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regarding-stories · 17 days

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Inertia Itself: The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

TL; DR: I'm gonna bash the series somewhat. (Sorry, folks.)

After it coming with a lot of praise and kept being recommended, the series itself didn't end up being what I expected, especially given the omission in Crunchyroll's synopsis blurb. I still watched it, and all the fan praise is... a bit over the top. (I'd say the movie deserves it, though.) Depending on your tastes and sensitivities, this can be a decent or good series. It has flaws - but it definitely is not just more of the same when compared to others.

This first part of the series aired in 2006, so you can expect spoilers.

The Setup

Initially we learn about a rather peculiar teenager named Haruhi who makes her entrance to high school by stating she's not interested in anyone who isn't an alien, a time traveler, or someone with PSI powers (also called ESPer after "extra-sensory perception").

Our actual protagonist-narrator, a regular guy we will soon know only by his nickname "Kyon," takes an interest in her and eventually befriends her. Little does he know that by doing so he unleashes a series of events that leads to Haruhi forming a club that does her bidding which she dubs the "SOS Brigade" which will look into the phenomena she's interested in.

The catch in the setup is that Haruhi is a being with god-like powers that is not aware of them. She can alter reality, but this happens unconsciously. It plays out mostly like a genie's wish: Whatever she wishes for has quite a bit of self-sabotage baked in. This is not apparent to her at all, and to some, I guess, the source of show's humor.

This leads to the following cast:

Haruhi Suzumiya: The universe centers around her, and she has the personality to match. She bosses others around to the point of bullying, becomes pouty and stubborn like a five-year-old when she doesn't get her way, and is often quite unreasonable. She's also a big tsundere which has a hidden crush on Kyon which she'd never admit, so she instead she treats him like a doormat. Her inner life is never revealed to us, except when others comment on how regular reality is after all, hinting that Haruhi's eccentricity is mostly on the surface. Beyond being a tsundere she's also a genki girl, being very lively, animated, and has endless motivation and stamina when it comes to put her plans to fruition. She's also kind to kids if not her friends.

Kyon: The everyman. Kyon is cynic and sarcastic, but almost never opposes Haruhi openly, instead playing an inner voice narrator commenting on everything. Most of the time he's a passive character, resenting being pushed around, but if put on the spot, he'd be forced to admit that he would never truly opt out. The show never makes it clear whether Kyon has some romantic attraction to Haruhi, even though at least Koizumi comments about it regularly. If he has, he's so put off by her antics that it never gets to surface throughout the run of the series.

Yuki Nagato: The resident alien, sent out by a near-omnipotent AI-like entity. As such, she's basically a robot, can conjure nano-machines, and whisper formulas that alter reality. Yuki is a "cold" character with no emotional response, and her supposed motivation is "to be an observer" because Haruhi seems to be an original factor that actually originates new things (which also suggests the universe would be kinda boring without her). Yuki is also the story's source of magic solutions to problems Haruhi causes and can be relied on to provide exposition when needed. And... she was recruited to the brigade to get Haruhi the former literature club's room.

Mikuru Asahina: A time traveler, and recruited to the brigade mostly to have a hot member. Investigates why no past exists before Haruhi entered middle school, but frankly, she really does nothing of her own through almost the entire series. Haruhi does whatever she wants to Mikuru, including dressing her in various embarrassing ways as the brigade's mascot, and in general Mikuru mostly sobs and goes along. Kyon also has a crush on her.

Itsuki Koizumi: This one is the PSI guy. He cannot do anything, however, except when a particular sort of crisis ensues: Apparently Haruhi's mood swings create destructive "closed spaces" in which giants start to destroy the world. The organization Koizumi is part of fears that if they are left to grow this would destroy the world, so he is the one pushing the most for keeping Haruhi in the dark about her own effect on the world and her powers, reiterating many times how he likes the world as is. Koizumi gets roped into the brigade because he's an exchange student and there must be something up with that, according to Haruhi, which she promptly forgets afterward. Koizumi's personality is rather manipulative and he can't drop it, and I can readily understand why Kyon is not especially keen on him.

