AnimeSuki Forum - The General Discussion of Haruhi Suzumiya

I recently watched the series for the first time ever. The re-airing occurred when I was in high school and surrounded by anime culture, but at the time it wasn't my genre. Still haven't watched the film (and don't plan to watch Nagato Yuki-chan -- CMV?), but watching just the series was like 1000 x (finding out the context for a meme you've been seeing everywhere). Kind of hard to evaluate whether I liked the series per se or just that feeling.

I remembered that there'd been a lot of brouhaha about the ideal watch order, but I went with the 2009 chronological order because that's how the episodes were numbered in the folder I had. Gotta say, I think that if I'd been there at the time I would have been on the side of "season 1 broadcast order... and maybe skip season 2". I was pretty into the first 11 episodes, chronologically. It reminded me of the slice-of-life stuff I had dabbled in for the vibe back then, like Lucky Star, with an overarching mystery to unravel. I even enjoyed Endless Eight as it was -- I watched an episode or two a week and felt like I was immersing myself in a certain ambience, with a growing sense of unease. It was like an "artistic" video game where the point isn't necessarily to have fun, which is something I appreciate in adulthood but wouldn't have in my teens.

But then my god, the movie-making arc was just unbearable. I can see why people hated Endless Eight and back-to-back with "The Sigh..." I would probably have ragequit the series as a kid, missing out on the last 3 episodes that I do think complete season 1. And as a cultural phenomenon, that's interesting. I had always thought Haruhi was supposed to be a Best Girl, the prototypical tsundere who's a serious jerk with a huge heart of gold (my preferred tsundere at the time was Shana, which shows how much Haruhi should have appealed to me). The first half and even Endless Eight sort of craft her character this way, but I was so unsold on Haruhi as Best Girl that I was surprised by the kiss at the end of "The Melancholy..." With all the Haruhi profile pictures and reaction images I'd thought she was supposed to be a romantic interest, but perhaps that's both my poor reading of the memes and the evolution of her image as the series fades out of the cultural consciousness. To me, she's like Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes, with even more selfish behavior and less self-awareness. On a moral level, I hated how the conflict of "The Sigh..." is resolved by the rest of the brigade forfeiting their dignity and settling for doing what little they can to direct Haruhi's subconscious. On a narrative level, the fact that Haruhi seems to learn nothing whatsoever about her poor relationship skills or the dignity of others is almost insulting. It tells the viewer that the series as a whole is a monster-of-the-week plot, and the monster is Haruhi.

Returning to season 1 (original broadcast order), I totally understand the appeal of this series: it's like Angel Beats!, and you can bet I'd have watched a second season of that. One of things that would have drawn me back was the promise of more worldbuilding, teased by the Steins;Gate-esque physics buzzwords in the OPs. But I was quite disappointed by the "physics" here (and in Steins;Gate, which bored me to death). I felt like I was missing something -- not in the episodes, which were as easy to comprehend as an episode of Angel Beats! -- but in the general discourse. Is the math and physics stuff discussed intelligibly in the books? To me it was like a thin veneer of buzzwords plastered over a soft sci-fi universe to make it seem harder, and the nature of the anime community is that fan discussion has the power to elevate meta elements (like the nonlinearity's impact on the story) and speculation to the height of what's explicitly in the show.

TL;DR I can totally see why it was worth meming, but without the symbiosis with ongoing discussion, the series itself is a pale shadow of the phenomenon it was.