The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - Episode 19 Discussion / Poll [2009 added ep. 9]

[Heminga13]

Essentially my analogy is all based on the theory that this was KyoAni's ultimate goal, to make the viewers feel extremely excited about reaching a "happy" conclusion after so many failed ones, similar to how the cast is probably feeling at that time as well (or in sports how the team is feeling) despite this being a form of entertainment where this sort thing doesn't usually occur.

If you watch anime mostly for the plot, Endless Eight is not for you. If you are really connected to the characters, similar to how a sports fan feels a connection to a single team, Endless Eight provides an opportunity to feel really happy about seeing their "team" finally achieve "victory" after a long, hard struggle.

A big part of this is if the viewer knows ahead of time what the arc is about and how long it is, just like a sports fan who wants to watch X number of games but is told there'll be X-1 losses and the last game will be a win before watching it. It lessens the experience in both cases. I think this is proved by the fact that the people who watched Endless Eight live each week/avoided spoilers before watching it subbed are the ones who enjoyed the ending.

I'll use my two animation studios again:

KyoAni - Tried something unique to the medium.
TrollAni - Tried to anger their fans for no good reason.

It's ultimately up to you to decide which you believe in.

[Akka]

I do tend to follow a serie because of the characters (though, of course, plot is very important too) and I do tend to think KyoAni tried something (though I don't understand how they could not see it was a stupid idea to begin with).

And still this arc feels awful, the characters looks like idiots who tries very hard to avoid obvious ways and solutions, and the ending feels pathetic.

If you watch anime mostly for the plot, Endless Eight is not for you. If you are really connected to the characters, similar to how a sports fan feels a connection to a single team, Endless Eight provides an opportunity to feel really happy about seeing their "team" finally achieve "victory" after a long, hard struggle.

And it's here that all fall flat :
What you say is what could be described by reinventing E8 into the world of rationalization. It's all theory. Actually looking at the arc, doesn't at all provide all this.

The "long, hard struggle" is simply characters being completely stupid. It doesn't make you cheer for them, it makes you wallbang your head. Not the most compelling way to make you feel about them. Additionnaly, the struggle itself was not against something exciting/interesting, it was against sheer boredom. Not the most interesting thing to enjoy "let's see how much boredom we can take".
The "victory" is a cheesy and ridiculous joke that ends up being not funny because it dragged out for far too long.

A big part of this is if the viewer knows ahead of time what the arc is about and how long it is, just like a sports fan who wants to watch X number of games but is told there'll be X-1 losses and the last game will be a win before watching it. It lessens the experience in both cases. I think this is proved by the fact that the people who watched Endless Eight live each week/avoided spoilers before watching it subbed are the ones who enjoyed the ending.

Well, if you want to use the sport analogy, here is the one that I would use :
Your favourite sport team start to purposedly play to lose, and will do it for a certain number of matches, before stopping to do stupid things in the field and returning to play to win.
Do you think you will be cheering for them while they are scoring goals against themselves ?
Do you think you will actually support them and feel any suspense ?

No, of course. You cheer for someone when he's struggling against something and try to overcome the challenge. A team losing on purpose isn't a great motivation.
Having a bad day and losing is something you can overlook and/or understand.
Fooling around on the field and losing can perhaps be fun once in a while if you don't take it too seriously.

Fooling around and losing on purpose for half a season and taunting the fans "guess when we'll start playing seriously ?" is not something that will make the sport fans cheering and sympathize with their team. This I can guarantee you.

[Heatth]

Originally Posted by Heminga13

KyoAni - Tried something unique to the medium.
TrollAni - Tried to anger their fans for no good reason.

It's ultimately up to you to decide which you believe in.

I believe in KyoAni. However, I really don't believe the were sucesful this time. Unique, sure, but not in a good way. There are many things they could have done, like trying another kind of part time jobs, insted of doing the same thing always. (on of my preffered episod was the one Kyon talked with Yuki at the corage test).

Also, they don't even adapt everything. Not even one episode comment Nagatos's null weight (actually, no episod showed the bike race). There is no real excuse fo this (time they had.

The restaurnt scene was epic, sure. It wouldn't be soo good if was just 1 or 2 episodes of frustration. However, by the 5th one they already archived a similar effect, there wasn't a real need to haing so many (for this mattr, I mean)

I don't believe is an evil scheme to troll us, however. This would be just plain dumb.

[Ninjacat]

Originally Posted by Akka

The "long, hard struggle" is simply characters being completely stupid. It doesn't make you cheer for them, it makes you wallbang your head. Not the most compelling way to make you feel about them.

Yeah, for it to work Kyon had to be carrying the idiot ball something fierce. In the novel he's pretty quick to solve the problem once he's aware of it. Because in the novel Kyon may not be a supernatural badass, but he's capable to tie his own shoelaces. Not to mention he's yuki's best friend and he let her suffer for five hundred years out of sheer passiveness.

Originally Posted by Heatth

I don't believe is an evil scheme to troll us, however. This would be just plain dumb.

