Clannad’s Ending, Explained

gamerant.com:

Clannad, and its second season, Clannad: After Story, is a rare gem among slice-of-life romance anime, in that it actually explores life post-high school. More than that, it's so emotionally satisfying, with romance, tragedy, and a second chance at a happy ending. A happy ending that may confuse some, but at it's core, it's based around the idea that orbs of light with the power to grant wishes amalgamate into a power to grant one person a truly wonderful miracle. But where do these orbs of light come from? At the outset, there's Tomoya Okazaki, who doesn't appear to care much about anything except getting through another day. And then he meets Nagisa Furukawa, and everything changes.

At the same time, there's this strange otherworld, completely empty save for a small girl, who builds herself a robot companion and brings it to life. The anime will occasionally cut back to this otherworld, following the girl and the robot trying to find an escape from it before it ends. This otherworld also just so happens to be the source of these orbs of light, and then they cross from this otherworld into the «real» or «normal» world Tomoya lives in. How? Good deeds and string theory. The first season concludes with Tomoya Okazaki confessing his love for Nagisa, after they've spent time together up to this point helping not only each other, but others in their growing orbit of friends. These other friends are the other girls with story routes from the original visual novel, and the anime takes the best parts from those routes and incorporates them into the main adaptation of Nagisa's route. Every time Tomoya helps one of them, an orb of light from the otherworld appears, though it doesn't appear that anyone can actually see them.

Sonny