I watched the Haruhi Suzumiya series
[Finished December 30th, 2023. Rating: 9/10]
I don’t know if I could have chosen a better story to end the year with. The Haruhi Suzumiya anime feels like something I should have been a fan of for years of my life by this point already, yet my repeated boredom with it on previous watches ended up leading me to only finish it in the final month of this year. Now that I’m done, I can reflect on what made me struggle so much to get into it and evaluate it with the full perspective granted to me by knowing all the context.
Except, no, I was actually completely insane because episode 1 alone is the best introduction to maybe any show ever??? (I know the start of the show is technically the movie the SOS Brigade makes, but that doesn’t count.) Admittedly, it’s not like I can’t understand why I was initially put off, but it’s hard to feel empathetic to that position anymore when my experience with the show was so perfect this time.
Enough beating around the bush. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is a show that brilliantly portrays grounded human struggles through supernatural surrealism. It delves into the horrors of neurotypical & heteronormative standards — and how they insidiously promote dehumanization — within a hyper-idealized high school setting, where the paranormal threats superbly contrast the escapism happening on a much more regular and mundane level. Our protagonist is Kyon, a witty everyman who’s thrust into bizarre escapades by the titular eccentric Haruhi Suzumiya. These range from actual encounters with the supernatural to slice-of-life antics spurred on by Haruhi’s possessive and idealistic attitude towards their school club’s members. But what truly makes these special isn’t the wackiness inherent to them; it’s the way Kyon reacts. Far from the aloof spectator he presents as, his perspective on the events he’s drawn into is consistently one of the most interesting in the show. What outwardly manifests as ‘maturity’ is a veiled excuse for repressing his emotions, and it creates a really unique downbeat vibe watching this subtly depressed guy quipping his way through such a rose-tinted high school life. Him struggling with his own expectations while also using that as plausible deniability to act in insidiously awful ways — not to mention the way he manipulatively uses others as a vector for his sense of self — is a back-and-forth that makes him a startlingly engaging morally gray protagonist.
Kyon is far from the only one involved in the show’s themes, too. I’ll get to Haruhi herself soon enough, but the beauty of this series is that even its most minor aspects are constantly adding to the way it explores its ideas. Every little choice is loaded with meaning: the unorderly storytelling, the frequently disorienting camera angles in slice of life segments, the parts where — despite its usual strong commitment to believable character interactions — it randomly downshifts into stock tropes so divorced from reality that it feels like entering an alternate dimension. While one without faith in the writing might argue this is simply falling back on clichés to pad out the story, I think The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya obviously knows what it’s doing. Season 1 alone features an arc where a character explicitly calls out the progression of the story being incomprehensible and tries to force it into the framework of a romance drama as a method of coping with implied mental illness. I’d go as far as to argue that every apparent cliché in the series is meaningful and informs at least one (but often more than one) main character in an important way, as the literal manifestation of social norms in a narrative context that the entire cast bases their ideals around. It’s actually kind of ridiculous how efficient the show manages to be at characterization by integrating its social commentary into the very idea of ‘tropes’ themselves and fleshing out so much of the cast’s relationships with being characters in a story.
To that end, even the less plot-relevant club members still get a sizable share of great moments. Mikuru Asahina and Itsuki Koizumi feel like the designated gag characters of the SOS Brigade, but they actually contain a lot of subtextual depth which makes them fascinating to think about. For one, Mikuru has a pretty complex relationship to her own victimhood. Her place within her profession frequently sends her on classified missions, where she’s unaware of many key details and essentially sacrifices her agency for what she hopes is a greater good. Thus, it convinces her that her own objectification is a regular necessity for that ‘greater good’, with intensely unpleasant results. On the other hand, Koizumi’s writing is subtler yet still deeply elaborate; his firm belief in insurmountable cosmic roles results in all sorts of depersonalization and manipulation, both of himself and others. He’s one of my favorite characters to think about for how his philosophy unfolds throughout the narrative, but it’s pretty spoilery to go into detail about that aspect, so I’ll simply say that the show’s deceptive uses of framing to align the viewer with the characters’ mindsets is perhaps at its peak with him. Both of these characters being so good in these understated ways is a testament to how much thought and care the writing is full of.
