I’ve been reading a lot of Anime News Network posts recently. There are times when it seems like Anime News Network has a hive consciousness that transmits thoughts between the minds of all the writers at once, so they’re all on the same page about things. I’m pretty sure it’s actually just that they all work together in a small office and share gossip around the water cooler, but as a reader, it takes way more effort to realize that than it does to jump to the conclusion that they’re a Borg-like collective of beings, when you see the exact same, not very common, idea expressed in three different articles by three totally different people in a short period of time.
I first noticed this when I saw two or three articles, plus an ANNCast, talk about how Haruhi Suzumiya, which was once incredibly popular both in Japan and in the US, has pretty much disappeared from the public consciousness. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it seemed to be true: the Haruhi Suzumiya love train had left the station and wasn’t coming back. It was particularly striking because I, personally, had seen Haruhi Suzumiya go from a favorite series to a second-tier favorite to a third-tier favorite to an ambient classic—the kind of thing you remember fondly, but don’t really actively seek out—to not even that. I was buying and reading the novels for a while. I enjoyed each one less than the last, though they never jumped the shark; there was never a moment where I thought “These have turned into crap, and I’m not reading any more.” I just kind of slowly bled away my desire to read them. The last one I bought, I think it was The Dissociation, I never read past the third or fourth page. I just slowly stopped caring.
To see something I once loved become so irrelevant was a sad thing. But I always knew the series had structural problems that would ultimately kill it. This blog is a postmortem, an autopsy of the rise and fall of a series that it just became really hard to care about.
The Rise of Haruhi Suzumiya
I first watched Haruhi in 2008 or 2009, not long after it came out. I rented the DVDs from Netflix.
Haruhi is, in a lot of ways, a clever series. Anime in 2006 had basically reached rock bottom in terms of intelligence. The parade of Eva clones from the early 2000s had overdone the “intelligent” side of things, and the Love Hina clones had drowned them out for a while. Haruhi appeared in the middle of a giant smear of really awful harem shows and offered something that had most of the good parts of the harem shows—an intelligible plot, likeable characters, a marked lack of pretentious and ultimately meaningless Christian symbolism, and lots of cute girls who sometimes get naked—without most of the downsides. There was no slapstick comedy, no falling in girls’ breasts, no screaming “Eek! A pervert!”, no obsessive and over the top love at first sight. Most harem shows of the time were for people who, as teenagers, participated halfheartedly in everything and graduated high school with a C average. Haruhi is a show for sarcastic loner teenagers who pretend to be cynical and aloof while reading Dune in the corner and get straight F’s because they reject this unfair system of judgment. Since that was pretty much me, the series appealed to me.
In fact, if Haruhi hadn’t come along, I’m not sure how much longer I would have been into anime. I’ve been on the cusp of abandoning it a couple times, only for some amazing series to come along and make me interested again by showing me what the medium can do. At the time, that was Haruhi. Fundamentally, I’ve always enjoyed harem shows; I was a huge fan of Tenchi Muyo back when it broadcast on Cartoon Network, and later I was a huge fan of Love Hina. But harem shows had just become too commonplace and too stupid by 2006. Love Hina and Tenchi Muyo definitely weren’t works of genius, but they were fun and had a kind of genuine quality to them. They weren’t money grabs like the later harem shows.
Haruhi was also clearly not a money grab. Even if it did have Mikuru, who very nearly deserves to be called the m-word due to her lack of personality and minimal effect on the story. (The m-word is moeblob, which I won’t say again out loud. Filthy word.) The initial premise, given enough background in 90s and early 2000s anime, was really quite smart. 90s anime was full of average teenagers who turned out to be special in some way: able to pilot a giant mecha, or gifted with psychic powers, or given magic and tasked with fighting monsters. Haruhi Suzumiya, the character, was rather a teenager who wasn’t special in any way and desperately wished to be, except that, unknown to her, she really was special after all, but could never know it.
