The Cockamamie of Haruhi Suzumiya
An editorial by Al Cone

(WARNING: The following is extremly scray. Viower excretion is advisd.)

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is the worst anime I have ever seen. It's one of those things that you watch, and you can tell that it sucks, and you cannot understand how or why it gained the kind of popularity that it did, but then you look at all the rabid devotees who proclaim it to be the best thing since buttsex, and you just want to drink until the hurting stops.

Now, I'm not the first person call this show overrated and examine what makes it one of the most fucking pointless and stupidly-written cartoons of the last decade. The truth is, a lot more people hate this series than its vast popularity would seem to suggest. It's a lot like Twilight in that way. Actually, it's a lot like Twilight in a lot of ways...but maybe we'll get to that later.

No, Haruhi has been dissected, analyzed, cock-slapped around and buried six feet under the ground numerous times by numerous people. Over and over again. It's a lot like Twilight in that way too. But watching all of those reviews, and listening to all those analyses, I gradually had myself one of those epiphany things that you hear so much about. As exhaustive as some of these reviews were, they never brought voice to my own complaints about the show.

Like any reasonable middle-American, I sat down and waited patiently for somebody to say something that roughly encapsulates my feelings on the subject. But nobody ever did. So we're gonna talk about that right now, you an' me. Let's discuss the reasons why Haruhi Suzumiya is such a fantastically stupid show. And let's do a good job of it.

Reason #1: The main character is an asshole.

This has actually been pointed out a lot, likely because it's pretty damn hard to miss. Haruhi Suzumiya as a character is rude, abrasive, oblivious to other people's feelings and needs, and seems to believe that the universe revolves around her. She's right, of course, but that's a whole 'nother basket of worms...

Her whole character centers on being this free-spirited nonconformist who does her own thing to the chagrin and confusion of her peers and superiors. And in a country like Japan, being a free spirit is tantamount to being a hideous demon octopus who violently rapes catgirls with his many suction cup-covered tentacles while shitting all over a heavily-muscled kung fu warrior from outer space. No, wait...they're okay with that other one. The demon octopus one, I mean.

So anyway, that's Haruhi's shtick. She's a free spirit. Now, I can get on board with this. I like characters who march to the beat of their own drum. The problem is that it's a lousy beat to march to.

Haruhi displays several qualities that are supposed to endear her to the audience, but in reality just make her out to be an overall shitty person. Our shining heroine embodies such qualities as:

- An unrepentant love of violence for its own sake.

- A penchant for cruelly manipulating others' thoughts and emotions to further her own gains.

- The ability to treat the people around her as objects for her own amusement without remorse.

- Habitual lying to get what she wants.

- A lack of understanding of clear and imminent danger.

- An alarming, constant lust for power, dominance, and control.

...I could go on, but that's a look at the tip of the horribly unlikeable iceberg that is Haruhi Suzumiya.

They actually have a word for people like Haruhi, I think. You know, people who demonstrate the traits that I just outlined above. It's a term you might recognize: "Sociopath."

Of course, we're not supposed to realize that. No, we as an audience are supposed to find Haruhi's outlandish and violent behavior amusing. We're not supposed to become conscious of the fact that she's a deeply troubled and unstable person. Or maybe we are, and we're supposed to find it cute. Is that it? We must be expected to laugh along with her when she does things like:

- Rape her fellow classmates.

- Concuss her fellow classmates.

- Blackmail and publicly castigate her fellow classmates.

- Cause the universe to destroy itself.

Haha, you never know what adorable antics that girl will get herself into next.

Now, making your main character an asshole--it can be done well. But you actually have to put a little bit more thought into it. You have to express redeeming traits in her personality somewhere. Show us that there's more to her than just what we get to see. People in the industry usually call that

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!

It's when you flesh out the character in question, and let the viewers know their hopes, their dreams, their plights and struggles, and show us what drives and motivates them and all their actions. It gives the characters depth and makes them relatable. To be fair to Haruhi, they actually do this pretty early on. In one of the early episodes, she tells us what it is that makes her the way she is. And is it ever a doozy of an explanation.

See, it turns out that one time, when she was really little, her dad took her to a baseball game. While she was there, she figured out that there were lots of people in the world. And then she had some kind of existential crisis. And that's why she's such a bitch.

...



Another part of constructing an interesting and relatable character is that you have to make sure the character grows over time. If they stay the same way the entire series through, then it's kind of a waste of a character, don't you think? People change pretty radically over time in real life, especially when placed in new or strange circumstances. And The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is all about putting Haruhi in a new, strange circumstance. She's never actually had friends before, yet now she does. That's a pretty significant change for a teenage girl.

