Suzumiya Haruhi Endless Eight
Albina Hickel
In Haruhi second season, there was 8 episodes that have been the same. The series of "Endless Eight" episodes are literally doing the same things over and over again. But it's not really the same thing, they re-animating and re-dubbing whole episode, they didn't being lazy and use the same source.
As you can see they give different tones, angles, outfits, etc. That's too much effort for same situation all over the episode for eight episodes straight. So why did they doing it? Did they also did it in light novel? What is the point of "Endless Eight"?
Most likely the last arc of the show was originally planned to adapt The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi, but the producers changed their mind well into production, and decided to make it into a movie instead. As a result they had to fill in a seven episodes gap that they already bought the timeslot for, thus this gimmick was born.
The characters seem to do "the same things over and over again" because they are trapped in what TV-Tropes call a "Groundhog Day" loop. The Wikipedia article on time loops explains it very short and crisp:
The episodes initially aired between 19.06.2009 and 07.08.2009, which may be why these episodes have such a bad reputation: the audience may have already suffered from the silly season and these episodes added more frustration on top.
It might be a bit far fetched, but I think this is also a play on how cool an endless summer break initially looks to pupils and students for as long as they don't know what to do with all their time until they realize that they are right in the middle of the silly season and that an endless summer break could also mean an endless silly season.
No one knows why director did it or what purpose it served. In the novels themselves, only last "loop" was recorded and the whole thing spanned not even 100 pages. If I were to speculate, then only reason why they did what they did was because number of coincidences during airing of the episodes were so high it was too good to pass on the opportunity. Also, if they didn't waste 8 episodes of it, then they would need to adapt some other material, which by the time of the show was just "Dissapearance" arc, something that later got much better movie adaptation.
I know an awful lot of people who were terribly annoyed by the Endless Eight sequence (if only because it meant losing seven episodes of potential new content), and even now that you can just marathon all eight episodes without having to wait a week inbetween, it's quite a slog. I can see and admire all the work they put into each episode, and even I still think it was a dicey move. ...But I've got to say, if you do watch all eight episodes, the rush you get when they finally figure things out and escape the loop is on a whole different level than it would have been if they'd solved it on the first try. That may have been what the director was trying for. (By the time work began on Season 2, there were two more volumes of unadapted short stories - "Rampage" and "Wavering" - in the series, so even if they'd originally planned to use "Disappearance" and decided against it, there technically were other options.)
What followed was one of the most spectacularly misjudged testings of fan loyalty that I have ever heard of. Within a single story arc, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya managed to piss away every last drop of audience goodwill it had accrued over the years. The franchise carried on after this for a while but it was a dead toon walking. No third season has been announced, and the franchise is now effectively dead. The arc in question was called The Endless Eight. So, what did this anim about a Japanese schoolgirl do to honk off its fanbase to the point that they abandoned it en masse? Did it involve tentacles? Surprisingly, it did not.
Something is different this time around (and my God but those words will be precious as we go on) and Kyon instinctively feels that something is off. He has a premonition that Haruhi is going to call and then of course she does. At the swimming pool Kyon gets a feeling of deja vu when he sees Yuki staring into space, and then again at the Bon festival. They go through the cicada hunt and the part time job as before but then, one night, something different happens (oh God sweet relief).
Kyon is woken up in the middle of the night by Mikuru, sobbing in the register of a wounded bat, who tells him that something terrible has happened. Next, Isuki comes on the line and tells Kyon that they have a situation and that he needs to come meet them.
But, more importantly, I have achieved inner enlightenment. I now see that all time is an eternal loop and I am one with it. I am here, I am there, I am yesterday, I am now, I am tomorrow. Time has no hold on me. I have become an immortal. I have become a god.
Haruhi season 1 is brilliant. Haruhi season 2 I hear after the abomination that is the endless eight has a few decent episodes, but never want to watch that series again because it betrayed me. The spin off series about Yuki as an average high school student with the others is good, until Haruhi pops up and ruins the nice slice of life premise of the series.
All the Japanese Formalism would come off less awkward if they just left the Honorfics untranslated. Because in Japanese they are more like suffixes then separate works. In Japan your allowed to drop Honorfics pretty much only with your immediate family.
The endless eight arc as an standalone thing is awful, but it actually has some payoff if you watch the aforementioned movie. Most people agree the movie is the best thing about the anime and a decent ending point for the series, so yeah, you should watch that sometime.
Endless Eight (Japanese: エンドレスエイト) is an infamous arc in the second season of the anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya by Kyoto Animation studio. The arc consisted of eight episodes of the cast being stuck in a Groundhog Day time loop. The anime episodes depicting this were more or less the same episode being animated over and over.
Endless Eight was an arc in The Rampage of Haruhi Suzumiya, the fifth book in the light novel series, where Haruhi wished for an endless summer. Due to her being God who can unwittingly bend reality to her will, her wish came true and the result was that the entire cast was stuck in a time loop that repeated itself over 15,000 times until Kyon figured a way to break out of it.
This arc caused a lot of controversy among fans who more or less raged and felt like they were being trolled. It got to the point where the former director of the first season of the anime series publicly apologized.[1]
Endless Eight is still commonly talked about to this day among fans of the series and has evolved into a running joke. The Endless Eight controversy spiked a lot of interested in the anime, despite it already being widely popular before.
Endless Eight was almost universally met with mostly rage in Japan as well as outside of Japan. During and after the arc people could commonly find threads on both 2channel and 4chan's anime board of people showing their frustration over the constant repeating of the nearly same episode. These type of threads can still be found on occasion, though some also start them in an attempt to troll others.
It is somewhat similar to other internet phenomena like Nyan Cat where a seemingly cute phrase when repeated several times can quickly get on one's nerves. Likewise, at the end of the arc the phrase got on most people's nerves.
This image is very likely a parody of Lelouche pointing a gun from the famous Spinzaku scene in Code Geass. It's use is very similar, but it was specifically created to express fan rage over the Endless Eight along with fans sympathizing with Kyon for having to deal with a lot of crazy things because of Haruhi.
I love the endless eight and have never before found anyone who does, too. I stumbled upon it blind, and marathoned it. Airing it weekly on TV is perhaps not the best distribution, though. So people who saw it as it aired may not have been that happy with it (especially after waiting for three years for their sequel).
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