Haruhi’s investigation of Ryoko Asakura’s sudden “transfer” draws a blank. Kyon, of course, makes the immediate connection with Yuki. Haruhi explains her melancholy which, for me, was the highlight of this episode and I ended up feeling very melancholic as well. Itsuki shows Kyon the interior of a sealed dimension and his ESPer powers. Great set-up for next week’s finale.
An addendum to Ep 12. I was LOL when I finally noticed that The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina was given more than half (five out of nine) viewing slots, reflecting Haruhi’s negotiating skills with the Film Club and the Film Club’s realization that the movie, so crap that it’s a classic, will draw in the LFBs.
Another display of the Cavewoman Haruhi Drag.
Loved how Yuki just shook her head and nodded in response to Haruhi’s questions about Asakura and then gave Kyon the sweatdrop by staring at him when Haruhi asked about her glasses. “Be careful” just reminded me of Donald Rumsfeld’s unknown unknowns - it’s a great concept but not particularly useful for direct application.
This scene flipped my personal trauma switch a few times because I’ve experienced what Haruhi is talking about. Though the circumstances were different, the end result was similar - a sense of ennui that arises from the realization that one’s individuality can be rendered meaningless by the aggregation of a huge number of individualities. Of course, one way out is through having meaningful relationships with those around you whom you regard as peers - Kojève makes this point in his interpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic: the master has an innate need to be recognised but as the slave is not a peer, the master can never gain the full recognition he craves and thus degenerates. Haruhi considers aliens, time-travellers and ESPers to have inalienable uniqueness and thus could bestow upon her the recognition that she craves. In addition, there is also the argument that romantic love is the ultimate form of peer-to-peer recognition - which is where Kyon comes in.
The flashback scene with the swing reminded me of Shinji Ikari’s folding chair of despair in the final two episodes of Evangelion and the use of the train with all its associated sounds further strengthens what seems to be a very deliberate attempt by KyoAni to claim Gainax’s mantle. Oh Gainax, Oh Gainax! / How thy virtue has decayed! / The past cannot be forewarned / The future cannot be pursued / Let it be, let it be! / Perilious is the fate of those who make anime!
Adding to the melancholy evoked by Haruhi and the decline of Gainax was the evening scenes of a Japanese city in the backgrounds. The colours, the lines, the sounds all remind me of how I would have liked to make a trip to Tokyo this October but am probably will not be able to (and in the bigger picture - it would be a good thing that I won’t be able to go).
Hello, Arakawa-san, aka the Butler from Lone Island Syndrome.
While this episode is nowhere as energy-filled as the Day of Sagitarius or Live A Live, I thought it was a really important in adding more substance to Haruhi’s characterization, it was also great mood setter with the background scenes, sounds and very good use of music as well as a prelude to what’s a stake and the events of the next (and final) episode.
KyoAni’s played with the episode credits again - at the end of Ep 5, her name and Kyon’s appeared together and extra large after falling to draw that pairing during the two morning and afternoon searches. Now her name’s on its own. Either it’s the sense of isolation that she’s feeling right now (and thus the appearance of the sealed dimension and Shinjin) or her assertion of (lonely) individuality.
Bravo…Bravo..what an excellent review. I’m looking more forward to this episode than I was before now.
Introspection on the part of the main characters is what I’ve been waiting for in this series, specifically Haruhi. For that matter, character development and interaction has always been my favorite part of any anime series. I don’t think I’m alone in that regard.
Oh yeah, sweet Kojeve reference. I’ll have to read up on him, thanks for the link.
Damn, talk about DETAIL - I didn’t even realize this till you pointed it out… and now it’s bloody clear. KyoAni’s determined to pack as many Easter Eggs and hidden surprises into Haruhi as possible, aren’t they? I guess they love Haruhi as much as we do, or else there’s some lonely genius that comes up with these changes just to screw around with anyone. :D
And, for some reason, this episode just raises the Yuki cuteness factor a bit - although I’m wondering if that means she’s a loli-type for the show…
I guess ONE of the reasons why they did the episode shuffling was to end the show with the focus on Haruhi. Notice how Mikuru dominated the early episodes, then it was Yuki, and now it is Haruhi. It makes better sense this way, since Haruhi is the title character. Unlike the novels, the series( or first season as most, including I, will say) does have a last episode, and to have a non-Haruhi-centric last episode would be… an odd decision, to say the least.