When you develop your asshole, you want to demonstrate some real, positive, tangible change. Not just like, little stuff, like now she'll put blankets on people when they're sleeping...that's just not enough. Or, like, showing us that she gets shy when people thank her for playing in their stupid rock bands. What's that bullshit? You can't just give us singular, isolated incidents and say "Okay, she's changed now. That one seemingly insignificant action shows that she's a whole different person."

The character of Dr. Cox on that TV show Gray's Anatomy is a perfect example. At the start of the show he's a narcissistic, self-loathing and self-sabotaging doctor trapped in a go-nowhere life with no friends, no family--no meaningful relationships at all, actually. He's generally a lonely and miserable person. But then his life starts to change. He reconnects with his ex-wife, starts a family, and grows closer to people he would otherwise have pushed away entirely. We see him develop as a character based on the way he adapts to the situations presented to him. We see him demonstrate a loving and warm side towards his son...we watch him look after Zach Braff and take him under his wing...we find out about his past with his abusive, drunken father, and how deeply that screwed him up. We as an audience learn about this fictional person and watch him change as he is faced with new challenges and new experiences, so that by the end of the series, he's a completely different person--a better person--than the person he was in the beginning.

Now, some might say that Haruhi changes radically from the person she started out as. And that's a fair assertion to make. But let's see how well that claim holds up under scrutiny.

So, in the beginning of the series, Haruhi is totally isolated from everybody around her. But then she gradually gathers a bunch of stupid jerks to boss around. So now she's not so isolated anymore. Huh. Well, that is development, I have to admit that. And you can really see the dramatic impact this has on her, with the way it alters her behavior radically in the second half of the show. I mean, it's not like she does things like, oh, say:

- Attempt to force-feed one of her friends rancid, bacteria-infested food past its expiration date, possibly leading to food poisoning, and eventually death.

- Drop-kick a classmate in the face based on an outlandish assumption that he's a ninja warlord or something.

- Rape one of her friends.

- Send away the one person who would stop her from raping one of her friends, expressly so that she can rape one of her friends.

- Treat one of her friends like a sex toy.

- Use said friend's endowment for many nefarious purposes.

- Claim sole credit for unraveling a bullshit murder mystery...when she in fact had almost nothing to do with it.

- Go completely over the heads of her friends and enlist them in tedious activity after tedious activity--oftentimes when they have no prior experience or expertise in said activity--and then become furious with them when they perform exactly how any normal person would expect someone with no experience in said activity to perform.

- Cause the universe to destroy itself.

The fact that she does none of these things in the second half of the anime clearly demonstrates her transformation as a charac--wait...wait, you mean she actually does all of those things? I--Really? ALL of them? You're sure? Oh... Well, I guess she really doesn't change at all.

Some of you might make a number of arguments about why it's not fair to judge her growth after one season, or that her growth is more clearly demonstrated in the novels from which the anime was adapted. Okay, fair enough. Let's address those arguments.

First of all, it's totally fair to evaluate her character growth after one season, because the anime was only supposed to be one season. From the outset, it was intended to be a self-contained storyline that would wrap up and conclude and never be spoken of again. I don't think anybody (including the producers) could have predicted that the Haruhi anime would become as popular as it did, and they certainly didn't plan ahead based on that prediction, as evidenced by the shitty storytelling. But we'll get to that part later.

The point is, yes, I can damn well judge Haruhi to be a terrible character after watching her lack of development after the first season. That was the intent of the producers.

Second, I DON'T READ NO GODDAMN JAPANESE LIGHT NOVELS, BECAUSE I DON'T READ GODDAMN JAPANESE!! And even if I COULD read the language, I'm not concerned with the light novels! I'm watching the fucking show! If her development and growth is so obvious in the books, then they should have adapted that element in the anime better, instead of making her an unlikeable fuckbitch without any redeeming qualities! Besides, I shouldn't have to read some extensive back story that never made it into the show to get the truth behind it all. If it were that important, then it should have been written into the cartoon.

Oh yeah, and I guess Haruhi is basically a god, or something...yeah. That comes up a couple of times...but that really doesn't have much to do with her so much as it has more to do with the people around her... Strange as that may sound.

Reason #2: They waste a perfectly good story.

At the core of its story, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is about three rival organizations wrestling for control over an omnipotent deity who doesn't realize her true nature. Her whims subconsciously alter the fabric of reality, and so the groups must simultaneously put aside their resentment toward one another to keep her content with reality so as to avoid her blowing the universe up, while at the same time trying to utilize her for their own goals. Taken at face value, that sounds like a pretty cool premise for a show. I'd watch it.

