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YMMV / Kanon

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  • Adaptation Displacement: Chances are, if you know about Kanon, it's because its characters are in Eternal Fighter Zero.
  • Alternate Character Interpretation: In Wonder Three, Yūichi goes beyond Deadpan Snarker to all-out Byronic Hero, and then there's Nayuki.
  • Americans Hate Tingle: Nayuki isn't despised per se, but being Yūichi's cousin seems to have impaired her popularity as a romantic option outside of Japan itself, with some bloggers calling her "incest girl."
  • Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The sex scenes in the original game suffer from this. They happen and then they're never mentioned again (beyond the screen immediately afterwards), even if the follow-up scene would warrant a mention. Particularly glaring in Shiori's and Ayu's scenarios, where one of the characters reminisces about everything they've done together and mentions everything except the sex. Makes it kind of easy to make the clean version, huh?
  • Condemned by History: The 2002 anime by Toei Animation became this after the release of the 2006 anime by Kyoto Animation, due to lower production values and cutting out most of the plot.
  • Ensemble Dark Horse: Akiko Minase is quite popular with Western fans, to the point that some are surprised that she doesn't have her own route in the game.
    • Sayuri, too — she outperformed the entire cast by a wide margin during Saimoe.
  • Fan-Preferred Couple: Nayuki; nothing's wrong with the Official Couple, but going with Nayuki could have saved the poor boy a lot of grief. Or not.
    • Some people are surprised that there aren't more Yuuichi/Akiko shippers out there, possibly out of confusion over aunt/nephew ships being still treated as incest while cousin/cousin ships are just fine.note  In fact, they also found it surprising that Akiko doesn't have her own story path in the game. There's a lot of Akiko and Yuuichi/Akiko doujin out there (in fact, it probably makes up the majority of them).
    • Kaori also has a lot of fans who wish she'd had her own route. Key giving Kanata her own route in Little Busters! Ecstasy may be their form of apology.
    • Sayuri/Mai. Even Yūichi ships it at one point.
  • Fan Nickname:
  • Franchise Original Sin:
    • A lot of people who complain about the Reset Button Ending in the CLANNAD ~After Story~ anime seem unaware that it was in the original visual novel as well. Not to mention that Kanon, which originally came out in 1999, uses the same trope in both the visual novel and the anime.
    • The story mainly focuses on comedy at first, later throwing in a terrible event as a plot twist that is meant to make the story more serious, only to undo it with magic that takes away all the negative consequences. This became even worse in the later anime Charlotte, which the visual novel's main writer Jun Maeda was also involved with; the same formula not only happens three times in just 13 episodes, but too often and very close to each event, making it impossible for even fanboys of melodrama to overlook it.
  • Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While Kanon '06 is popular and even beloved in the West, in Japan it seems to be all but forgotten entirely, seeing how it always performs very poorly in popularity polls while its "siblings," Air and CLANNAD, do much better. Especially Clannad, which almost always wins "biggest Tear Jerker" and similar awards, something quite egregious considering how much it owes to Kanon in the first place, so you'd expect people who likes one to like the other and vice versa. Then again, it was the second TV anime for a (at the time) seven-year-old, repeatedly rereleased PC game; there may not have been much left in that well.
    • Also see their results on the original Saimoe: Air got one girl in the Top 8 and Clannad got 3 girls in the Top 8. As for Kanon? Sayuri managed to make the Top 16 (Round 4) but not one of the other girls even made it out of Round 2.
  • Harsher in Hindsight:
    • The first episode establishes Yūichi's gadfly/troll nature by pretending to have forgotten Nayuki's name and teasing her, in response to her question of whether he remembered it after seven years of separation. We also had Nayuki's "Liar..." played for domestic comedy later in the same episode. Then Episode 22 comes, and we find out Nayuki's side of the scene: she was truly afraid that Yūichi had forgotten her after seven years, and was dead serious when she asked him whether he remembered her name. In addition, her "Liar...", said in the midst of a Heroic BSoD, punches harder than before. Ouch.
    • On a smaller scale, there's Makoto's Verbal Tic, "auuu". It turns from cute to tragic once she loses her human intelligence and it becomes the only thing she can say.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Yui Horie voicing a character named Ayu.
  • Hollywood Homely: Mai.
  • I Am Not Shazam: Ayu's name is not Kanon. The main character of that other series called Kanon linked at the top of the main page is named Kanon, but Ayu is not.
  • Just Here for Godzilla: One of the only reasons to see this show or play this visual novel is because its characters are in Eternal Fighter Zero.
  • Les Yay: Mai and Sayuri. They are very, very close, to the point that even Yūichi briefly wonders in the VN about them. Probably reaches a high point when Sayuri remembers with great fondness how for her last birthday Mai bought her a ginormous bouquet of flowers. And then there's the Threesome Subtext...
  • Mainstream Obscurity: Quick, how many people can actually give detailed information about Kanon? The show is mentioned in internet memes like the infamously-Off-Model "am I kawaii uguu face" (which was actually the 2006 version edited to look like the lower-budget 2002 version), but barely anyone even knows that "uguu" is actually from something.
  • Memetic Mutation: From the 2002 anime: AM I KAWAII UGUU~?
  • Mis-blamed: Mai's aunt was the one who made her display her powers on the television show (and they wouldn't let her leave until they did), not her mother. Of course, that wasn't spelled out in the anime, so people who didn't play the VN sometimes see the mom as not deserving her revival.
  • Moe: The original visual novel came out in 1999 and is one of the earliest examples, putting a lot of focus on the cuteness of its female characters and giving them sad backstories that make the audience want to protect them.
  • Squick: It's bad enough that Yuichi has sex with Makoto after she begins losing her humanity (or even at all), but they also do it doggie-style.
  • Values Dissonance: Nayuki being Yuichi's first cousin and a potential love interest isn't seen as problematic in Japan, but does saddle her with the "Incest Girl" nickname in the west. Though an equal chunk of fandom from both sides of the pond has no objections to shipping Yuichi with Akiko, his aunt; that is treated as incest in Japan and so the people who would ship that anyway exist in equal vocal numbers no matter where you are.
  • The Woobie: Yūichi becomes this after regaining his memories.

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