Anime Like Haruhi Suzumiya
Telly Piatt
Worse yet, an older and more experienced version of Mikuru pops up throughout the series and indicates that she remembers her time with the SOS Brigade fondly. This has two very different implications, depending on how one reads it, and both of them are pretty bleak.
But that descriptor can be applied, really, to a lot of great anime. Even a beloved industry stalwart like Evangelion has lapses into leering at fourteen-year-olds between its mech fights and moments of existential terror.
That said, for those willing to bear with the show through those weaker moments, they lead to an effective examination of why that behavior is wrong and how it can tear apart friendships. While using a trope to critique a trope is still ultimately relying on that trope, the eventual throughline reframes those moments as what they are: violations that need to be addressed and rectified.
That gets at the heart of why The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is still such an endearing show, in spite of these problems. One of its climactic moments is somebody standing up to an abusive friend and telling them to knock it off, and that friend having to confront their own behavior in a critical way. This speaks to a larger trend throughout the show, which is mostly preoccupied with a group of outcasts coming together and discovering new things about themselves through each other.
Madeline Blondeau is a journalist, author, and the hostess of Rocketto Punchi Podcast (available on iTunes and Spotify.) A graduate of Guilford College, her work can be found at Anime News Network, Gayming Mag, Screen Queens, CGM, TheGamer, and many others. She's currently seeking publishers for her third novel, and trying to suck less at guitar. You can find her often vitriolic, but always well-meaning rambles on Twitter @vhsvvitch.
My sister, a friend who was my neighbor and I kind of grew up watching anime. Many young people did this in my time, we certainly were or we are still clearly "real otaku", we make cosplays and we were increasingly having experience in this medium. The years passed and we continue to see names that came up, certain animes like Code Geass, Ouran High School Host Club, Azumanga Daioh, Death Note, Fullmetal Alchemist and Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu appeared around in the 2000s. The old or "cult" anime were forgotten or won a new season, the same highly acclaimed. We are very eclectic in taste, and in 2006, Haruhi impressed us as one of the great news and a good revelation of the year and the acclaimed Kyoto Animation.
But we started to follow completely different paths after the end of the second season, famous for having the acclaimed "Endless Eight", and the film Suzumiya Haruhi no Shoushitsu. You see, my friend started to get more and more addicted to romance animes as Toradora, which he generally found a bit "boring". But I still watched some big names like Monogatari and K-ON, already my sister... well... it didn't change much, but it started to go more in my friend's taste too but it was kind of "cult" so to say.
Our first acquaintance with anime was when I was 11, back in 2001, when we first saw that awful edition of One Piece by 4Kids. But, we saw pirated episodes or on DVDs and VHS by some friends or illegally purchased on "undeground" sites. We just tested these things a little, nothing serious, but ended up screwing with our storage on my PC. After adding two pirated anime and one of them was Haruhi's second season, he completely spoiled and became impossible to see. We were upset at first; my sister was sorry for the loss of her hours of work and my friend was sad for not spending the afternoon watching anime, and I understood. I said:
We lost the PC when we sold it to a guy from nearby Dothan, Alabama. We bought a new PC when we traveled to Florida, now, one that could even fit pirated episodes. Before Haruhi's film, we agreed that there was something missing from it compared to last season. We were trying to see honestly, and although we were done, it left us with a good old nostalgia. Where were our anime DVDs that we always bought in the good otaku days? It took us a month to go through the boxes, but we finally found a bunch of old DVDs and electronic gadgets: My old Game Cube still worked, our DVDs of our favorite anime still looked well kept.
We took everything we could, it was so good to have the first episodes of Haruhi and the anime mentioned above back. Soon we went to check our old files, having our old memories, and we realized the things that were too nostalgic to get rid of. Me, my sister and my friend started seeing Haruhi Suzumiya again since the first season. She immediately remembered catching episodes on pirate sites and how easy it was. I just shook my head at her and remember saying:
She never liked it when I preached about "piracy abuse". I closed my mouth after that, but let it go. I thought that just once was too much; I should keep my thoughts to myself, really... two days have passed. I was on the balcony, watching the landscape of my city, about to go to an anime convention in Birmingham, Alabama, Kami-Kon. Which was really new in my state and they had been there for a year, when I realized I needed a little help. The cosplays that my sister and I did were very dirty and we needed to wash them to be able to present them to remove this dust, I knew that my sister and my friend always did this to present in a kind of "theater" playing Haruhi and Kyon or dancing the famous "Hare Hare Yukai".
