Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - The Haruhi That You Might Have Forgotten
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Silver Kirin
Posts: 1757 |
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I still find it hard to believe that The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya anime is already 20 years old. I already made some comments on an article about its impact back in 2020, so I hope I'm not repeating myself, but while I actually never watched it, I still remember it being referenced in various places on the Internet back in the late 2000s and 2010s. I actually don't know why I never give the series a try, I think the reason why I did not watch it back in the day, aside from the fact that it was never dubbed/licensed where I live, though I could have tried to watch it on YouTube or by other means, I was in high-school when the show was in its peak, and anime series focused about teenagers in high-school didn't interest me back then, I watched tons of anime since an early age, but I always liked more action oriented shows, like shonen and mecha series, it wasn't until I reached my adulthood when I began watching more slice-of-life series. Though just a couple of years ago Haruhi Suzumiya managed to get an official Spanish dub, though in the European dialect not Latin America, so I decided to give it a try, but I only watched two episodes before I had to do some other stuff and I never continued, maybe one day I'll watch it.
Don't know if younger anime fans are familiar with Haruhi Suzumiya, you'd think that in the current age where there's been a resurgence in nostalgia for the 2000s and the "early YouTube years" a show like Haruhi would also have a sort of resurgence, but I myself haven't seen too many mentions, and I constantly see tons of posts on my Instagram for shows such as Azumanga Daioh, Ouran High School Host Club and Lucky Star. |
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Kougeru
 Posts: 5801 |
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Very well said on pretty much everything. I've been rewatching it in-sync with the original airing, in broadcast order. And as weird as it is, I do still believe it's the optimal way of first experiencing it. On the 2nd viewing, then do "season 2" is full chronological and DO NOT skip Endless Eight. Feeling even a small portion of what Nagato felt is literally the point and all these Endless Eight haters are truly reductive - and not EVERY episode is the same!! There's small differences that should be appreciated. It's truly a magical franchise and modern anime owes so much to it. I can't even begin to start going into how much influence it had. But one thing I really appreciate about is how "of its time" it is. Watching it again really feels like I'm back in the mid 00s and not because it's "dated" or the art style but because of the setting and how much the real-world of the time influenced the anime. It feels like we lost so much as everything went digital over the last few decades.
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Lizuka
 Posts: 429 |
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I last rewatched through the show a couple of years ago and I still love it on the whole, though I only watched the first, second, and last episodes of Endless Eight. It really is just a boring, tedious slog that smothers the second season, even just watching those three episodes was a chore.
Though being completely fair here I also think Someday in the Rain is really boring. I think it kind of shows why the formula for the series exists, it's the one that most breaks away from just being from Kyon's perspective and it feels like nothing actually happens in it. |
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Oggers
 Posts: 467 Location: Ontario, Canada |
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I was never really into Haruhi Suzumiya even when it was at the height of its popularity (as I've mentioned during previous threads about the series, I'm not a big fan of Haruhi herself, or of how she and the other characters treat Mikuru), but as others have said, I also can't deny that it has a lot of strengths that contributed to it blowing up as much as it did, especially among otaku of the late 2000s (as evidenced by Lucky Star, though I admit that all the Haruhi references in that show felt a little too self-congratulatory on KyoAni's part).
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varmintx
 Posts: 1320 Location: Covington, KY |
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Were you afraid that telling me Haruhi is 20 years-old wasn't gonna get the job done? Did you have to also throw in the fact that Project A-ko is 40 years-old just to make sure I completely crumble to dust?
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Xavon
Posts: 391 Location: Minnesota |
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I never minded the Endless Eight.
I just wish they had done more with it. Like instead of just a quick segment, dedicate some episodes to one or two of the events. Show 10-15 minutes of the bowling. Have an ocean with 7 minutes of fishing and 7 minutes of ocean swimming. Also the ending of the light novels was kinda meh. I wish they would have done more. A lot more. Like second year of high school more. |
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Eilavel
Posts: 477 |
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Look, endless eight got a lot of production effort, but it was bad storytelling. Time loops are not a novel phenomenon in fiction, there are plenty of examples that very effectively communicate the same ennui without, essentially, wasting my time.
Well, probably worth noting thats someone who thought Haruhi was perfectly fine (humour hit and miss, plot stuff and production quality usually fun, was never very charmed by Haruhi) but wouldn't have really said I was a particular fan. Its probably a shame it consumes the discourse... but hey ho. |
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quoss
Posts: 130 |
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Lovely article. Touched on so much. I've been wanting to rewatch Haruhi too. Indeed she was my time too and it always baffles me how she has disappeared. I ask practically every new person I meet if they watch anime; if they say yes, which. Where did our people go? You could not get away from Haruhi and Lucky Star, they were so everywhere it was annoying. Now... ??