The problem is that this principle concept really has no bearing on the show. We're told that there's some sort of clandestine power struggle between various organizations, but we never see it happen. In fact, the show seems pretty dead-set on taking these extraordinary people and putting them in stupid sitcom situations that are totally uninteresting. It's like if you took Iron Man, and instead of having Tony Stark use his suit to beat the crap out of Mickey Rourke, you had him use it to, like...repair the septic tank...or bathe the elderly...or play baseball. You know, some menial bullshit that really underutilizes his full potential. And that's basically this cartoon in a nutshell. It's menial bullshit that underutilizes its full potential.

So our protagonist is this kid named Kyon, played by Crispin Glover.



He just happens to meet Haruhi one day, and they start talking, and he accidentally gives her the idea to start her own club, because apparently none of the clubs at school are cool enough for her. So then she starts gathering up jerks to be in her stupid club for jerks. First they get this purple-haired chick named Nagato...



What the hell is it with Japan and rainbow-haired chicks anyway? Is it dyed? Or is purple supposed to be her natural hair color? Do you think she's purple down there too? I don't know. Maybe someone should check.

But see, Nagato's really, like, an alien robot with the power to manipulate the fabric of space and time! No, not like Haruhi, because Nagato can't...do it...a lot, or something. I don't know. They never really adequately explain what she is, or how it is she's able to do what she does. She's a robot from outer space that works for...someone...I don't know. This shit is impossible to figure out.

Later, Haruhi rounds up this other girl named Mikuru, whose character is centered around her big-ass tits. Haruhi basically wants her around because she likes to motorboat those puppies...this is the girl that is always getting raped, by the way. Surprise, surprise.

Mikuru basically exists as fanservice. Haruhi tears her clothes off and dresses her up in humiliating outfits, then parades her around school for the perverse pleasure of the students and faculty. At one point she even shames Mikuru so completely, and breaks her sense of self-worth so thoroughly, that she just leaves the school and doesn't come back for like...days. She finally returns only because it's her mission...

Oh yeah, she's a time traveler. From the future. I guess that's kind of important. And she came back in time because...um...they detected a time-quake. I don't know what the hell that means, but it sounds really stupid.

Apparently, this time-quake made it impossible to travel back in time past the point where it happened. I don't know how that works, because you'd think that, like, it being the future and all, they'd never have been able to travel past that point in the first place, because it would have already happened, or...I don't know, temporal mechanics never make any fucking sense. Just forget it. If you want to watch bullshit time travel stories then you're better off watching Star Trek reruns anyway.

But I digress. Bottom line, it's Mikuru's job to find out what the deal is with this time-quake nonsense.

...Except we never really see her do anything besides, you know, get raped. Oh, and she's got this thing for Kyon...and Kyon quite obviously wants to motorboat those puppies too. But because Haruhi's in love with Kyon and is always on the rag, that makes her jealous enough to blow up the universe. So yeah...looks to me like having Mikuru around just causes more problems than it's worth. Maybe they should have sent someone else back in time. Someone who Kyon wouldn't fall in love with. Maybe they should have sent, like, Kyle Reese...



That would have been kind of cool...Except I guess they need him to fall in love with the agent so they can manipulate him or something like that...so that would have caused problems too...

Then you have this other asshole named Itsuki Koizumi, who's played by the Black Power Ranger.



He's got magic superpowers, but he can only use them under certain circumstances while in certain dimensions that Haruhi subconsciously creates whenever her vag starts bleeding particularly badly. So he's basically pretty useless. All he really does is provide countless hours of exposition to the audience and smile a lot. He's not very interesting. He COULD have been, mind you, because we do occasionally get subtle hints that he's this creepy bad guy. Unfortunately, that barely-there subplot never really goes anywhere and is seldom brought up after a certain point. It's a wasted opportunity, just like everything else on this damn show.

So as you can see, this show gives its audience an interesting premise, then goes about it in the absolute worst way possible, mishandling nearly every aspect of it and ruining what should have been a kickass TV show. And in all fairness, the first six episodes are quite good, and make up a complete and well-told story arc. We meet the characters, we're introduced to an engaging conflict that eventually gets resolved, there's a developing love story between Kyon and Haruhi...it's basically a complete story.

Damn, you know what, the show should have ended right there. They could have even combined those episodes into a movie and released it theatrically. It still wouldn't have been great, but at least it would have been better than what we got. And that way the writers could continue to tell the story in future theatrical releases and expand on the world that they introduced.

