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The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱
2006 · TV series · 23 min episodes · 1 season
ComedyAnimationScience FictionFantasy
I thought that when I entered high school, my days of believing in aliens, time travelers and ESPers were going to be over. That is, until she introduced herself. Claiming to be interested in only aliens, time travelers, and ESPers, Haruhi Suzumiya was the strangest girl I've met in a long time... Before I knew what's going on, I've been dragged into her weird club, and it looks like I'm not the only one who has been drafted into this "SOS Brigade" of hers, because there are three other students who don't seem to be so ordinary themselves.
1 positive1 negative3 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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5 comments on Hacker News
I watched The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya recently. The main character can bend reality to her wishes. She is unaware of this. But it makes her basically a monster, because the other characters are locked in a constant struggle to prevent her from getting bored or angry, in case she remakes the world without them in it. By the end of the series this is not resolved at all, she is still a monster with the other characters in her thrall, it's just that the last episode is somewhat calmer as if they've arrived at a kind of stability. Also there's eight episodes in the middle that are all nearly identical, because they get stuck in a time loop due to her unwillingness to permit the end of summer.
Slightly offtopic: Has anyone tried watching Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in a random order?
Does it tell a story with a beginning and an end? Or is it more like season 1 of the Simpsons, which you could also watch in any order you want.
The truth is kids are resiliant and not stupid. generations "survived" these types of stereotypes and in 20 years someone else will be wringing their hands about the misguided stereotypes the current crop of acceptable movies is involved in (including everything you listed as a positive).
I would never hesitate to allow a child to watch any disney movie, but I definitely would hesitate to allow a child to watch Berserk or a lot of the borderline loli content. I remember watching Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya and waiting for the hammer to drop on the PE teacher who was constantly creeping on the teenage girls. When the season ended and it never happened I was completely confused, it wasn't until years later I found out that's an actual trope that shows up in a lot of anime.
What I'm saying is that I don't disagree with you that there are plenty of anime that's perfectly fine for children to watch, but the other posters concern is absolutely valid too, there's a lot of anime children shouldn't be watching (opening scene of elfin lied anyone?) and your hand wringing about Disney movies not being perfect doesn't move that needle in the slightest.
> "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is a 14-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2006.
The first version to be correctly. They later added another 14 episodes, but instead of calling it a new season, they mixed in the new episodes between the old episodes and rebroadcasted it as one complete series.
As a special "joke", they also had a timeloop-story spanning multiple episodes, with each episodes telling the same story with slight changes in the story, and individual art-style, meaniung each episodes was produced new not just recycled from the first episode. The "joke" with this story was, that of the 14 new episodes, the timeloop-story filled 8(!) episodes and went under the funny name "Endless Eight". I think someone was fired himself for this.
For those not familiar with the series in question, there's a reason why, if you're going to choose a TV series to discuss permutations, you'd choose Haruhi.
"The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" is a 14-episode anime adaptation which aired in 2006. Unusually, it broadcast its episodes not in chronological order, but in a mixed order, but for good theatrical reason; the series comprises a main plot arc, and various self-contained episodes which chronologically occur after it. Rather than have the climax of the series come halfway through, the self-contained episodes are distributed in between the episodes of the main plot arc. It sounds mad, but it actually worked very well.
This idiosyncrasy was explicitly referenced by the episodes themselves: the "next episode" preview at the end of every episode has one of the characters say "The next episode is episode X", then another character says "Wrong! The next episode is episode Y", where X and Y are the numbers according to broadcast and chronological order.
Amusingly the story gets more complicated from here. After the series was unexpectedly popular in the anglosphere, it got licensed for an official release. After the contract was signed and it was too late to change it, the company which licensed it noticed the contract had a stock clause in it requiring the episodes to be released on DVD in chronological order. They were unable to get this changed, whereas the strong fan preference was for the broadcast order. As a partial workaround, I recall they released a special edition with the same episodes on two sets of discs: one in broadcast order and one in chronological order.
But the DVD "chronological order" isn't quite chronological either; one of the episodes is a show-within-a-show, a film made by the characters of the series. This happens chronologically late in the show, but it is the first episode in both the broadcast and DVD order (which makes for an extremely confusing introduction to the series).
So there are at least three different plausible ways to watch the series: broadcast order, chronological order, and DVD order (which is almost like chronological order but not quite). This absurd legacy makes the series rather the obvious choice for discussing permutations of episodes. (My own preference is for yet another permutation: broadcast order, but with the aforementioned first episode moved to before the 12th episode, which relates to it.)