of the first season.
That spring when Tomoya Okazaki and Nagisa Furukawa first met.
That moment when Tomoya Okazaki spoke to Nagisa Furukawa and they got to know each other.
Only this time.
As if he had seen how the future would unfold, Tomoya Okazaki let Nagisa Furukawa walk away from him this time without saying a word.
Haruka understood the metaphor in this scene at once.
Tomoya Okazaki regretted it.
He regretted ever meeting and marrying Nagisa Furukawa.
If it weren't for him, Nagisa Furukawa might still be frail and friendless, but she wouldn't have had the added burden of pregnancy, which consumed all her life force and led to her death.
If only we had never met.
Then this tragedy wouldn't have happened.
The ending theme began to play.
Ushio's birth, Nagisa's death.
What the sixteenth episode of Clannad's second season brought to millions of viewers in Japan tonight was.
An anger that couldn't be put into words.
"That old scoundrel Shirogane, come out and say something."
"Expressing yourself is one thing, but this is too much. What even is this?"
"The female lead just gave birth to a small baby, why did it have to end like this? Just because you're the screenwriter, you think you're so great? Just because you're the creator god of this story, you can hand out such a cruel fate to your characters? Have you considered the feelings of us fans?"
"Stupid screenwriter, I turned from a hater to a fan over these past few years. I'm speechless. I'm going back to my old ways. I wasn't wrong to hate Shirogane a few years ago. Are there any Shirogane defenders coming out to speak today?"
"I'm numb. This plot is too malicious. Killing the female lead in a romance anime?"
"It's not a romance anime. The second season is a family drama."
"Then is it acceptable for the wife to die in a family drama? What kind of logic is that? I can understand people dying in Demon Slayer as a sacrifice for a better future, but what's the point of this plot in Clannad? What was the point of Nagisa Furukawa's death? Isn't killing off an important character for no reason just being an idiot? Does Shirogane have any respect for the characters he creates?"
In his office at the company, Rei let out a soft sigh as he looked at the comments from netizens about this episode of Clannad.
Yes, killing off an important character for no reason is a sign of a creator's incompetence. It's a low-tier method of forcing twists into a flat plot when one can't think of an interesting continuation.
In his previous life, when he saw this part of the Clannad anime, he had cursed the screenwriters in his heart too.
This work is god-tier because it has a Happy Ending, yet the path to that Happy Ending is filled entirely with Bad Endings.
It's a plot pattern where joy is born from the depths of sorrow.
Right now, the Clannad fans were bashing him because of Nagisa Furukawa's death.
Within a month, Japan would explode into an even greater uproar over the death of Ushio Okazaki.
The phone rang.
Rei took a look, coughed, and didn't answer.
His wife, Miyu, liked all of his works, but her favorites were those with romantic elements like 5 Centimeters per Second, Tonight, and Clannad.
Miyu was among the most hardcore fans of Clannad, you could say.
Her feelings for the Clannad anime had nothing to do with her relationship with Rei. She loved the work, plain and simple. Tonight's plot in Clannad had a massive impact on her, and her anger toward Rei was not a bit less than those cursing him online.
"Her anger will probably have subsided by tomorrow. I'll hide for tonight first." Rei thought, coughing again.
As for the massive outcry regarding Clannad on the internet, Rei couldn't do much about it.
Anything he said now would be wrong. A month from now, when the final episode of Clannad aired, the public opinion would shift on its own.
Under the overbearing authority of his wife, Rei still sent her a message on a messaging app.
Don't panic, come and settle the score with me after you've finished the whole work in a month.
A statement of this level would let the smarter anime fans know that there would be a turn of events in the plot later on.
Miyu also had a look of doubt in her eyes after receiving Rei's reply.
"What can happen a month from now? It's not a fantasy battle anime. If the female lead dies in a romance anime, can there still be a turn of events?"
At that moment, a sudden flash of inspiration hit her.