Mikuru most probably led the charge because she is the most likely to garner attention( i.e. those bespectacled boys in the theatre? That’s us ;) ). Attention grabbing is crucial for an anime series’ profitability, more so in the beginning when people have no idea what the show is about^¹. Like it or not, Haruhi WAS a brat in the early episodes, and this is a turn-off for some people( one only needs to read back the early posts on SHaruhi). Mikuru was considered to be the damsel-in-distress( cue protective instincts), and Yuki was… Yuki was ignored by a lot of people… cruelly dismissed as a Rei-clone. Q_Q
Yuki then became the transition star, and Mikuru became more or less… wallpaper( or as the local slang goes, a flower vase). Throughout these two phases however, Haruhi is never far behind. Not in the spotlight, but not in the background either. During this middle phase, Yuki was suddenly seen to be awesome by a magnitude of 42°, and KyoAni added more fanboys to their potential viewerbase. Mikuru fans will whine of course, at the lack of attention Mikuru is receiving, but it is too late. They have been hooked. Ensnared from the get go. They will more or less finish the series to get as much ‘Mikuru-chan’ as they can.
By Ep10, if you are STILL not a fan of ‘The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi’(TMoSH), then I guess the series is really not your cup of tea. Pity, but different strokes for different folks, as the saying goes. I mean, I myself have not watched ‘Cowboy Bebop’ yet.
*GASP!* *SHOCK!* *HORROR!*
I also imagine that it would have brain-crippling to have two dialogue-intensive episodes nearly back-to-back. Imagine watching the ‘Yuki and company explains all’ episode just before Ep13. Brain cells will die. In novel form, the reader can take a break, close his eyes for a while, etc… before resuming reading. On TV? What the heck are you going to do?
“Wait! What did he/she say? Pause! Wait, there is no pause! Rewind? ARGGGGH!”
Even if you take fansubs into account, the average human will need to pause and playback many, MANY times, before he/she can absorb in everything. This breaks the immersion, and to do that for two episodes within a short period is a MOOD KILLER( see Fate/Stay Night for an example on how not to do it).
One of the annoying things I find amongst some critics, is that they unknowingly show their ‘dark side’ by not taking into account that the anime is shown on TV… first and foremost. So unjustified whines about pacing and breaks just blatantly reveals that they most probably never watched anime on TV in a long time, if at all…
This is one of the reasons why an anime series can invoke different feelings when watched once a week compared to a marathon session. You want to marathon TMoSH? Try watching it in Haruhi’s sequence. It should prove interesting.
By spacing them out however, and inserting standalone shorts inbetween( even WITHIN the episode itself), KyoAni has enabled its’ audience to recover and slowly digest what has been revealed BEFORE revealing more. Information diarrhea is a bad, BAD thing to do in literature, so kudos to KyoAni for avoiding this pithole by pacing the story.
I will comment ’some’ more once I have seen the fansub. Cheers.
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*1 As TMoSH was from a novel, and not the more traditional manga, most mainstream anime-junkies will not have heard of it before. KyoAni’s gamble of airing Ep00 was BRILLANT in that it generate CONTROVERSY, and we all know how people like to share their two cents worth when it comes to controversy. ;)
“What the f*** is KyoAni smoking? And where can we get some?”
By mindf***ing the anime-viewers, it generated an unholy amount of gossip. Word of mouth will then spread.
“Hey, check this out! It’s so damn bad, it’s funny!”
TMoSH’s first episode was not embraced with open arms, initially. It left many, MANY people speechless( including me). It was only because of word-of-mouth that I decided to pick up this series, and I suspect it was the same for many others. Word-of-mouth is definitely a powerful tool for self-expanding-promotion. It is free advertising for KyoAni!
So the first episode had controversy and the damsel in distress( ‘moe’, as explained in the next episode :P). This sets the stage for the attention grab that KyoAni most probably planned for. No pre-season hype? Hohoho… ‘ph34r the qui3t on3s’.
whoa, interesting easter eggs. I would never have noticed. I stopped sitting thru OPs and EDs for a while since most of them tend to be the same except in certain instances/series.
to me, Yuki is like the very senior cute (school) kid type.
There’s some pattern in the walking mass towards the last frames of it. I guess it’s some kanji. Can you read that?
It’s around 00:07.16. Well, I just looked a stills of it and maybe it’s not actually Japanese but rather a DNA loop.
Yeah, I thought it was a kanji or pattern too but can’t make out what it is.
Okey-dokey, time for part two of my thoughts. It will be short though, since most of I want to say has been said already, and said better by others. The highlight of this episode for me was the monologue by Haruhi. Unlike Itsuki’s monotonous rambling, KyoAni managed to keep Haruhi’s spiel interesting through visual enhancements.
In text form, a seasoned reader can probably speed through Itsuki’s dialogue in less than a minute. In speech however… hoo-boy. Unless Itsuki goes into rap-mode( for which fans will never forgive KyoAni), it is impossible to compress the time needed to say everything any further without cutting out text( which leads to an incomplete dialogue and spoils Itsuki’s characteristics). One of the many pitfalls of exporting text into speech.