Endless Eight is a masterpiece. One thing that wasn't touched on here is the OST. Listen to those trumpets and try not to feel. |
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db999
Posts: 437 |
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I’ve always really liked Haruhi, note if you can try and find the original broadcast order for season 1 as that is the optimal way to watch it. While I do sometimes wish that it’d get a remake or that we’d get another season or 2 to finish out the story of the light novels, The Disappearance movie does work great as an overall ending to the series, given that it ends with the conclusion of a character arc for our main character Kyon.
I also love the Endless 8 and I always watch all 8 episodes, but I do recognize that it’s really only for a small niche of people. Specifically if you do a lot of video editing, or love watching multiple different productions of stage plays, or if you’re for instance someone who watched every version of Blade Runner just to see the differences between them. What I love about the Endless 8, is how different each episode feels from each other. Yes most of the same events happen in each episode, but everything else is completely different. The music, the animation, the vocal performances, the lengths of scenes. Take just the scene of Kyon, Mikuru, and Koizumi learning from Nagato about the time loop situation. Depending on the episode it can be played for comedy, for horror, for drama. But I do realize that if you’re not one of those kinds of people that love analyzing how minute differences can completely change the feel of a story it’ll probably do nothing for you. |
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dm
 Subscriber Posts: 1714 |
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My favorite version of Endless Eight was the edit some Youtuber did which had a gallery of all eight episodes running on the screen simultaneously.
At the time, it felt like a raised middle finger to the fans who had hoped that more of the novels would get adapted — a statement that Kyoto Animation would prefer to be doing something else (from the animators’ perspective, doing eight renditions of the same basic story with the same set of characters is little different from doing eight different episodes of eight different stories). The novel, as I recall, only did a couple of iterations on the incidents. It’s endless eight only because of the visual pun of “8” and “ ♾️”. I don’t remember — was the scene in the novels where Kyon snaps and tells Haruhi to lay off abusing Mikuru ever adapted into animation? |
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Triltaison
 Posts: 937 |
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I was in college when Haruhi dropped and so I was also there at the ground floor. Online forums and places like LiveJournal had Haruhi as the soup du jour for yeeeeaaaars. It was truly inescapably huge. Definitely really enjoyed the series, and broadcast order is the only order I ever use for it. I was also in the minority that enjoyed Endless Eight back then.
One thing that probably helped it fade so sharply from the fandom's collective was the death of Bandai in the US, honestly. The Haruhi DVDs were incredibly expensive for several years after the exit from the market and it wasn't easily available to the casual fan. I had a duplicate copy of the second season that I remember selling for something like $120-$200 when it was actually going for much more on eBay at the time, and that's a hefty chunk to blind buy into. I think it started getting a bit more traction once Funimation license rescued it, but who knows how long those discs will stay alive under CR. I just kinda think of it like Sailor Moon in the US: absolutely huge for a generation, but then unavailable to the one following it because of licensing reasons, so it then lost a lot of its momentum in staying relevant to new fans. Older series tend to stay relevant if they successfully cross the multigenerational divide. |
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BalmungHHQ
Posts: 709 |
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I was a high schooler at the time Haruhi aired. I collected Bandai's DVD and shared them with my school's anime club.
Hard to believe it's been 20 years... I am rewatching Haruhi as one of the shows I'm following this season, in its original 2006 order. (Along with Higurashi When They Cry, which premiered in the same Spring 2006 season.) |
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Covnam
 Posts: 4372 |
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Endless 8 was certainly an experience watching it as it came out. It was pretty unbelievable seeing the "same" thing come out each week.
Even if it was annoying at the time, in retrospec, I have to respect them for putting something like that out. They could have just put up the same episode up each week or just made minor changes, but instead each episode was new. Doing the same story over again 8 times probably got a lot of push back, but it's quite unique and will probably never be done again. @dm Thanks for the suggestion of looking for all 8 episodes in one. It really helps show all the differences =) |
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lucio542
 Posts: 341 Location: Brazil |
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I just remember that i skipped endless eight when i watched the anime for the first time in 2014 because i thought there was a bug on the site i watched or it was just a bad upload.
Until this day i haven't watched more than 1 episode of this arc (watched everything else), one day i will correct this...but well to have the motivation to just watch 8 episodes of almost the same things surely is hard. |
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Hiroki not Takuya
 Posts: 3028 |
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Greetings! I come from the year 2009 and I can say no one needs to see Endless Eight other than the first and 8th iteration and the last episodes of S2 are missable, as is the Disappearance movie. S1 is fine as it was and belongs to a fondly remembered past and should remain so...EOL
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