She thought of the anime movie Your Name.
Her heart rate quickened a few beats, and her expression flickered. She sent a message to Rei.
I'll believe you and forgive you for now. Come back and rest tonight. Otherwise our daughter will keep crying for her Papa.
Over the next week, many fans of the Big Three were watching the spectacle of Clannad fans throwing tantrums and bashing Shirogane online.
Some die-hard fans originally wanted to speak up for Rei, but once they heard it was about the female lead dying in a romance anime, and for such a ridiculous reason as being too weak to survive childbirth.
Even Shirogane's most loyal anime fans fell silent.
This plot wasn't just stupid. It was feeding the audience shit, plain and simple.
The media was even more direct. Saying Shirogane's talent was exhausted was unrealistic. No one in the Japan animation industry doubted Rei's creative strength right now. Such comments might only find a market after Rei turned fifty.
Most media outlets bashed Rei for being arrogant and becoming pretentious after getting famous and wealthy.
The core idea was that Rei didn't lack the ability to portray the story well, but had fallen into his own artistry, oblivious to the world. This then led to a series of historical examples of famous people who had no good ending due to their arrogance.
Across this week, Rei watched these criticisms of himself online with a blank face.
He felt more and more calm in his heart.
Even so, no one was calling the Clannad anime trash.
The characterization in this anime was fine. The reason for the huge controversy now was that the arrangement of the characters' fates was bizarre.
Soon, it was Saturday again.
The seventeenth episode of Clannad's second season aired.
After Nagisa Furukawa left the stage, a new lead appeared.
The most adorable girl in this work, Nagisa Furukawa's daughter, Ushio Okazaki, who was still in kindergarten, made her debut.
Carrying a cute backpack, sensible, with large, curious eyes, she was afraid of strangers but yearned for Tomoya Okazaki's care.
With just one week of plot, she melted the hearts of a crowd of Clannad fans on the spot.
So after the seventeenth episode aired, the Clannad comment section became very distorted.
"I wanted to take one last look at this anime, but I was captivated by Ushio Okazaki in episode 17. What should I do?"
"That old scoundrel Shirogane, you really know how to portray characters. But don't think I've forgiven you because of this."
"I just feel bad for Ushio Okazaki who lost her mother and want to see her grow up. I'll keep following it for now."
"But Tomoya Okazaki is such a bastard, isn't he? How could he just dump Ushio Okazaki on her grandparents? He doesn't show her any concern at all."
"The blow from Nagisa Furukawa's death was too great, leading him to escape from his family. Seeing Ushio Okazaki makes him think of her mother and feel distressed, so he began to fear the family, numbing himself in work, and not even daring to care for his daughter."
"Sigh."
"He's really not a man. Too fragile."
"Give it a rest, keyboard warriors will say anything. Who knows how you'd be if it were really you? The male lead had no mother, his father is serving time in prison for a crime, and his only support, the female lead Nagisa Furukawa, died giving birth to their daughter. His entire belief in life has collapsed."
"When Nagisa Furukawa died, he was only about nineteen, a youth who started a family right after graduating high school. How strong of a psychological state can you expect him to have?"
After the seventeenth episode aired, the crowd of Clannad fans in Japan forgot last week's unpleasantness.
Bashing Shirogane wouldn't help. What attracted them most in the plot now had shifted from Nagisa Furukawa's death to seeing the father-daughter bond being established between the new lead Ushio Okazaki and her father.
Before Clannad reached its second season, the anime fans in Japan never thought they would one day be so obsessed and moved by such a plain parent-child relationship plot in an anime.
And then.
The most god-tier chapter of the Clannad anime began after the little angel Ushio Okazaki made her debut.
In the eighteenth episode, to let the male lead and his daughter establish a father-daughter emotional bond, Tomoya Okazaki's parents-in-law arranged for him to take care of his daughter while they went on a trip.
