[Ninjacat]

Originally Posted by Myssa Rei

KyoAni is capable of doing original material, but their track record with such is... hokey. On one hand they had that nice Hot Spring Fumoffu episode. On the other they have Munto. Worlds apart.

They specialize in adaptations, really, with a few tweaks (Live A Live was a glorious example that worked, while Lone Island Syndrome was a mixed bag). And giving the viewpoint to another character would be straying too much from the source text, as many of the lines would have to be written for them from scratch.

You're right of course, but in a way it makes Haruhi 2009 even more weird. They stuck very closely to the source material... By rewriting a 30 page short story into a 240 pages novel Without adding a single word.

It's the worst of both worlds really...

Originally Posted by Heminga13

Well, Someday in the Rain is the only story that doesn't focus solely from Kyon's point of view (though it was Tanigawa's doing). The nature of the overall series is that this is all seen from Kyon's point of view, which is why "narrator reliability" is a big topic of discussion for the series. If they had changed the point of view the story would have been drastically different than Tanigawa's imagining of it.

If you believe the theory that luck is the reason Kyon stopped the loop based on his royal flush the next day, Tanigawa is implying that Kyon's character spent those previous 8000+ times trying desperately to think of a way to stop it but ultimately couldn't because 'luck wasn't on his side.'

Good points, I this one was a bit of a stretch. Still, it leaves 8000+ iterations of Kyon trying something and a lot of room for ways to make this interesting. Many of those times with the possible help of the rest of the team, and many of those times with Nagato's help. None of it is in the series.

They bent over backwards to make it as boring as possible

Originally Posted by Heminga13

Also, Nagato was the only one who always knew what was going on (just didn't know how and when it would end) but I think her statement of being an 'observer' meant she would not be able to let the others know each loop what was going on and that this was something the "humans" would have to figure out.

This I have to disagree with, Yuki has had no trouble intervening in the past. From going forth and telling Kyon she was an alien (a big no-no for an observer), to having one of her teammates pose as a fake girlfriend so the SOS brigade can investigate the disapearance of the president of the computer club, up to and including talking to Kyon when he's trapped in a parallel dimention. She's one of the brigade's most active members. She wasn't going to figure out how to break the loop herself, but there's no reason to believe she wouldn't do everything she could to help Kyon.