Instead, the show goes on for ten more episodes that go absolutely nowhere, do nothing to expand the story presented in the first six episodes, and just generally serve as padding and filler. Padding and filler is supposed to come DURING the main story arc, not after, you retards! How the hell do you pad out a show that's already ended?! That'd be like if the end of Battlestar Galactica was followed by twenty additional episodes where Starbuck plays backgammon.

So instead of continuing the story from where we left off, we get a lot of cutesy-ass one-shot episodes that make me want to kick Haruhi in the teeth. More than I already did, I mean. Instead of more episodes focusing on the hidden agendas of the characters, or maybe building upon the budding romance between Kyon and Haruhi--you know, interesting stuff--we get episodes like:

- The SOS Brigade plays baseball. Oh, I forgot to mention, they call their stupid club for jerks the SOS Brigade. And for no reason whatsoever, Haruhi likes to wear an armband that is a blatant visual reference to a Nazi Swastika armband. Like I said, megalomaniacal tendencies...

- The SOS Brigade fights a giant space cricket inside a computer. It comes completely out of left field, is never adequately explained, and nobody ever mentions it again. Hot damn, that's some great writing right there.

- The SOS Brigade plays StarCraft.

- The SOS Brigade solve a murder mystery. Spoiler: It turns out that there actually was no murder...just like with O.J.

- The school has a fair...of boring.

- Kyon buys a heater while Nagato reads a book. Meanwhile, Haruhi rapes Mikuru. Guess which one of these plots gets the most attention? I'll give you a hint: Nagato reading the book.

Nothing pisses me off more than a show that wastes a totally good premise. Just shit or get off the pot, you stupid--

Reason #3: This show is ridiculously popular.

I like to compare this show to Twilight because it sucks ass for so many reasons, yet it's among the most popular franchises out there within its fanbase. Ask almost anybody these days what their favorite anime is, and The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya will be either at or close to the top of their list. It's actually making a strong case for "Most Overrated Anime of all Time," a title that Neon Genesis Evangelion has held onto pretty securely up to this point. I actually think that Haruhi is worse, though, because at least Evangelion occasionally has giant robots kicking the shit out of one another. Also, I really like that Shinji kid. Unconscious chicks can't say no...



But why is Haruhi so popular? Is it the plot? Is it the story? Is it the characters? Fuck no. It's that stupid dance that they do at the end of every episode.

Now, if that sounds like a cynical absolute statement, that's only because it is. However, it's also the truth. I recently sat down and watched the end sequence of Haruhi Suzumiya with my friend, Fred Phelps.



We both agreed on one thing: Those stupid Jews have got to g--

the animation for the ending sequence is of far higher quality than the rest of the episode.

Granted, that's not to say that the show looks bad. It's actually got a very aesthetically pleasing art style. Nor is it unusual for an anime's opening or closing to have a different animation style from the rest of the episode, or be made with a higher budget that grants an increased attention to detail. But it's not supposed to eclipse the quality of the episode's animation, nor is it supposed to be more entertaining than the whole of the episode itself!

Not to say that the dance is entertaining. It's one of the stupidest things ever, actually. But I guarantee you that there's more happening in that minute and a half of dancing than in the entire twenty-two minutes of episode that you just watched. It's sort of like My Heart Will Go On, the song at the end of that movie, Titanic. You remember that? Yeah...yeah, that movie was swell...

Anyway, everybody was singing that fucking song. Everyone loved it. It was part of the Titanic fever that hit way back when. To this day, it's still the part about Titanic that most quickly comes to mind when you think of the movie. That fucking song. That's because it was meant to be memorable. Just like the stupid dance at the end of Haruhi.

See, the Japanese have this thing called moe.



It means, like, really really cute...or, like, appealing...for a variety of reasons...okay, I don't really know the exact definition. I don't speak no Japanese, remember? But I knows it when I sees it. And that's the appeal behind that goddamn dance. It's cute! And exciting! And the animation is so fluid! And they sing a stupid song and make silly poses--holy shit! I gotta buy this show! And every box set that comes out! Because then maybe I can see that dumbass song and dance at the end of every episode!

Because really, when you get right down to it, the anime itself is pretty incidental. It's really just a vehicle for more of the same loosely-related J-Pop bullshit that has no bearing on the show itself...which is so deeply entrenched in anime these days, it's fuckin' ridiculous...

Oh, and there's also all that crap about them releasing the same episode over and over again and calling it a complete season, but I won't get into that. By this point, I think I've driven home my message about as thoroughly as possible: Haruhi Suzumiya sucks and you suck for liking it.

Al Cone - 9/10/10