Bobduh

I'd say it's mostly just reflective of the person making the argument's preferred genres.

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It's the rare anime that won't have some element that sets off a highly tuned problematicism radar. Art is inherently quirky and weird and sometimes troubling, particularly when it comes from a far-removed set of societal values/assumptions. Whether those elements are dealbreakers for you often just comes down to how much you're enjoying the rest of the show. I can take some fanservice or whatever if I think a show has strong writing or great energy, for example. And different types of troubling content will be dealbreakers for different people, and that's totally normal.

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(Incidentally, yes, I do think OPM's gay panic character is orders of magnitude worse than any ugly subtext in Eupho's relationships. But hey, I would think that, because I don't think OPM is very good anyway)

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[continued] abstraction between helping people and good things coming out of it because of the light orbs, and that MHA having this happen at the start of the series as opposed to the end removes the focus off of it as the show is now using it as a vehicle to explore other ideas.

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On the other hand when I watched After Story years ago, I had enjoyed the ending to it because it was a cathartic release similar to the ending of Edge of Tomorrow. I liked the way Film Crit Hulk articulated in his piece on Edge of Tomorrow that cathartic releases can be good, even if I'm not that sure now if Clannad fully deserved it. [end]

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Your initial thoughts are well-placed ones! Honestly, your second thought about MHA pretty much covers the crux of it. It's true that My Hero Academia giving Deku a quirk means it's not actually a story about a kid without a superpower who wants to be a hero in a superpowered world - but well, that's just how it is. It's not that story, and though such a story would also likely be interesting, you can't really judge a story based on its non-adherence to a premise it discards within its first chapter.

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My Hero Academia is a classic, archetypal shounen with "western superheroes" acting as the obligatory theme; those are the story's own goals from the start, and thus those are the terms it's most reasonable to evaluate it on. A magical conceit established in a story's first chapter is a fundamental assumption of that story, something that generally comes too early to rewrite or cheapen anything that had come before. It's still setting up its own rules, it's not likely something introduced there is going to break them.

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In contrast, Clannad's ending is a narrative device that isn't at all built into the context of the story from the start. It's a twist that is a true twist - not something like Madoka's "twists," where everything that happens feels thematically solid and almost inevitable, but a piece of deus ex machina, an "and then this happened" intrusion that rewards characters you want to see happy. It's not meaningfully established on a narrative level, and actually does negative work for the show on a structural/thematic one. If the show has successfully made you care about the characters involved, then it can indeed be cathartic - but that's a result of other elements of the narrative working well, not that particular element of the narrative being the best possible vehicle for its conclusion.

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