Part of the show’s problem is that it tries so hard to introduce clever twists on the formula that it forgets that those formulas exist for a reason. They create dramatic tension and drive a plot forward. Haruhi Suzumiya constantly neuters its own dramatic tension and trips up its own plot because it’s more concerned with clever twists on the formula than it is with being an effective work of art. Endless Eight is the perfect example: while it was clever and audacious to throw away more than half of the season on reanimating the same episode eight times, it wasn’t an effective storytelling choice. It didn’t accomplish anything that four episodes, or even one episode (as in the novels) couldn’t have accomplished. You see this over and over again in Haruhi: the stories end on a complete anticlimax, because they have no real stakes to them. The various game episodes (the baseball episode, the computer game episode) always end with the SOS Brigade winning, despite their complete ineptitude, because of Yuki’s superpowers. Other stories, like Mysterique Sign or Remote Island Syndrome, start out like they’re going to have a meaningful plot of some kind, but the central conflict is usually resolved with almost no effort and then explained afterwards by Yuki or Koizumi in a long, boring dialogue. Charitably, I choose to believe this was intentional. It was Tanigawa (and the KyoAni writers who adapted his work for the anime version) trying to be clever by turning what would have been a big, serious plot in the kind of show they were referencing into an anticlimax which is easily resolved and quickly forgotten. This is amusing for a while, but it eventually gets tiresome.
Thus began the fall.
The Fall of Haruhi Suzumiya
At the time I watched Season 2, I was still pretty into Haruhi. I’d moved on a bit, but I definitely bought the second season and looked forward to it arriving from Amazon with excitement.
And I actually did enjoy it, aside from Endless Eight, which was…I don’t know. I watched all eight episodes of it. I wasn’t sure I would make it at times, but in the end, I did. I’ve never actually watched the second season again. It’s a combination of my waning interest in the series and the tedium of Endless Eight. I have a problem starting shows. That makes it hard to watch Haruhi Suzumiya Season 2, even though I know I can skip parts of Endless Eight. If I skip some episodes, I have to start another show sooner. I have trouble with that. I also have a problem with super long shows and manga. I took a four-year break from Negima after the school festival arc. I took a fifteen-year break from One Piece in the middle of Sanji’s recruitment, and only picked it up again a few weeks ago. One or two cours is the perfect length for me. In manga, eight or nine volumes is pretty optimal.
Since I was still hungry for Haruhi, I started buying the novels. The Sigh and The Boredom were just okay, but The Disappearance was amazing, and kept me going in the Haruhi world. I also bought the first volume of the Haruhi-chan manga and enjoyed that, though not enough to buy the second volume.
After The Disappearance, I kept buying the novels, kind of robotically. I would read them, get kind of into them for a few days, put them away, and forget about them.
The Disappointment of Haruhi Suzumiya
I liked the Haruhi Suzumiya characters. I mean, they’re not all genius—Koizumi is pretty boring, and Mikuru is kind of an m-word. Tsuruya is kind of gimmicky. But Kyon, Haruhi, and Yuki are genuinely interesting and likeable characters.
Since the plots are usually pretty weak, so eager to defuse themselves in the name of cleverness, I was sticking with the series for the characters. I wanted to see them grow and learn. I wanted to see them maybe get closer.
We got a little of that. Mostly between Kyon and Yuki. Some between Kyon and Haruhi. A tiny bit between Kyon and Mikuru. It might have been nice for Haruhi and Yuki or Yuki and Mikuru to have a real relationship, like Tsubasa and Hitagi in the Monogatari series or Kirino and Kuroneko in Ore Imo. But some real, meaty relationship building between Kyon and one of the girls, more of what we saw in The Disappearance, would have been enough to satisfy me.
However, when I read The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya, it became clear that the book had not just shot itself in the foot, but had shot itself in the foot with a speargun, and now couldn’t move because its foot was pinned to the floor by a spear. The whole setup of the series precludes actual character development. Kyon and Mikuru can never get closer, because Haruhi will get mad. But Haruhi and Kyon can never get closer, because Kyon still refuses to acknowledge that he likes her. Kyon and Yuki can never get closer, because Haruhi and Mikuru will both get mad, and Yuki is ruled by the great data mind thingy that won’t let her. There can never be any character development.