Under various arrangements, the male lead took his daughter on a train to the hometown where he had lived as a child.
There, he met his grandmother for the first time.
One of the truly god-tier aspects of the Clannad anime is that.
Many of the male lead's venting behaviors and thoughts in the early plot, which seemed normal to the audience, would come back like a boomerang.
From the first season, it was emphasized that the male lead's father was an alcoholic who treated his own son with the distant politeness of strangers.
What about after Nagisa Furukawa died?
What did Tomoya Okazaki do?
He sank into work all day. His daughter was already five years old, and he didn't care about anything. He just sent a fixed amount of money to his parents-in-law and then shirked all companionship and education.
Was Tomoya Okazaki so depressed because of Nagisa Furukawa's death?
Then what about his father? Wasn't he also just as depressed because of his mother's death?
Even so, he still worked hard to raise the male lead alone, only to receive in return a father-son relationship where the male lead treated his father like an enemy.
In the story told by Tomoya Okazaki's grandmother, his father was a youth with determined eyes back then, a man who took his son away from his hometown and made up his mind to raise him to adulthood.
Now, it was another cycle.
Tomoya Okazaki was standing on the same path his father once stood on.
If he chose to keep ignoring his relationship with his daughter, then the Okazaki father and daughter would just repeat the same mistakes.
After realizing this, in the plot of episode 18, Tomoya Okazaki communicated with his daughter in the flower fields of his rural hometown.
He helped his daughter look for her missing toy. After searching for a long time until after dark and not finding it, his daughter refused when he suggested buying her a new one.
Then, the first famous line of this work was born.
Why did the daughter insist on finding that toy instead of letting Tomoya Okazaki buy her a new one?
Because that was the first time Papa.
The rest of the words weren't finished, but every viewer in front of the TV knew why that lost toy was special and irreplaceable.
It's easy to buy another identical toy.
But it would not be the first gift a father gave to his daughter.
Many viewers were already teary-eyed at this point.
Later in the plot, the second famous line of this episode was born.
Since her debut, Ushio Okazaki had been quiet. Her biggest quirk was always wanting to go to the bathroom at key moments in the plot. Many fans had complained about this behavior from the little girl.
In this episode, when Tomoya Okazaki asked her if she was willing to live with him.
Ushio Okazaki said she was very happy.
Losing something important was also very distressing, and she asked if she could stop enduring it.
After realizing that her father had accepted her, this sensible little girl said this.
Can I stop holding it back now? Sanae said that the only places I can cry are in the bathroom, and in Papa's arms.
A simple plot.
Simple words.
In the previous plot, because Tomoya Okazaki hadn't accepted his daughter and was still in the grief of his wife's death, when his daughter was sad and distressed, she could only run to the bathroom alone.
That was the real reason why the daughter often ran to the bathroom.
After Tomoya Okazaki took the initiative to suggest that Ushio Okazaki live with him, knowing that her father was willing to accept her.
This five-year-old girl threw herself into her father's arms for the first time and cried her heart out over the lost first gift from her father.
That night, millions of anime fans in Japan finished watching this episode with red eyes.
Including Miyu, and Rei's three-year-old daughter.
Two weeks ago, all the Clannad fans in Japan were still bashing Shirogane for killing off the female lead Nagisa Furukawa.
Two weeks later, the entire internet was filled with praise for the Clannad anime.
Opening the forums of various major anime websites in Japan, they were uniform posts praising Clannad as a masterpiece.
Even in the comment sections for the Big Three, it was peaceful tonight as the fans of the Big Three collectively called a truce.
The fans hadn't forgiven Shirogane for killing off Nagisa Furukawa in their words, but in their hearts, they didn't want to keep dwelling on something that couldn't be changed.
Everyone had only one thought in their hearts.
Shirogane, you better let Tomoya Okazaki raise Ushio Okazaki well in the story. Whatever you do, don't freaking make it tragic again.