spoilers: CLANNAD (major), Muv Luv (extremely minor [just the below image])

Why does everything need romance? “Well,” you may begin to say, “you actually don’t need romance and media that is absent it is actually better,” to which I’d say you are the king of fools and I will momentarily be drawing, quartering, and dragging your innards through the streets behind my car. Things aren’t made worse by romance, but a bad romantic plot can ruin a piece.

This actually testifies to the pivotal nature of romance to almost every genre of media. Romance adds a special flavor of drama that is felt in the very core of our being. It taps into something uniquely human, in that we do not merely mate, or even merely mate-bond like some other monogamous species of animals (though we know from psychology that we certainly do do this as well), but we weave this drama around not only the act of romance: marrying, intimacy, and children stuff; but we have constructed an entire complex around even teasing romance. This is to say we are drawn to even stories about the feeling of being in love. Observe any story that is labeled a romance, particularly successful ones, that run for significant lengths of time: so live TV shows, anime, manga, long novels, ect. How much time of these pieces of media do the characters spend together, as a couple? The answer is almost none of it. Because the point is not necessarily to display the day to day realities of human intimacy, and works that attempt this have to be extraordinarily well-crafted to keep its spark without being so saccharine-sweet it breaks our suspension of disbelief. The real point is that romance is something baked into our DNA to be invested in the results of, and such it isn’t a source of drama that has to justify itself like others. We may have to be convinced that any other goal of a character is actually worth the effort put forth, but something like romance needs no justification beyond “wow that girl is really cute of course he’d want a relationship with her” and thus we immediately understand how happenings in the story relating to this goal would play on character motivation. Its one of the view kinds of drama that can insist upon itself.

I talked in a previous article about how reading Kubo-san makes me want to kill myself but how I couldn’t stop reading, and it’s precisely for this reason. A finished romance has no drama, unless its dysfunctional, which the audience doesn’t want for characters they’ve come to love. So, the goal of the author of a romance story is to know when to bring down the hammer and functionally end the story by bringing about the happy ever after, and it’s in their interests from a business perspective to drag this out as long as is plausible in-story.

One exception is if post-getting together there is some aspect of the relationship that causes further drama to be farmed for reader tears/laughs. CLANNAD is one such story where there is a build-up to and point where Nagisa and Tomoya get together and begin their relationship, and the story does not end with that, rather continuing on into the early years of their marriage after the end of school. This is because the writers of CLANNAD are talented enough to not have to rely on this intrinsic self-insistent drama that comes with romance, and have other plots that intersect with the main romance plot and keep the reader interested. Primarily, the question of parenthood is central post-getting together, as not only does Nagisa become pregnant, but Tomoya from the moment of their engagement has had a bad relationship accelerating to worse and worse heights with his father, complicating the relationship he has with fatherhood in general.

Then, Nagisa dies in childbirth. She dies in the act of making him a father.

This is the massive difference between using romance as a tool in crafting a narrative much larger than the mere feeling, and using it as a crutch so you don’t have to work so hard to get a potential reader invested.

CLANNAD is fundamentally not a story about warm fuzzy feelings or being enamored with a girl who has a pretty face and a nice body i tak dalye though it certainly includes that. It touches on a fundamental idea of love, of which romance is a type and shadow of. Lets think for a moment about the other “routes” in CLANNAD, and notice how most of the drama of these tales, while heavily involving romance, really are about its intersection with something else. Take the twin routes, what is the main idea? Is it not the sisterly relationship Kyou and Ryou have? In a real sense, the fact that these girls have anything to do with Tomoya is only to bring the details of this relationship to the light, and to give the audience a window through which to see it. Or Kotomi, my favorite route in the entire game? How important is her relationship to Tomoya, really? Is it really anything more than a narrative tool to connect her and the reader to the past she lives her entire life in the service of, which has infinitely more to do with her late parents? Or even the non-Nagisa routes that are explicitly in the romantic quadrant so to speak, like Tomoyo. Tomoyo’s route is explicitly about the weight of responsibility and the importance of one’s goals. This route actually makes the argument that Tomoyo and Tomoya made the right choice deciding to not be with each other (temporary, though that wasn’t evident at that moment in the story) given the obstacle he was to the preservation of the cherry blossom trees, though this shouldn’t be read as a disregard of love since this goal is in service to her love for her brother.

All this is to say that romance in media, in our stories, is so important because it is the most basic instinctual reflection of our need for love. For connection to other human beings. It’s even a type and shadow of deeper love, love for your family, your friends, your fellow man, and even the love of God for mankind (see the Song of Songs). So keep on loving one another, even and especially non-romantic love, as fun fact: you will never be romantic with most people you meet. But you still must love them, because that’s what makes us true humans: that we love one another.