In my opinion, Itsuki’s explanation would not have sounded so tedious if they had done it the way they did for Yuki and Haruhi. Splice in related visual metaphors/keys to spark the audience’s interest. When you have a freeway background for more than five minutes, no matter how many layers you put into that background, it is going to get old, and get old fast. Unless of course… it was KyoAni’s intention to make the audience empathise with Kyon. If that is the case, then I retract back my statements… a bit.
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What Haruhi experienced, I think any person with a smidgen of cynicism has experienced before. I remember I used to question myself before I went to sleep what would happen to me after I die. What happens then? Back then, my mental blocking abilities were not so strong, and I often had panic attacks if I thought about it too much. These days, I simply ignore the question whenever it pops up.
Who will remember us after we die? And if anybody does remember us… for how long? Will anybody recognise our existence after 50 years? After a 100 years? After a 1000 years? If eventually nobody remember us… did we actually exist in the first place, or to put it another way, what then, was the point of our existence? They say memories last forever, but memories still need someone to remember them.
So yeah. I can empathise with Haruhi on the topic of insignificance.
Without somebody or something to recognise our existence, it would be as good as though we never existed in the first place. Depressing as it may be( if you think about it too much).
Probably one of the best ways to highlight this is the occurance of natural disasters not in your country/area. I may sound like a heartless cold-blooded bastard, but frankly speaking, I do not really give a damn about the starving Africans, or the victims of drowning in the Indus region. On the flip side, those same people will most probably not give a damn about whatever happens to me, some random dude in South-East Asia.
Furthermore, the value of a person’s importance is always subjective. The Pope is important to Catholics. The Pope is a nobody to Atheists.
In the end, no one can please everybody. You know how often people complain about GONZO not following the source material? Well, get this. People also complain about KyoAni following the source material to a fault. Good grief. There will always be detractors.
I think, for Suzumiya Haruhi, the thing she needs to realise is that in the end, the only person she truly needs to satisfy, is herself. Once a person is content with him/herself, there is little left to regret( if any).
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Yuki’s VA must be laughing all the way to the bank… I refuse to believe that she gets paid per episode. No way. Nobody can be that generous.
“Be careful.” … “Okay, where’s my paycheque?”
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It was Mikuru’s turn to be left out in this episode. :P I wonder if her name was left out the credits?
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I already know what Kyon is going to do to Haruhi in the next episode thanks to poorly disguised spoilers/’hints’, but I have managed to avoid spoilers on what leads up to that event. I hope the effort is worth it.
Cheers.
“The Pope is a nobody to Atheists.”
Nonsense. Maybe you meant “of no importance”. However the pope has always had influence on the Western world. Nowadays, it’s not significant for most but just a few hundred years ago, the vatican was the most important force in Europe - no matter what you believe in it. I don’t what you mean with “remember” but when you’re the pope your name will appear in encyclopedias for centuries to come. You can hardly expect more than becoming a historic person. The people that know you personally die just a few years or decades after you. However, I believe very few people really care about this and not everyone can really relate to Suzumiya’s conflict or take it horribly serious. Well maybe when you’re 16 or so, you can. I’m probably just too old for that.
I was using it as an example on how different people will assign different values of importance to any one person. Note the first part of the paragraph, please.
“Furthermore, the value of a person’s importance is always subjective.”
The paragraph is meant to be read as a whole.
Additionally, written history may last for centuries, but will it last for ETERNITY? How many people in the world still remember who the fourth Pope is( and if you need to look it up, it meant that you personally forgot about him until you looked it up)? Is there any guarantee that the memory will last in the eons to come?
Cheers.
Of course, I cannot tell who the 4th pope was without looking it up but that’s the point of written history. If you’d be expected to know it all, we’d need no written documents. No it will not last forever of course. It would be against the way of the universe. Somewhen some detailed history will be reduced to a few snippets because all capacity is limited and everything has a relative importance and relevance. Do you remember your childhood very detailed? Most-likely not. “Nothing lasts forever.” might look like a very bold or silly line but it may very well the deep truth behind all existence and once you’ve deeply understood it, one might be able to use their existence to its fullest.
What’s the point of being remembered forever anyway? It might be a nice thought before you die but once you’re dead you couldn’t care less. So again, it’s not about death but about life. There are however infinite ways to lead a happy life, doing something that let’s people remember you for centuries or at least giving you this impression is just one way and it might actually be a pretty one with many disadvantages and a high price. The problem of Haruhi is that she wanted to be a person of *absolute* importance and she didn’t consider her relative importance *at all*. Where was her family, her friends in that scene? Nowhere. She reached so far, that she didn’t even notice the obvious right in front of her anymore.
Well yes, that was basically what I wrote in my above post.
Okay, I added some redundancies to increase the likelyness that this message is being remembered.