Companies have done really dump things in the past. Nothing is easier than being stupid by comitee. Sometimes things look a lot better in the planning stages than in actual execution...

[Heminga13]

You're assuming the viewer knows before hand that each episode is the "same" and which one ends it. If they don't, they don't have that feeling of "this is going to be the same and not end." Instead, they have the option to hope.

Also, Japanese society reacts to things in a different way than American or Australian or whatever. What may be more likely to succeed in one region may not be in another. However, if Endless Eight does indeed become a success in Japan then KyoAni's goal is accomplished. We simply have to accept what they did or despise it, but either way they're not going to care what foreigners think because they'd think we're strange.

Also, the novels imply that the same events of the story took place 8,769 times previously (the number of previous loops they found out but were unable to stop it). It's a little harder to convey deja vu in text than it is in animation, where you have visuals, dialogue, and music at your disposal. Tanigawa himself may have been the one that allowed this arc to happen as a 'collaborator' for this season because he felt it stayed true to the nature of his story. Also, looking at the novel again, Nagato says she does not know what the solution to ending the loop is (and she does indeed live outside the boundary of "space and time" so to speak, or at least the DITE does, and is unaffected by Haruhi's reset).

[SgtHydra]

Yeah. The eight episodes of E8 really drove the point home once and for all that Yuki has limitations.

And, of course, is a prelude to other things, which could possibly seem to come out of friggin nowhere if they didn't nail it in like it was.

[Myssa Rei]

Originally Posted by Ninjacat

In the novel he's pretty quick to solve the problem once he's aware of it.

In the novel though we're only treated to the last repeat... Forgetting the fact that Kyon failed to resolve the Loop more than 15,000+ times, which could be seen as a serious case of idiocy on the part of the cast, if not for the fact that it really looked like they ran out of vaguely Summer-vacation related fun activities that Haruhi might have been interested in. The suggestion of doing homework was frankly grasping at straws.

[Kogetsu Shirogane]

Besides, the only one who can do anything is Kyon. Kyon is essentially your typical shonen lead male(only more philosophical than physical): While there are clearly characters that would be better suited for any given situation, it's him that ultimately comes through and solves the dilemma... even though he's usually the indirect cause of said dilemma.

[Heminga13]

Right, if Tanigawa is indeed heavily involved in the new anime episode as the 'Development Collaborator' of TMoHS (2009), he may have intended Endless Eight to convey a feeling of despair (or something similar, plus maybe deja vu) to the viewers and was behind the idea of extending the arc to include 'failed' loops to convey the meaning he intended. However, as it was only the last loop the readers witnessed in the novels, I know I didn't get that feeling and the story was simply alright plot wise. Plus, like I mentioned, it would have been really hard to try and "repeat" that story in text form because it would just have been boring to the reader. Of course, even in anime form it's boring to many but there is more room for variation in animation than text to keep some people interested.

Aside from the fact eight episodes is "symbolic" to the story, it may have worked well in that it allowed them to fit a two-season airing schedule with what they wanted to do. They may have needed to do so because of Kadokawa's pushing them to or something else. Or maybe they were fully behind the idea that eight episodes were perfect, but I don't know if that was the case from how some interviews are sounding. KyoAni's blog had one where it was implying the worker's weren't happy about it, plus the 'Endless Eight Movie' joke in the recent Newtype seems to indicate (to me) that they know the current Endless Eight arc was pushing the story to it's limit from a fan's perspective.

[Ninjacat]

Originally Posted by Myssa Rei

In the novel though we're only treated to the last repeat... Forgetting the fact that Kyon failed to resolve the Loop more than 15,000+ times, which could be seen as a serious case of idiocy on the part of the cast, if not for the fact that it really looked like they ran out of vaguely Summer-vacation related fun activities that Haruhi might have been interested in. The suggestion of doing homework was frankly grasping at straws.

It at least gave the impression they were trying to find a solution instead of lying around like a pile of dead fish.

I think that's the part that really annoyed me, the sense of wasted potential. First because Haruhi and KyoAni gave us far better than that in the past. The first season managed to be both entertaining and groundbreaking.

Second because there was quite a few ways to make the arc interesting for those who don't care about meaningless symbolism and Yukata desings. Variation of activities, seeing Kyon and co. trying and failing to break the loop, Kyon sending himself messages, changing the POV cahracter (Imagine an episode focusing on Koisumi, then an episode focusing on Yuki)... It wasn't hard to make the arc interesting. Yet they didn't even try, heck they had to force the characters into an uncharacteristic passiveness to make it go the way it did.

It's really puzzling.

[Myssa Rei]

Originally Posted by Ninjacat

It's really puzzling.

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.

[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.'

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" (or maybe just Kyon) would have to figure out.

[Akka]

Originally Posted by Ninjacat

It at least gave the impression they were trying to find a solution instead of lying around like a pile of dead fish.

