The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

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Lightice
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The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Post by Lightice »

This is a very new title (April 2, 2006 – July 2, 2006 in Japan) I just saw and I wonder if enough people have seen it to make decent conversation on it. Due its newness, it's obviously only available as fansubs, for now, so if you have a strong convinction against them, you propably won't be seeing this series, any time soon.

I would call the series a curious crossbreed of Azumanga Daioh and Serial Experiments Lain. The first curiosity you see watching it is, that the episodes are not in a chronological order, making the whole thing a bizzare memory game, where you must memorize the beginning and the end of each episode to understand, where it goes on the timeline. The purpose of this, I assume, was to both emphasize the quirky nature of time and space in the series and to work around the fact, that chronologically speaking the climax of the story takes place halfway to the series - this way they've gotten it to the last episode, where it belongs.

The plot is a rather difficult thing to convey, without spoilers. In the basics, it's just another high school drama with a cast of bizzare personalities gathered conveniently together around the near-manic, yet oddly charismatic person of Haruhi Suzumiya. In this story, though, you could say that the whole idea behind the story is to explain, just how can such a group of stereotypical anime-personalities come together in a manner that seems downright scripted. In other words, at least some of the characters are aware of the fact, that life shouldn't work like a story and make their theories of why it is happening, nontheless. This curious meta-plot element kept me interested in the series.
Most of the characters seem rather two-dimensional, but plotwise even that begins to make more sense, as the story develops.

The animation, by the way, I've heard, is shot HDTV quality. It certainly looks good enough, even in the fansubs.

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It'd be fun to see some discussion around this series.
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Gillsing
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Post by Gillsing »

I watched it and enjoyed it, but I don't think I can make a 'decent' conversation about it. I thought Haruhi was cute, and it was cute how she obviously had a crush on Kyon without daring to admit it to either herself or anyone else.

I also thought that the last episode was really the last episode and not episode 9, chronologically speaking. I guess that I should find an episode guide and then cut and paste it all together in a chronological fashion so I can at least get the story straight. I mean, I have a rough idea of what went on, I just didn't pay all that much attention to when it went on. I figured that if it was really important to know, then they probably wouldn't have screwed with the order like that.

After watching the third episode I almost gave up, thinking that despite the obvious humour of the first episode, it was all going to turn out to be some kind of harem anime with a school backdrop. But everyone praised it and didn't call it a harem anime, so I decided to give it a chance. Good thing for me! :) (I can't be trusted to recognise a harem anime when I see one - but I'm pretty sure that Fate/stay night is one)
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Lightice
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Post by Lightice »

Gillsing wrote: I also thought that the last episode was really the last episode and not episode 9, chronologically speaking. I guess that I should find an episode guide and then cut and paste it all together in a chronological fashion so I can at least get the story straight. I mean, I have a rough idea of what went on, I just didn't pay all that much attention to when it went on. I figured that if it was really important to know, then they probably wouldn't have screwed with the order like that.


The last episode was, in fact episode 6. The order, I imagine, gave an opportunity for the creators to play with hints towards the episodes to come, as well as to keep the fans of the original novels on their toes.

The series seems to have become a strong Internet meme. That's what got me watching it, in the first place.
Interestingly enough, I've heard of a little Standalone Complex taking place among the fans of the series - a number of people unrelated to each other apparently created bogus advertisements for supposedly coming live action version of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and released them almost simultaneously, with no knowledge, whatsoever of each other's actions.

What raised this series above the typical high school dramas for me was the fascinating use of metaplot, characters being aware of the wall between fact and fiction being broken. Also, Haruhi's character felt uncommonly real - exaggerated, ofcourse, but she actually resembles some people I know and feels like an actual person - something quite rare in any kind of fiction. In contrast, the rest of the cast - even Kyon, most of the time - seem like living plot-devices. And in essence, that's what they are, even in the context of the story. This curious relationship between Haruhi and everything else in the world is another fascinating point in the series - to me this dual relationship seems like an exaggeration of the duality in our daily lives. We all split the world between ourselves and everything else, but Haruhi does it more obviously and forcefully, than most of us.

I found the series to be a fun mixture of light-hearted comedy and taught-inspiring postmodernism. You rarely see as good connection of two opposite types of story. I hope there'll be a second season based on the later novels...
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