Donkey balls! I can't watch Clannad in a 4:3 aspect ratio! I need Clannad in its intended 16:9 aspect ratio, because I'm a pedophile who can't get it up unless I see all the little girls playing in the background! Cock in my mouth!
Oh, by the way, I was being sarcastic.
When the first episode of Clannad was broadcast in Japan, practically every otaku with an anime blog wrote a tearjerking post about how the decision not to air Clannad in its widescreen aspect ratio ruined the show. Guess who doesn't give a shit? It's not that I don't care. Oh wait, that's exactly how it is. I really don't care. If you're going to cry about something as trivial as an anime's aspect ratio, you're a spoiled little bitch.
When I first started watching anime, fans were grateful for whatever they could get. We didn't have a choice between Xvid and h264 encoding. Try a 50 megabyte RealMedia file (Realplayer sucked back then too). If you wanted to watch your fansubs full screen, forget about it, the files were too damn small and grainy. On top of that, the intro and endings were usually cut (except from the first episode) to conserve precious disk space and download time. You want DVD quality? Buy the DVDs.
We didn't have bittorrent, the greatest invention of the 21st century. If you wanted fansubs, you had to get on an IRC channel and wait for hours on someone's queue until you could download a file. Don't know what I'm talking about? Lucky you. Waiting to download anime on IRC is the reason I'm so hateful today. And keep in mind, I only started watching fansubs in 2001. I can't imagine what our sempais from the 90's had to go through...
Here's some screenshots of Clannad in both aspect ratios. How bad do they look?
I didn't go blind either. That view really shouldn't bother you unless you expected widescreen proportions in the first place, and even if you did, you'll get used to the 4:3 aspect ratio after watching it for a few minutes. If you really care, you could always be a tool wait a few weeks until Clannad airs in widescreen on some fancy schmancy subscription channel.
If Clannad were broadcast in 16:9 on all channels, nobody would pay extra to watch it on the subscription channel. This is the typical price discrimination/market segmentation strategy you'll find in any intro level microeconomics textbook. Basically, a company may find it profitable to put out a lower quality version of its product in order to jack up prices for the original version. In other words, you can get desperate consumers pay more for your product by going out of your way to screw it up. As evil as that sounds, it only works because too many people have screwed up priorities. Quality is not more important than speed.
There was once a group called Wannabe Fansubs. Normally I'd never say anything remotely bad about a fansubbing group, but these guys were just assholes. They'd go months without releasing a School Rumble episode, and whenever someone asked them if they had plans to release an episode anytime soon, they'd have a PMS outburst about how everyone should be kissing their asses for all the work they've done. After all, if they didn't sub School Rumble, we wouldn't be watching it, right? Wrong. By sitting on their asses and not letting anyone know what was going on, they were effectively deterring other groups from subbing School Rumble.
Somewhere along the line, a badass group known as Super Hyper Racing Import Max Performance Subbers (SHRIMPS) stepped up to the plate started speed-subbing School Rumble. Their subbing quality was horrendous. It was awesome. Meanwhile, the snooty Wannabe Fansubs loyalists bragged that they wouldn't watch SHRIMPs because Wannabe's quality was higher. They seemed to shut up by the time Wannabe finished subbing School Rumble, which was about 7 months after SHRIMPS. The moral of the story is that I am always right.
1058 fans encouraged corporate opportunism by subscribing to see Clanned in widescreen