But that's just the cast and their motivations, if any. What really matters is...

The Dynamic

What keeps the show going are the manifestations of Haruhi's powers based on her conscious and unconscious desires and the pushback from the other brigade members to keep those in check and preserve reality.

The roles in this are clear:

Koizumi will provide the rationale and some of the exposition, always arguing for preserving the status quo. (And also manipulate others.)

Mikuru will be comic relief and part of Kyon's motivation to get involved.

Nagato will provide solutions when the group cannot solve problems with regular means. She'll also at times provide information dumps, but mostly say very little.

Kyon will provide a reaction to it all, his narration provides an ironic take on the events, but his involvement will be crucial in driving the plot - where there is a non-magical solution, it will fall on Kyon to derive it and put it in place.

What I personally dislike about the show is this dynamic because it's focused on keeping things in place and preventing change. This is embodied especially in Koizumi, whose manipulations often leave a bitter aftertaste (and then he laughes them off).

But it's also present in Kyon's character. He will disagree internally with Haruhi but go along like a doormat. This then builds until a resolution of sorts or until one of the few instances where Kyon actually loses his shit after things have gone way too far and he's complicit in it for doing nothing and saying nothing. Most of Kyon's interactions with the world are internally, and whenever he's called to action, he often acts very late and when it's clear that nothing else will do.

Taken from another but similar angle, a lot of the story is about denying Haruhi satisfaction, and watching Kyon being basically an unhappy character who cannot enjoy things for what they are by constantly judging people around him. At least Haruhi tries to do things. Koizumi especially wants to prevent things, and Kyon mostly lacks impulses of his own.

Without Haruhi, Kyon would have fewer friends and lead a boring, ordinary life. With Haruhi, Kyon gripes about the hassle of having more than an ordinary life. What is his aspiration in life? Would he ever do anything?

Endless Eight

There's a special punishment hidden in this show, its absolute low point. A series of episodes titled "Endless Eight I - VIII". It reminds me of a quote by Douglas Adams: It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They're not altogether clear what those sins are, and don't want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever their sins are they are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat. If there is anything worse than the sandwiches, it is the sausages which sit next to them. [...] The sausages are for the ones who know what their sins are and wish to atone for something specific.

(From "So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish".)

Leaving aside that the British should know what their national sins are, this encapsulates how I feel about having watched these eight episodes. It must have been some sort of atonement. Because they suck worse than the sausages.

"Endless Eight" itself is your garden variety time loop triggered by Haruhi's unconscious wish to have a never-ending summer break that she enjoys to her fullest. So they end up going through Haruhi's list of summer activities, only they end up doing it over and over again. The show suggests that the they do this more than 16,000 times and well over 300 years in total (repeating the same two weeks of August).

The characters react to this situation according to their dynamic:

Nagato actually knows but as an observer, she does nothing.

Mikuru notices the absence of a future beyond the end of August, but only falls apart, triggering a higher level of involvement by Kyon.

Koizumi drops exposition but does nothing to change the situation itself, except dragging Kyon into it and suggesting that if Kyon simply played the part of Haruhi's boyfriend, the situation would resolve (= he manipulates him).

Kyon does nothing with the information given to him and hesitates except for the one time he breaks the loop.

Frankly, seeing the group being dragged through this summer break makes me sorry for Haruhi for a change. She strives hard to make a fun summer in her bossy way, and everybody else looks like they've been run ragged. What would the summer have been like without her? Kyon on his couch, watching boring baseball games?

Endless Eight, ignoring the execution for now, itself exposes some depth in regards how it sees the situation. It plays with the concept of lucidity and a certain kind of probabilistic determinism. The characters will react to similar stimuli within a given range of variation, meaning the situation repeats almost entirely the same in the end. The only thing that can break such a situation is lucidity, and this lucidity is highlighted by slow motion moments in Kyon's awareness. In all other moments, everybody is sleepwalking through the same motions of their lives.

