There was some deep and moving stuff there.

Kyon: all alone, completely powerless and clueless. And forced finally to show some emotion, make some decisions, and act. He even cried. And maybe died.

Yuki: totally beautiful; paralyzingly shy and exposed as a seething pyre of emotions and desires.

Haruhi: strapped down, but ultimately irrepressable and the inevitable catalyst of the solution by sheer strength of will.

A good mystery. A complicated plot that kept getting kicked up a level, tying in with other stuff, and even introducing more complications to the ongoing tale.

I swear I saw a shadowy face run by the window just at the end when Kyon is sitting in the classroom. Anybody else see that?

Now then, Yuki stole Haruhi's power to recreate the universe, right? Doesn't that mean she unlocked that potential for evolution that her people are so crazy about? I only ask because I'm pretty sure (I'll have to check when I get home) that that's how it's described in the movie. The more reasonable alternative, of course, is that Yuki didn't actually steal Haruhi's power; instead, she just modified existing data to produce a world where that potential for evolution no longer exists, forever sealing it out of reach of the ISDE.

As I type this, the latter option seems increasingly more likely, but I can't shake the feeling that the movie actually indicated that Yuki stole Haruhi's power. So what's the deal here?

Yuki says:

"The spacetime alteration was done by harnessing Haruhi Suzumiya's ability to generate data, and partially altering the world's composition data. Consequently, the resulting Haruhi Suzumiya has no powers whatsoever. In that time plane, the Integrated Data Sentient Entity does not exist either. Haruhi Suzumiya's powers were stolen and used to alter past memory data between this point in time, and approximately 3 years 5 months into the future on December the 18th."

I interpret this as Yuki manipulating Haruhi's power to create a world where Haruhi no longer had the power. I don't believe that from that point Yuki had Haruhi's former power. I think "stolen and used" above means temporarily used. Haruhi lost 'em (because they didn't exist in the new world), but Yuki didn't gain 'em.

So in fact Yuki brilliantly saved the universe by ridding it of this ultimate destructive (creative) power, but left the final decision to Kyon, who decided it was more fun the way it was. :pI think yes, in the sense that if Yuki could do it one time, then any of her people could do it again whenever desired, like we would "steal" the power of a horse to pull a plough. But did her people want to have that evolved power, or were they just interested in observing it?The ISDE didn't exist in the new world either.

The kicker is that it's not until he makes his decision that he understands just how monumental that decision was. When Kyon presses Enter, he just wants everything to be the way he remembers. He wants to wake up from the nightmare. Problem is, that "nightmare" is in fact a fully formed reality with real people in it. Reverting the world means destroying those lives absolutely.

Granted, it's not his fault at all. He's put into the torturous position of decided which of the two fully realized worlds to silence forever. Can we blame him for choosing the one he's familiar with? If he picks the original world, he abandons the alternate one. If he picks the alternate world, he seals the fate of the original one. That's indescribably awful. That's not giving Kyon a choice; it's burdening him with a literal world of guilt.

I rant like this because if you look at it this way, Yuki's change is nothing less than abominable. I didn't catch it at first, and I'm sure most people didn't, but when I considered it more closely, it's just mind-blowing what Yuki did to the world. All of the time travelers, all of the espers, all of the aliens associated with the ISDE - gone in an instant, possibly never to return. That's a genocide of a potentially greater scale than anything we've ever experienced. And then to pass it off to Kyon, to say, "Okay, now that I've done this, you choose who to pull the plug on"? What is that? What the hell is that? That's despicable.

And before you say, "But the espers and the like didn't die; they just lost their powers," remember that their lives revolved around those powers. Their existence was completely uprooted and replaced with another, and I seriously doubt the new existence is anything close to the original one. They're not the same people at all.

So then Yuki indeed committed a terrible criminal act against her people by taking that potential out of the universe. Oh and also by wiping them out of existence.

But she has also solved their problem by demonstrating how they can use this power, so that any of them can do it at any time. Or do they insist on having the power personally and not being content just to use it? As I implied before, to destroy something is to create something else and to create something is to destroy something else. Shiva is both the destroyer and creator of worlds. Koizumi also has expressed his doubt in stopping Haruhi's destruction of the existing world because in reshaping things, she may be improving them. He admits that in stopping her, he is really only acting selfishly in preserving himself and his world and thus possibly preventing something better from being born.