Now, what I'm going to tell you was a month after that, after I spent a night for dinner at a restaurant with my girlfriend at the time. I had literally come home and gone to my room to watch anime or some series on TV. I had no idea what happened this whole time, since my sister went to Mexico with my parents and at the same time that her ex-boyfriend was from there. So I got up and went home, and when I was crossing the room, I noticed that the carpet had been messed up and not to mention that there were guns on the floor from knives to my dad's gun that was stored in the safe lying on the floor.
I was a little scared. This should have happened this afternoon, otherwise someone would have seen it and complained about the rug. I thought someone broke into our house and broke in, but no, I was wrong. It was impossible for that to happen, there were not many robberies around Dothan, just in the city center, and gangs focused only on big cities like Mobile... Birmingham... Montgomery... I went into my room to see if anything had really happened, somehow, that was even more worrying.
I found my friend lying on the edge of the bed, which was weird because he was my neighbor. The door I remembered being locked and how did he get here at my house? Did he come in through the fence and the back door? I don't remember talking to him on the same day or anything, that was too bizarre. His face was paler than I had ever seen, paler than the time I had traveled to Detroit, Michigan, to visit his aunt and a mad criminal had chased him with a gun in the city center and later committed suicide in the in front of him and some policemen. At this point, I noticed that he was passed out on the bed and a DVD was on the floor. Somehow, they had been in some possible anger from my friend.
He ended up passed out, I was scared of all that, I remember keeping that DVD in my room to see what the hell was in it. Did it just scare my friend? Shit ... I was really nervous at that time, what the hell happened to him breaking into my house like that without authorization? I called an ambulance fearing the worst, I remember his parents were out too and called them to let them know what had happened.
He ended up going to the hospital for a few days, he woke up in the morning from passing out. When we went to visit him, no one could find out what had left his strange behavior. There was a conversation that I did not understand at the time, about some kind of disorder that he can or epilepsy, but despite my knowledge, he did not suffer from epilepsy at all ... maybe that was my fault. I hadn't said a word about what had happened when he accidentally broke into my house or whatever. On my last visit to the hospital, after school, I was left alone in the room with him, when his mother had a private conversation with the doctor about the precautions to be taken in case it occurs again. I sat on a chair next to the bed, he was looking at the ceiling. Suddenly, he sat up, making me shiver.
His voice was tired and desperate, he looked like an old man on his deathbed. My poor friend was in trouble, how could I refuse? What did he want to talk about to continue to see? What the fuck was he trying to say? I did not know...
In the afternoon, I was leaving college after lunch with two colleagues. I kept his promise in my head all day. I didn't know that at the time, but this would be the last time that I could play the role of best friend and help him. I just had to get home and get rid of that DVD in my room ... but, the way the day went, a sick curiosity started to cross my mind. What could have happened on that DVD to scare you so much? I was scared myself, but I had to know, I had to do it.
I got home, I noticed that my PC that I had left in my room was in the living room and I didn't even want to know why, but I went straight to my room, deciding to find out what the hell was waiting for me. I had cleaned the room, the DVD was where I left it, in the drawer. I took it, feeling shy, but holding on to the promise I made. There was enough dust under the drawer to make me cough. But I finally saw the DVD amid so much clothing and cosplays from me and my sister. They had been pushed into the corner, on top of a notebook that looked too young to be there for a long time. Without thinking, I grabbed the corner of the paper and the DVD and dragged everything with me, still panting from the dust.
They looked so innocent, two simple things. When I shift my attention to the DVD and notebook, I start looking at the DVD, and I notice something that is written in Sharpie. In a way that looked very crudely written, as if I had been in a hurry, but it looked very dry and I had to use the light on my iPhone to see what was written:
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