^ It's padding. But just because it's padding doesn't necessarily make it a bad thing. Some of the episodes actually do go out of their way in adding to the main 6 Melancholy episodes
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Originally Posted by Gamer_2k4
It's worth noting that they're not just doing it to be wacky. The Haruhi series simply doesn't transfer well to an anime format, and they had to do the best they could. After all, if you air the original story consecutively, what the heck is your climax going to be? The arc would be done after 6 episodes!
So in both cases, the "unorthodox and outlandish tradition" is simply the necessary consequence of filling out complete seasons. Just like the 2009 season had to be padded to 28 episodes, the 2006 season had to be padded to fourteen. You wouldn't have had much more than an OVA otherwise.
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The wackiness is more of a side-effect and rather fittingly so given Haruhi's absurd nature, but you are right that there are underlying reasons behind it all that often go unnoticed, along with getting a proper climax and properly placing it of course lol.
In the case of the first season, Tanigawa specifically requested that the series be jumbled up. And it wasn't a complete random jumbling of episodes either. If you look at it in the grand scope of things it becomes pretty apparent that a lot effort, thought and planning went into structuring the jumble in a way so that the episodes would be able to work together under such conditions.
EG:
- Beginning the series with the Adventures of Mikuru which sneakily introduces everyone.
- Keeping the core 6 Melancholy episodes still in chronological order only just spaced and paced out with the other side stories.
- Clever use of side stories to help further develop and emphasis certain plot points without spoiling the main Melancholy plot points too much. In the case of Boredom (baseball eps), they used it to provide a bit more weight to Yuki's supernatural reveal at the end of the previous broadcasted episode, Melancholy II, whilst foreshadowing the upcoming Shinjin events which occur in Melancholy VI. Inserting Boredom here also keeps Itsuki in the audiences mind as well since he won't show up again till Melancholy III and even then it's a rather limited role.
I think it's also interesting that when Taniguchi was writing the series, he didn't necessarily do it in chronological order either