So really, we are all constantly making this decision. Do we create change, thus annihilating the existing situation and bringing into existence something new and unknown? Or do we struggle to preserve the comfortable status quo that we are familiar with and stave off (destroy) the new that would otherwise come into being? Kyon actually had the advantage of us in that he clearly knew what the alternatives were. When we opt for change, we don't have the luxury of knowing the outcome. We DON'T understand just how monumental our decisions are.

In the end, Kyon opted for the familiar. He had more fun in the old world and was frightened, bored, and alone in the new one. The selfish choice, just like we all ultimately make.

Does it matter? Their evolution has occurred before our own and independently of our own, and their reasons and uses for further evolution shouldn't even be relevant. The problem here is Yuki. She's like a spy stealing nuclear secrets from a foreign country, only instead of relaying that information back to her superiors, she launches a bunch of ICBMs at them instead. And furthermore, the only alternative to that is no change at all, leaving everything the way it is. Out of Yuki's three options (keeping the secrets to herself, using the secrets against her people, or actually freaking doing her job), she narrows it down to the two harmful ones. That's a problem.

I would say that Koizumi's argument invalidates itself. If a god is really rewriting the world, yes, our opinions shouldn't matter one bit. We're inferiors, and we have no right to argue against our superior. On the other hand, if it really is possible to influence that entity's decisions, then how can you call them a god? To me, omnipotence is kind of a requirement for a deity. Add to that the fact that Koizumi doesn't even understand the anthropic principle, and I'd say there are serious doubts that what he says is anywhere close to true. Sure, changes to the world might result in a better one. But you know what? They might also result in a worse one, and you'd be right for opposing those changes.

Yes, we all make choices, and even the absence of action is a choice. But there's a world of difference between forcing change, especially drastic change, and letting events change the world naturally; it's the same difference between someone catching a cold and someone being intentionally injected with a virus. We might be repairing the Ship of Theseus every day, but Yuki sank it outright and built a new one. That's why it's a problem.

I agree that not all change is bad, and that resisting change can have poor results (not eating, for example). But it's BECAUSE we can't prevent change that makes the motivation behind it and the consequences that result from it so crucial. I can say Yuki was wrong for the same reasons I can say a criminal is wrong.

And I'm not blaming Kyon here; he was little more than a puppet in all of this. He was given two terrible choices and he picked the one that, to him, was best. What more can you do than that?

I would argue both that the choice wasn't necessarily selfish, and that we don't all necessarily make selfish choices either. Kyon was right to revert the world just as an engineer would be right to reroute an accidentally (or intentionally) diverted train. Sure, the train may still be intact, it may still be going the right speed, and it may still drop off its cargo at the end. But it's going to the wrong place. There was a right path for the train, and it's not on that right path.

There's also the fact that these hypothetical changes are being brought about by an emotionally immature high school girl who doesn't even know she has the power to effect them. I'd oppose them too.

Just like we all are, we are not used to changes that are made towards us, especially if they come unnoticed. Kyon was not really used to this new world that Nagato made for him, he couldn't get along with Asahina without getting severely beaten. Haruhi was nowhere in sight, so there was nothing fun to do in this world. There was no Koizumi in sight as well, so there was generally nothing to talk about and explain how they could solve this.

His old rival "Asakura" is back to life... That literally sent him into shock.. The only person he actually got along with early in the movie was Nagato herself, since she was still in the S.O.S Room (which was the Reading Club's Room) it was obvious that she was there from Kyon's thoughts. But Nagato was not enough for Kyon... Even though Kyon thought this world might be good since he wasn't dragged into the nonsense brought by Haruhi Suzumiya, but it was really clear that he actually "enjoyed" the times he spent ever since Haruhi shaped his life in the old world. So when he was given the choice, it was not really a selfish choice, even though Nagato wanted to stay in the new world she made for him. He just wanted everything to be back to normal, and unchanged.

He would still have fun with everyone, so it was completely different from the new world. Also when Asakura stabbed Kyon, has it been clarified who the shadowy figure was? Was he Koizumi from the old world somehow appearing in the new world, and bringing things back to order? Or was it a member of Koizumi's organization? Or another faction that was secretly observing?