Clannad After Story 17 (or How To Be a Worthless Scumbag)
クラナド アフターストーリー Episode 17

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

In the Illusion World, Garbage Bot is not making any progress with the flying machine and Mystery Girl knows he’ll be lonely without her.

In the real world, it has been five years since Ushio’s birth and Nagisa’s death. During that time, Tomoya dumped his daughter on Sanae-san and Akio-san and only sees her if they bring her over, and then he won’t really look at her. Tomoya wallows in self-pity, focusing only on working, eating, sleeping and other activities to try to forget he even knew someone named Nagisa much less had a child with her.

One day, Sanae-san comes by wanting Tomoya to take her on a date. The head to the family restaurant where Sanae-san proposes a group outing to take a trip when Tomoya has vacation. He says he’ll consider it since his boss is pressuring him to take a vacation. Sanae-san calls Tomoya as soon as he gets home to ask if he’s agreed. He hasn’t yet but when she calls again, it is clear that she won’t take no for an answer. So he agrees.

The day for his vacation starts and he comes by the bakery-residence of his in-laws, but discovers they aren’t there as they had to leave for unspecified reasons. Tomoya hears steps and sees a small child running to avoid him. It is his 5-year old daughter Ushio, and she’s very cute but also shy. She has her backpack on ready to go on the promised trip, but since Sanae-san and Akio-san aren’t there, Tomoya isn’t taking her by himself.

There’s some awkwardness in the air as Tomoya doesn’t know how to deal with Ushio, but when she trips and breaks her turtle toy, Tomoya does repair it with super glue. Ushio didn’t wait for the glue to dry so the wheels get stuck. When Tomoya suggests throwing it out, Ushio will not hear of it.

Since Sanae-san and Akio-san aren’t back, Tomoya decides to go get some food. He doesn’t even notice that Ushio has followed him until a neighbor lady talks to him, then to Ushio. Tomoya buys ingredients to make fried rice, but Ushio doesn’t like the taste much, preferring Sanae-san’s cooking. She will eat plain rice and even seasons it with special rice seasoning. That night, Tomoya stays over since his in-laws never returned and the following morning after observing a father taking his two kids somewhere, Tomoya decides to take his daughter on a trip, if she still wants to go. She does. As they walk to the station, she begins skipping.

Thoughts/Review:

Oh heck no. I cannot begin to describe the anger inside of me as I watched this episode. Yeah, it is a work of fiction, and yet I know that there are loser scum like Tomoya out there in this world who have no problems fathering a child from the sex aspect but when it comes time to actually being a father, they are no where to be found (or as in Tomoya’s case, there as little as possible and then only when the child’s grandparents bring Ushio over). What a *@&^$ scumbag. What a self-absorbed piece of crap (and that’s an insult to the self-absorbed piece of crap community).

“Whaaah! My wife died. Whaaah! I have a kid. Whaaah! I can’t raise it. Whaaah! I’ll dump ‘it’ ’cause I wish ‘it’ had never been born. Whaaah! I was mistreated as a child so I’m going to follow my father’s footsteps like the tail-hole I am. Whaaah! All I have is my work. Whaaah! I hate this city. Whaaah! Poor me. Whaaah! I wish I’d never met Nagisa. Whaaah! My life is so hard. Whaaah! I can’t be a father to my child. Whaaah! I don’t want to look at what I’ve spawned. Whaaah! Whaaah! Whaaah!”

Ugh.

Seriously, this kind of thing just angers me to no end. I recently read a horrific story of a woman who put her daughter into an oven and burned the little girl. Child abuse is something I cannot stand and cannot abide. OK, Tomoya didn’t do something so horrific, but abandoning your child and ignoring your child for no good reason is inexcusable to me and as such angers me almost as much as the trash of a mother that put her daughter in the oven. Now, had Tomoya simply used his in-laws to help take care of Ushio for a short time after Nagisa’s death as well as used them for free babysitter services while he’s at work, well that is something I can understand and accept. Beyond that is inexcusable and Tomoya needs to be beaten with baseball bats.

Ugh.

Clearly, Sanae-san and Akio-san realize that Tomoya needs to be involved in his daughter’s life. While they’ve obviously had no problems raising her for the last five years, they’ve decided to not follow ANB’s suggestion (wherein Akio-san takes his bat and clubs his son-in-law until he knocks some sense into Tomoya to take care of his precious daughter) and instead they staged this whole trip thing so that Tomoya would be forced to spend some days with his daughter. His daughter needs him. Ushio clearly is interested in her father and clearly loves him in some level and clearly misses her father, even if she’s not known him very much.

Poor Ushio. Gah. From the moment she appears, one can’t help but feel for her. She’s drawn very cutely, so much so that it just makes ones heart melt. That’s good because it makes the whole idea of Tomoya’s abandoning such a precious child even harder to accept. I hope that somehow Tomoya wakes up after this trip and takes care of his daughter, but he’s such a loser that I don’t see this happening, at least not realistically. I’ve no idea what the visual novel did with the story but whatever it is, I’m guessing that if Tomoya decides to be a man and love his daughter fully, it will be done in a way that maybe even I can accept it.

One side note — when Ushio refers to Akio-san as “Akki,” I couldn’t help but smile. After all, when Nagisa was pregnant, Akio-san said he wanted his grandchild to call him “Akii” and he got that wish. I am a bit surprised that Ushio doesn’t address Sanae-san with one of the Japanese titles for “Grandma” but as “Sanae-san.” However, for whatever reason, Sanae-san and Akio-san decided not to go this route.

Finally, there’s the Illusion World. It has to be tied to the Nagisa-Tomoya story somehow but still, there’s no clue as to the how.

sigh On to the next episode. Thankfully, I think there’s a comedy I can watch to distract my mind.