But there also apparently can’t ever be a plot, because the series pathologically refuses to let one develop. Anything that seems too plot-like gets abandoned pretty much right away with little fanfare. The later novels kind of hinted that there might be a plot in the works, but it was developing at a snail’s pace, and didn’t really seem that interesting anyway.
I was disappointed after I read The Intrigues. I was hoping there would be either a plot or some character advancement one of these days, but it seemed it would never happen.
The Fade of Haruhi Suzumiya
And just like that, I sort of stopped caring. There was never a big moment where I came to the stunning realization that I didn’t care anymore. It was implicit; I implicitly didn’t care. Sometimes I thought I should care. A few times I thought about buying The Disappearance movie. I always found something else to watch instead. One time that something else was Oniichan Dakedo Ai Sae Areba Kankei Nai yo ne!, which ought to show how much I didn’t care about Haruhi anymore. I bought The Dissociation just to fill out an Amazon shipment so I could get free shipping. Then I tried to read it, and I made it through about three pages before I stopped caring.
Haruhi Suzumiya faded from my mind.
The Aftermath of Haruhi Suzumiya
In the end, Haruhi Suzumiya didn’t amount to much more than Digi Charat. It was a bunch of good-looking characters with funny quirks that was clever in a sort of vapid, superficial way.
It did have some nice science fiction elements. I mean real science fiction, at least at the Star Trek / X-Files level, that kind of pretends like it’s a little bit plausible, and not the out-there stuff in most anime made after the early 1990s. It also had some nice moe, even if Mikuru is sort of an m-word.
But I got bored with the series, because it was inherently constructed not to ever have character or plot advancement. You couldn’t have any of the characters grow closer to each other because they were all either working for rival organizations, or the object of unadmitted love by Haruhi, or were Haruhi. Haruhi couldn’t advance because if she ever stopped wishing to be special, there wouldn’t be a show anymore. She also couldn’t relapse, because it was established that getting to mess around with the SOS Brigade satisfied her enough to prevent that. The series was also crippled by being so closely tied to Kyon’s point of view. You couldn’t really develop any relationships except for Kyon’s, because the point of view never left him. Even Mikuru’s friendship with Tsuruya is an informed attribute; we hear about it in a distant way, because Kyon hears about it in a distant way. Kyon could never get closer to the girls, because Haruhi would get jealous. He could theoretically have gotten closer to Koizumi, but Koizumi annoys him, and honestly Koizumi annoys me too, inasfar as he’s a boring character whose only purpose is to explain stuff in giant chunks of dialogue. And the plot could never advance, because any kind of real plot development would provoke some kind of response from Haruhi, and the entire point of the series was never to provoke a response from Haruhi, so it would fundamentally change the structure of the story if they could allow that to happen.
My love for Haruhi ended not with a bang, and not with a whimper, but with a sort of bemused silence. It’s like having a best friend you move away from and forget about, until one day you wonder what ever happened to that guy, and you look him up, and you find out he became the manager of a Big 5 in Bismarck, North Dakota, and you think that maybe if you’re ever in Bismarck, North Dakota, you’ll look him up, but you know you’ll never be in Bismarck, North Dakota. Occasionally you try to come up with reasons why you would be in Bismarck, North Dakota, but you can’t think of any. Then one day you go to Bismarck, North Dakota on your way to Canada for a camping trip, and you need a backpack, so you stop in a Wal-Mart, and then once you’re in Canada, you realize that you could have gone to Big 5 and seen your friend. You think maybe you’ll look him up on your way back down, but you end up getting frostbite and having to be airlifted to a hospital in Ottawa and you forget about your friend. Then three years later you suddenly remember that you were going to see him on the way back down before you got frostbite, so you look him up, thinking maybe you’ll at least email him, and you find out he died last year in a tragic bikeshedding incident. You feel a little bit sad that you never went to see him, but you ultimately figure “Well, that’s that” and get on with your life.
That’s pretty much how things went between me and Haruhi.
