"I hate this town. It's full of memories I'd rather forget. I go to school every day and hang out with my friends. And then I go home. There's no place I'd rather not go ever again. I wonder if anything will ever change."

It’s a strange sensation when a fictional character voices your inner monologue better than you can. I never loved my hometown, and not because it was especially awful, just because it wasn’t particularly anything. I grew up in a city that always felt like it was trying to convince you it was better than it actually was. Impressive on paper, in photos, on glossy postcards and influencer reels, but hollow in a way that’s hard to explain unless you’ve lived there. A city of air-conditioned schools and artificially watered parks. A city where families lived in vertical stacks of apartment buildings, and where grass was plastic more often than not.
Growing up, my dream was to leave. Staying in my city after high school wasn’t even considered a valid option. It was assumed, almost culturally required, that if you wanted a future, you’d study abroad, start over, erase your accent if necessary. Unlike Canada, where most people I know stayed within arm’s reach of the lives they built as teens, my hometown felt like a launchpad you were never supposed to return to. The idea of staying was spoken of like a social failure, a lack of ambition. So I did what was expected. I left. I studied abroad. I didn’t look back, at least not consciously.

But romanticizing it in a way was always at the back of my mind, because of Clannad: After Story. And for the first time in years, I missed that soulless, decrepit city I grew up in. Clannad made me homesick for a place I never thought of as home. Not because it told me my hometown was secretly magical, but because it suggested something more powerful: even the most ordinary places become sacred when memory and emotion are etched into them. What makes Clannad, and specifically After Story, so striking is its philosophical undercurrent, which deeply believes in the idea that our surroundings shape who we are, and that discarding one's past, no matter how much it hurts, leaves one unmoored.
Almost every story teaches you something about its worldview. A character’s arc, a resolved conflict, an ending. But Clannad isn’t subtle about it. It practically begs you to reflect on your own life. It wants you to remember. I realized I had been treating my childhood like a bad dream I outgrew. But Clannad reminded me that even the most difficult beginnings deserve to be held, not erased.

The story follows Tomoya, a boy who begins the series completely detached from the world around him. His town is grey, oppressive, saturated with painful memories of his broken family. He doesn’t see value in his daily routine, his classmates, or the school that keeps dragging him along. His mother is dead, his father is emotionally absent and an alcoholic, and Tomoya has learned to live by not caring. The town becomes a symbol of everything he resents: stagnation, failure, emptiness.
This all starts to shift when he meets Nagisa, a shy and sickly girl repeating a school year due to chronic illness. Their first conversation happens at the foot of a hill, beneath a gentle sky, in the kind of scene that could only feel romantic in retrospect. At the time, it’s nothing special. Just two lonely people who happen to talk. But like most moments in life that end up mattering, it doesn’t seem important until it grows into something else. What changes isn’t the town, it’s how Tomoya sees it. Because of Nagisa, the world begins to soften. The places he once walked through numbly start to mean something. The theatre room at school. The bench where they sit together. The bakery her family runs. These aren’t new places, but they become newly alive through emotion and shared experience.

What After Story does next is rare in any coming-of-age narrative. It refuses to end at high school graduation. Instead, it pushes forward into uncharted territory, early adulthood. The transition from youth to adulthood is rarely graceful, and in After Story, it’s downright painful. Tomoya and Nagisa fall in love, get married, and prepare for the birth of their child. These events are joyful, but they don’t come without cost. Nagisa’s illness returns, and each winter becomes more threatening than the last. Every season change brings anxiety instead of relief. What’s supposed to be a beautiful stage of life is constantly shadowed by the possibility of loss.


As the town undergoes actual, physical change, with new buildings going up and childhood places being replaced with construction sites, Tomoya becomes increasingly unstable. His relationship with change becomes complicated. He once longed for it, hoping it would lift him out of his painful past. But now that he’s happy, change feels threatening. When things were bad, change was hope. But when things are good, change is a thief.
Eventually, that change becomes devastating. Nagisa dies shortly after giving birth to their daughter Ushio, and Tomoya unravels. He disconnects again, not just from the town, but from his daughter. He retreats from life, working a meaningless job and refusing to feel anything. His hatred for the town returns, not because it’s changed too much, but because it reminds him that nothing stays. He begins to see the town as a cruel witness to his grief. Every street is a ghost. Every familiar corner taunts him with what he’s lost.
“I don't mind leaving this town if you're with me, but when we do leave, it should be with positive feelings. If we leave with regret, we won't be able to come back."

This phase of the story forced me to think about the ways we reject the places tied to our worst memories. It’s a very human thing to do, to blame the physical world for our emotional pain. I’ve done it. When I left my hometown, I convinced myself that the city itself was part of what made me feel invisible, exhausted, and inadequate. But when I went back years later as an adult, something strange happened. The same streets that once felt suffocating now made me feel tender.
The place hadn’t changed. But I had. Walking past the park I used to sit in after school, I could almost see myself there. That version of me, eating chips from a plastic bag, texting friends I no longer speak to. It wasn’t impressive. It wasn’t even particularly beautiful. But I remember it constantly.
Eventually, Tomoya begins to reconnect with his daughter. He takes her on a trip to places that mattered to him and Nagisa. In doing so, he begins to grieve not just her loss, but also the lost time—the years he spent avoiding his own life. The town once again transforms, not physically, but emotionally. It becomes a place of healing, of memory, of continuation. Not everything can be fixed. Not every wound closes. But the town becomes livable again, not because it’s better, but because Tomoya is willing to see it as something more than a graveyard of memories.

There’s a barren area near my old house where a dried-up reservoir sits. A few trees surround it, but the reservoir itself was never filled, probably an abandoned plan from the housing development. I used to walk there during my teenage years for no real reason. I’d sit on the bench and listen to the crows, which were the only natural birds in the city. It wasn’t peaceful or pretty, but it became a place I returned to without knowing why. Even now, as an adult, I go back sometimes. It’s still just as plain, just as overlooked, but it feels different now, familiar in a way I didn’t expect.
It reminds me of a scene in Clannad: After Story where Tomoya’s daughter, Ushio, visits a park near a hospital. The area used to be a forest but was cleared to make space for the building. It’s not beautiful anymore, and Ushio doesn’t know the history, how her mother, Nagisa, was once saved there as a child. Still, she’s drawn to it. When her friend asks why she keeps visiting, she simply says, “I don’t know, I just do.”

Some places are like that. There’s no singular memory that defines them, no significant event that took place. They just exist, and for whatever reason, they stick. Maybe for Ushio, it was something subconscious, tied to her mother and the echoes of a past she never fully knew. I don’t know what that reservoir meant to me. But if someday, my future children feel drawn to that same spot without knowing why, maybe I’ll finally understand. In the quiet revelation of Clannad: After Story, when Tomoya says he doesn’t hate the town anymore, it’s not some grand declaration of healing. He’s not romanticizing the place. He’s simply letting go. Of the guilt, of the pain, of the version of himself that kept reliving the same loss over and over. He doesn’t fall back in love with the town. He forgives it and himself in return.

I’ve rewatched After Story at every phase of my life, and it’s remained resonant throughout every phase of my life. As dramatic as it sounds, I think this show physically changed the way I see memories and handle change. I think it’s a gift everyone should be able to experience as they grow up, so I urge people to watch this show constantly. I didnt just grow up with Clannad after story, I grew up because of it.

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