But of course, it wouldn’t be The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya without Haruhi Suzumiya herself. As the centerpiece of the show and the contrast to our already brilliant protagonist Kyon, she’s given a big role to fill in order to tie everything together. And, well, she plays that role perfectly. Haruhi is not only an enthrallingly layered and analyzable character, she’s also one of the most fun presences in anime, striking the perfect balance of ‘thrillingly whimsical’ and ‘horribly flawed and discomforting’. This is one of my favorite personality types to watch, and she takes full advantage of that; positioning herself as the director of her life’s movie, she’s very particular about making her world more exciting. She devotes herself to arranging a precisely performed gallery of clichés so she can inject her surroundings with the joy she yearns for, blatantly disregarding the humanity of whoever she must involve to get there. In other words, she’s the exact kind of opposition Kyon needs. Seeing them bounce off each other is as enjoyable as it is interesting, with Haruhi paralleling him in a lot of unexpected ways; her quest to seek the supernatural is motivated by the same resentment towards the aimlessness of their everyday lives that Kyon tries to bury much deeper within himself. Since elaborating would once again involve spoilers, I’ll just state that how she expresses her subconscious desires through extreme behavior is a treat to read into.
Despite all of these amazing qualities, I did end up finding the show’s conclusion slightly lacking — season 2 has some solid final episodes, but they feel more like a haphazard attempt at a stopping point rather than a cohesive ending to the main thrust of the story. It essentially decides to end on a fairly random escapade that only provides slightly more than the usual amount of characterization. I wouldn’t complain about it, but viewing it on its own terms, I’d be a little disappointed. That is, if not for The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya.
Disappearance is an incredible arc to conclude the anime with. Despite knowing that many more light novels have yet to be adapted, I wouldn’t even question it if you told me this movie was actually the end of the series, because it does such a wonderful job wrapping up what’s already been explored in satisfying ways while also providing entirely new angles to think about the rest from. On top of that, it’s genuinely one of the most magical experiences I’ve had with fiction. Kyon being thrust into a life without Haruhi or the SOS Brigade gives the entire thing a majestically wistful and dissociated atmosphere as he endeavors to pick up the pieces of what those things meant to him, and every scene of him doing so is given the most emotionally resonant attention to detail possible. It’s as though the direction is trying to make up for all the feelings he was holding back throughout the show — he explodes out of control with anger and desperation so fiercely uncomfortable to watch it repeatedly made me want to bury my face in my hands, and his eventual cascades of joy when finding a lead on Haruhi are so raw and messy that I wanted to cheer. This is all enhanced by the spectacular animation, capturing the nuances of his expressions to a stunning degree that sells just how real his feelings are, especially when compared to his previous muted persona.
The core of what makes Disappearance’s writing so good is intimately tied to how it portrays those visceral bursts of emotion. It’s a story of self-acceptance where Kyon is forced to come to terms with his repressed desires and sentiments, and in a way that even demonstrates entire new dimensions to his already existing characterization; his outbursts reveal a possessive and controlling side that’s quite fun to read into. Watching him rise from his lowest point to finally begin understanding himself is enormously cathartic after two seasons of denial. However, it wouldn’t be nearly as powerful were it not for the other star of this movie. Kyon fighting his own depressive haze is only as powerful as it is because of his parallels to Yuki Nagato.
Nagato is the hardest part of this movie to discuss without spoilers, especially as she warrants a lot of subtextual analysis, but her presence seriously elevates it so much. Her rationalization of Kyon’s predicament is substantially more layered than his — an impressive feat considering it feels like a setup made for him specifically — and it works wonders to contextualize her writing all throughout the series. As always, she’s very quiet about how events affect her, but it’s clear how much her relationship with Kyon (and the internally self-sabotaging ways she processes his actions) affects her even from a surface level. While totally out of left field as a major part of the anime’s ending, the conclusion of their relationship is nonetheless fantastic and somehow ties together all of Kyon’s growth throughout not only the movie, but the entire series as well.
After all my failed attempts to get into it, I’m glad I can end this review by saying the Haruhi Suzumiya series is an enchanting experience. It hits that ideal sweet spot of being incredibly surface-level entertaining, having lots of immediately graspable depth, and containing such an abundance of subtler writing that I could think about it for weeks on end without getting bored. Its concept is so instantly appealing that there’s hardly any wonder so many people are attached to it, or that I was so easily able to get lost in the joy of watching it in the moment. I’ve seen many other series try with similar ideas, but none of them nearly live up to the immaculate presentation and execution of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya.