I think that's the part that really annoyed me, the sense of wasted potential. First because Haruhi and KyoAni gave us far better than that in the past. The first season managed to be both entertaining and groundbreaking.

Second because there was quite a few ways to make the arc interesting for those who don't care about meaningless symbolism and Yukata desings. Variation of activities, seeing Kyon and co. trying and failing to break the loop, Kyon sending himself messages, changing the POV cahracter (Imagine an episode focusing on Koisumi, then an episode focusing on Yuki)... It wasn't hard to make the arc interesting. Yet they didn't even try, heck they had to force the characters into an uncharacteristic passiveness to make it go the way it did.

It's really puzzling.

Couldn't have said it better.

[Ithekro]

Because if they tried to make the arc interesting the point would have been lost. That and there is no writing from anyone elses POV, since we only see things through Kyon's mind. We don't know the inner workings of anyone else in the cast and that might be very important for later novels/episodes.

I'm still not seeing how this arc makes the characters look stupid. All are behaving according to their personality. They've been going for days on end trying to make Haruhi happy. They are tired, have no idea what else she might want since her list is finished. Mikuru is true to type...useless for most things/subserviant to Haruhi. Itsuki is the Yes Man, and will only do what Haruhi wants to do. Yuki is the observer and takes no proactive actions even though she is quite bored. Kyon is living one loop at a time and not remembering the previous loops for the most part. He's tired and fustrated. At the end he knows she's not satified, but is at a loss for what she wants since they did everything she could think of. Also they failed a whole lot of times before the end even in the novel. While we only get to read the end loop in the novel, they still failed all those other times even when they knew they were in a loop. So therefore there must be a reason they failed. Their general submissive nature when it comes to Haruhi would seem to be the best cause for this failure. All reaction and no action.

Also this is Kyoto Animation. They are best at doing adaptations. They don't generally stray far from the source material because going too far off can make it difficult to continue faithful adaptations later on in a series. Especially if you somehow royally screw up the personality or motives of a character as showing anyone elses POV might have done in this case.

Also consider that Kyon does think of his homework in every loop...on the night of August 18th. He probably doesn't think of it again until it is staring him in the face on August 31st (or perhaps the evening of August 30th). Because honestly, who wants to do there homework during the summer when you could be having fun instead? It is probably also the homework that causes Kyon to no think of anything on the 31st. He's busy with that and from what I remember of homework, it takes a lot of of you (especialy since he was doing 3 days of it in a day), so the thought of "to hell with this, I don't care anymore" is quite understandable.

[Akka]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

Because if they tried to make the arc interesting the point would have been lost.

If the point of the arc was to be boring, then it's a completely stupid idea to begin with. You can rationalize it however you want, the very concept of "making a boring entertainment" is absurd by itself (especially for such a long period).

Much more interesting and keeping the idea is to give a feeling of despair and captitivity, which doesn't imply boredom. Seeing them actually TRYING but failing would keep the feeling of "we can't escape", but would at least make the show worthy of being watched.

[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.

[Myssa Rei]

Originally Posted by Ithekro

Also this is Kyoto Animation. They are best at doing adaptations. They don't generally stray far from the source material because going too far off can make it difficult to continue faithful adaptations later on in a series. Especially if you somehow royally screw up the personality or motives of a character as showing anyone elses POV might have done in this case.

*coughs* Yuki-nee! Yuki-nee! *coughs*

Where a quiet library keeper becomes a Yakuza-lite anego. It's a minor thing in the context of the adaptation, but it's quite different from its source, certainly.

Yeah, original material hit and miss, definitely.

[Ithekro]

Well with Yuki-nee, it works because after her arc ends, you really don't see her again for anything that involves the plot, and they knew that in advance.

I still contend that Endless Eight was meant to be boring. There is no other reason aside from filling episode count to extent this arc to eight episodes other than to make it boring. If it followed the "lets try something different" each week that resulted in a fail, it would have been no different than any other series time loop shows/movies. This is "unique" in its boredom.

[Kogetsu Shirogane]

Originally Posted by Ninjacat

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.

She didn't do anything in the novel at loop 15,498 beyond telling them of the loop number and any differences. At that point, she most likely considered or tried every possible option she can think of and gave up. Just see Higurashi for details on that.

[Myssa Rei]

Originally Posted by Kogetsu Shirogane

Just see Higurashi for details on that.

Even Gods feel despair.

Also, someone mentioned previously that, while Yuki has been shown to have the capability of being pro-active, most of the time she acts like someone who, if not following the orders of her superior to the letter, follows the orders because her hands are tied, and any action on her part would mean her neck literally on the chopping block. She could have technically wanted to do something about Haruhi looping the timeline endlessly, and still do nothing but observe as any sort of action (like throwing Haruhi off the apartment roof) would have resulted in a mission failure.

Originally Posted by chikorita157

What's done is done... Hopefully the last 6 episodes won't be as bad.

Sssh, don't jinx it! We might get a 'Melancholy of Hirasawa Yui' art shift again.