Ahhh, Air. Since 13 years later a team of awesome individuals over at "Gao Gao Translations" decided to get together and finally fully translate the "Cursed" Visual Novel, I was finally able to experience the story the way it was intended (aside from the beta translations, of course.) I say "cursed" because several teams of attempted to translate Air in the past, and all of them randomly C&D'd about halfway through, needless to say I've been super excited to finally play it.
I'll go over Misuzu's/Summer/Air route at a later date, and I probably won't touch Kano's route because I wasn't that impressed by it.
To give a bit of a backstory on this route, Tohno is basically a dandere that plays with a tsundere girl named Michiru. After the relationship development in the common route with both of them, you find out that Tohno's mother is mentally ill. After losing her would-be second daughter to a miscarriage, she starts to confuse Tohno with her miscarried sister, Michiru.
Spoilers start here~
So basically, in the visual novel the theme of dreams plays a much bigger role than the anime. This is most likely due to setting up the Summer and Air routes, as both Kano and Tohno's route act as introductions to different elements of the true routes. In the anime Tohno's friend, Michiru, basically confirms that it is, in-fact, her daughter coming back to make Tohno happy. In the VN, however, This isn't outright confirmed, and makes room for much more open-ended interpretations. Basically what we get out of the VN is Michiru confirming that she asked the girl in the sky (who is cursed to constantly dream sad dreams eternally); to come to earth and make happy memories with Tohno. So in a sense we kinda have the whole astral projection theme that we had in Kanon, as well as, Clannad... save the fact that Michiru didn't currently exist on earth.... until the end of the route, where it is revealed that Tohno's father had a child with his new wife... named Michiru.
Another major difference from the VN is, Tohno actually blames herself for her the death of her sister, because she prayed to sacrifice anything to save her mother. In the anime the only touching on this was when Tohno said her curse was "wishing" for a sister. Basically just a darker theme on the story that the decided to leave out, possibly for time constraints (compressing 30+ hours to 12 episodes never really works out).
My interpretation of the VN is as follows. Tohno dreamed of having a little sister, and being able to be herself rather than mistaken for her sister since she was no longer able to be herself. In her "dream world" she created her image of the little sister she could have had if all went well, this allowed Michiru to become a physical being with the help of the girl in the sky. With this girl Tohno was able to be herself, and have the little sister she always wanted. This resulted, however, in Tohno becoming stagnant and not move forward (which is one last thing I'll touch on). Once she was able to meet Yukito and take her first step towards moving on, Michiru disappeared. After this, it turned out that she did have a little sister all along from her father, who greatly resembled the little sister she made in her head. This is due to the repeating timeline and "dreams" of the girl in the sky. Since Michiru was able to give the girl in the sky happy memories, this repeated memory was no longer sad, therefore the time they spent together was no longer a sad memory, and Michiru, indeed exists.
Last thing I wanted to talk about was the overall meaning of this route. Basically, the message is about moving forward. Tohno was happy that she had her friend to play with, even if she wasn't happy at home with her mentally ill mother. She knew she had to take the initiative and make steps forward, confront her mother, etc, but she didn't want to, possibly because she knew it would end with her dream's demise, and the disappearance of Michiru. She was in a comfortable place, even if she knew it wasn't perfect, it was somewhere that she could be happy. Then, Yukito helps her make the first step, and she moves on, and finds that she had a little sister all along. She had no reason to be afraid, what she longed for was there the entire time, she just had to move forward to find it. You may be saying "but wait! it doesn't go with your theory! The real Michiru would have never existed, so she had to be sad, she was right to dream!" Right you are correct. In life, things get you down, and you may dream of something you wish for and nothing else. You want it, but don't take the first step to get there. Taking the first step sucks, and you'll wind up going through a lot of rough times, blood, sweat, and tears, as they say... But in the end, if you manage to break through the dream, and try hard enough, it can become a reality. I can't tell you it's going to bring back dead siblings, but you never know what life has in store until you try~
~End spoilers
~John
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You can find the translation patch here - http://gaogaotranslation.wordpress.com/
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