Fandom Friday-The Hidden Themes of Haruhi Suzumiya

I feel like the best way to end a week is to focus on the stuff you love, and so on my blog every Friday is Fandom Friday, where I center a post on something I already adore. What better way to start out the tradition than with an editorial on my favorite anime of all time?

A lot of anime fans my age or younger weren't in the scene when The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya first burst onto the anime landscape in 2006, so please allow me to give you a refresher course on the series before I start. Based on a series of light novels by Nagaru Tanigawa the anime follows Kyon, a freshman in high school who finds himself mixed up in an insane club with even more insane members and circumstances, despite the fact that he just wants to live a normal life.

If that sounds like half the anime broadcast every season, that's partially thanks to this anime. With excellent ratings and sales, especially internationally, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya left a deep impact on the anime culture and on what got produced, giving more leeway for weirder ideas to have higher budgets.

But behind the funny lines, memorable characters, and obscure references, there are deeper things at work in the series that I think most people missed out on, likely because they haven't watched it the necessary twelve or so times. Today I'll focus on one important brushstroke on the canvas: the dynamic between our protagonist Kyon and the titular Haruhi Suzumiya. It all starts with how the first episode opens.

No. No, not that first episode, the actual chronological first episode.

The scene that opens that first episode is actually pretty well-known now, even my people who aren't super into the anime itself. It dives head-first into the series's signature style by showing Kyon walking to school, narrating to the audience as he does so. More specifically, he's thinking about the question of whether or not people believe in Santa.

Now, to make that clear, he isn't thinking about whether Santa is a real person, but instead about how stupid the question itself is. He reveals that he never believed in Santa, at any age, but admits that there was a time where he believed in superheroes, monsters, villains, all the things from the media he consumed as a kid. Or at least, he wanted it to be real. But as he grew up, he resigned himself to reality as it seemed to be, giving up his childish notions of other worlds and magical abilities.

Not only is this a good way to introduce the fact that the protagonist narrates the show, and that he often dips into philosophical and sociological tangents as he does so, but it also reveals a lot about his character. Kyon is clearly an intelligent young man, articulate in his word choice and resolute in his stance. But the world he walks through is grayed out, the color sapped away by the lens he sees it through.

Kyon doesn't just accept reality, he has been crushed by it. As the series goes on it becomes clear that despite his intelligence Kyon gets average to below average grades, he has no interest in social matters, sports, clubs, or even hobbies. Sure, he seems to play video games and read books, but he does so without passion or fervor, and like everything else it feels as though he does this to kill the time. Kyon has accepted that he'll probably get an okay job, live in the middle class, and maybe have a family. He's decided that he is normal.

Then, there's the other protagonist, the titular Haruhi Suzumiya.

Haruhi is the weirdest girl in school, completely uninterested in social activities or anything most people would consider "normal". She's also highly attractive (as Kyon himself notes), one of the smartest students in their year, and a natural athlete. She's prone to long, mopey fits of boredom, but when excited her energy goes through the roof and propels her to feats most others her age wouldn't take on. Or probably shouldn't take on, for that matter.

Instead of looking at her introductory scene, which is works great in context but doesn't reveal very much about her actual character, I'm going to focus from a scene from "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Part 5".

After spending a lot of time together over the course of the previous episodes, while walking home from a friend's house, Haruhi chooses to open up to Kyon while it's just the two of them. This is a very significant event, because up to this point Haruhi's personality is best summed up as either "cold and antisocial" or "bubbly insanity". Instead her mood here is somber, and serious as well.

She tells Kyon about a time as a child where her parents took her to a baseball game, and she was astounded by the sheer number of human beings in the stadium. Feeling as though it must have been almost everyone in Japan, afterwards Haruhi, being a very bright child, looked up the total population of the country and divided the maximum capacity of the stadium by that.

That huge sea of people, of every shape, size, and age? The amount so enormous it almost overwhelmed her mind? It was only one-two thousandth of the country's population. It hit her then, as a young child, that if that enormous crowd was just a drop in the bucket for all the people in Japan, and Japan was only a small amount of all the people in the entire world, then was she really special?

Her parents, her teachers, they all had told her she was special, especially bright and athletic. Her friends seemed one-of-a-kind, her parents irreplaceable. But with the sheer number of people in the world, there must be other girls as smart as her, and many smarter. There must be people just like her friends, adults just like her parents. Was it possible, after growing up thinking her life was beautiful and unique, that it was the same as so many others?

It was then that Haruhi decided that, if there really are that many people in the world, then ever if she herself isn't special, there must be someone out there who is. Maybe an alien, or someone with ESP, or a time traveler. After this, she grew less and less interested in the people around her, only able to see their normality, their blandness.

This is a wonderful reveal about who she really is. Haruhi's coldness and callousness comes not from any place of cruelty, but from the fact that in the last decade or so she has almost completely stopped seeing other people as people. Kyon is the first person she's been able to connect to genuinely and interact with in a long time. This is also where her obsession with the paranormal comes from, as it's the one thing she thinks can redeem this dull world.

As great as both scenes are on their own, they're at their best when thought of side by side. At their core, Kyon and Haruhi are incredibly similar. Both of them are intelligent, have the capacity for athletic achievement, and think in ways that many would consider odd. And they both once believed in a world where anything was possible and the unexplained and magical existed until it was challenged by the banalness of reality.

The reason the two have become perfect foils for each other is that they reacted to the attack of their worldview differently. Kyon succumbed to it completely, not standing out in any way and giving up on any ambitions he might have once had. Haruhi has completely rejected reality and normality in favor of whatever interests her, leaving her with just as much of a lack of general direction as Kyon.

This is why the two connect, why they spit fire and snipe at each other, and why so many people ship them. They're two sides of the same coin, made from the same stock while presenting themselves entirely differently.

I hope you liked me rambling about my favorite anime for a while, and if this editorial peeked your interest in the anime then you can buy the series on Amazon here. I wish it were streaming somewhere for easier access, but c'est la vie. Join me next Monday as I try out another work from Japan, but this time one with less animation to it.

#anime #haruhi #fandomfriday