This view of human consciousness may be, depending how you see it, somewhat realistic and/or depressing, but there's nothing wrong with it - and it's one of the most compelling points the show puts forward in its run. However, the how is... horrible.

You see, the show repeats the same episode eight times with no real variation in plot - except for episode I and VIII. (Because August is the 8th month and an 8 laid flat is infinite and... pure lack of imagination.) Given the length of an anime episode this means you sit through about 160 minutes of repetition. The show does no montage of the events, it repeats the same key bits out. It basically makes you live, yourself, through part of the time loop in probably the least imaginative way - or at least the least narratively artful.

Now, while the story is roughly told identically beat by beat eight times, it is animated differently eight times. Camera perspectives change, meaning they each had to be animated individually. Same for the voice acting, lots of minor variation. (So they all did their job, I guess.) The eight realities subtly differ - what clothes everybody wears. Unimportant choices they make. Like what popsicle to get or what mask to buy on a Bon festival. Many people in the comments expressed their appreciation of the love of detail.

There's something wrong with these people. What they're saying is that they don't mind being served up the same story eight times if only the trappings change slightly. I guess this got us Episode VII of Star Wars...

To spoil it further: This run of episodes is a trap. There are no real hints to the resolution. You start seeing patterns where there are none. I even thought for a short while that the iterations might be counting backwards. They are not. And while this might get you to ask some questions, it's a really horrible, in-your-face, unskilled way of doing so. And in that it's the low point of the show.

The resolution is to make summer end by doing homework together. Does this somehow imprint the end of summer on Haruhi's brain? Does this mean she gets to spend more time with her friends on their instigation? Does it mean she was secretly hiding she didn't do her homework after all?

Whatever. The lame ending would have been excusable if they hadn't set the bar so high by walking us through an overlong movie version of this. This is the kind of stuff people walk out of a cinema for.

What makes up for it

Now, the way I describe Haruhi and Koizumi suggests I don't like them very much, but especially in case of Haruhi that's not true - not to the extent it might seem. She has definite character flaws, and they're probably quite intentional - but Haruhi, unlike other characters (looking at you, Koizumi) gets things going. And her inner motivation is relatable. Have we not all looked at the world at some point and thought "What if this place was less mundane and boring?" If not - why watch anime?

Nothing makes this more clear than the follow-up movie "The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya"!

This movie does its characters and premise more justice than the series did. Kyon ends up in an alternate reality/timeline where Haruhi isn't in his class, there's no SOS Brigade, and his friends are not his friends. And he doesn't like it one bit!

In a late twist reminiscent of Data from "Star Trek: TNG" we see a reality where Yuki Nagato is not a near-ominiscient robot, but a shy and adorable girl. Kyon fights to get his reality back. Mikuru, even though it's her future self, actually does something effective. Koizumi still is dragging things down, but can be tolerated. And Haruhi isn't actually gone after all.

The story has heart, and it contains some cruel choices. It lets us also sit through some parallel world "nobody shares my memory" shenanigans, but not for so long that you inwardly opt out. It's well-paced, and it's focused on moving things forward - even if forward means "back to the future." But I can't help but feel that Kyon has changed inwardly in response, realizing at long last that what a world without Haruhi actually means.

And that's just brilliant. It has a bit of heartbreak, it has tension and suspense, it has making choices. By taking the dynamic of the original and inverting it in parts, I actually like it a lot. (I still doubt I would rewatch the series, though.)

To be fair, the anime makers may have drawn out the original material - a lot. The movie is essentially one volume of the series, and that works. But the original 24 episode series (plus bonus material) just encompasses 3 and a half volumes, and that seems awfully little. (The manga adaptation apparently sliced the salami quite differently.)

Anyway, you might find something for yourself in this series. It has had a certain staying power and a fanbase, and not many shows would manage to still be talked about ten years after their reissue. The art is... nothing to write home about, but the premise is unique enough to be worth your time once.

Just skip Endless Eight II to VII... Unless you have a yukata/swimsuit fetish.

#the melancholy of haruhi suzumiya #anime series #high school anime #the disappearance of haruhi suzumiya #endless eight

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