The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - These Notes Had To Be There

These notes are associated with the essay, "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya: You Had To Be There."  It’s inevitable that when writing an essay the flow ends up dictating that some thoughts will fit and some will not, no matter how important or interesting you think they are.  These aren’t necessary for understanding the main gist, but I thought they were worth writing down to share:

1) Source vs. anime order:

I have not read the light novels, but often when the unusual order is mentioned people cite the source as inspiration.  Doing a quick comparison that does not appear to be the case.  The volumes don’t match at all, nor does the original serialization.

Digging deeper, you can see that “Wavering” was a middling but became the first episode.  “Boredom” was disassembled, slotting Mysterique Sign between the two Lone Island Syndrome episodes while Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody, a story you’d think would be vital to tell, didn’t make the cut.  The Day of Sagittarius was plucked from “Rampage,” leaving the Endless Eight for another season and Snow Mountain Syndrome for never.

While none of this is definitive proof, it gives me the impression that somebody was taking the opportunity to tell their own story using the pieces at their disposal.

2) Nagato’s conflicting information:

Nagato in the early series is maintained in a very fine balance.  She is shown to be freakishly quiet and unresponsive, defying the normal stereotype of awkward-bookish girl.  When she speaks it is actually with confidence, but with slightly disorienting phrasing.  None of this is enough to believe she’s an alien of course, and we’re even fed an easy out: she’s always reading science fiction.  With Suzumiya already exhibiting delusions aplenty it would be reasonable for the rest of the cast members to have a few screws loose.  If we’re operating on the assumption that this is only a high school comedy, this is enough of an explanation.

However, walking into her apartment the inhuman sparseness is striking.  This is something much harder for her to fake as a character, and the episode strings us out as Kyon, like us, is made more and more uncomfortable.  More subtly, something that Nagato could not control (maybe?) has changed: the atmosphere.  As soon as we entered her technological, ethereal theme began.  The bloom is increased to otherworldly levels.  Even the shots become disjointed, moving from Kyon to Nagato and back, as though they are not occupying the same “space.”  Characters can be delusional, but can series?  Is this series?  It’s the problem we face as we wonder what to do with an atmosphere that agrees with the patently ridiculous.

3) On Nagato

It’s criminal how little I get to talk about Nagato in the main essay.  She’s fantastic in her own right, but for our purposes here what matters is how she prepares the way for Suzumiya, especially in episodes 10 and 11 before the festival.

The essence of Nagato’s development is that she begins a total non-character but through the course of the series is shown to actually have quite a personality in her own right, giving hints that maybe her unreadability isn’t her fault but ours.  She was always being completely honest.

Melancholy IV blows the lid off of everything, though.  The earlier indications of her proficiency were either comedic or campy.  Here it’s vibrant (and bloody); that even though she acts like it’s not a big deal, when the fight ends Nagato collapses with how much it cost her.  When Kyon thanks her later, her self-anger is remarkably palpable for somebody whose face doesn’t change much.

Day of Sagittarius, which aside from mocking us relentlessly for our baseless self-confidence while using the same dumb strategy repeatedly (and failing), gives Nagato’s softer side.  She actually does like having fun, too.  We just have to know how to read her; that it’s not how she looks, but how long she looks, that tells you what she is feeling.

This brings to a close Nagato’s development in the series, but is the crucial setup for Suzumiya.  While Suzumiya is overly expressive, she suffers from the same persistent problem of misinterpretation.  It was funny to see Suzumiya freak out over Asahina’s pictures being deleted, but what that covered was her angry tears on leaving the room, knowing that Kyon stashed those pictures away, implicitly choosing the other girl.  That she’s also surprised, and honestly just a little hurt, to be treated as so awfully undesirable as a prize is something we can’t appreciate until later.  Seeing really is believing, and just like how we didn’t take Nagato seriously until her fight with Ryoko, it’s not until the concert that we’ll take Suzumiya seriously either, and why it is Nagato up on stage with her.

4) Tsundere Island

I’ve tried to not clog up my notes with too much fawning over good scenes (there are just too many), but there is one in particular that deserves attention: the island cave.

This sequence is to showcase everything about Suzumiya.  It was the “real” truth hidden in the middle of all of this, that Suzumiya didn’t isolate them on an island for a murder.  She wanted to be alone in the world with Kyon.  That’s her dream (“You were there, I was there, and everyone else had vanished”), foreshadowing the conclusion of the series.  So that’s what she gets, where a mysterious figure just happens to lead them down a convenient rock ledge that just happens to break (harmlessly) to prevent them from returning that just happens to be near a cave that just happens to be warm enough to offer the possibility for intimacy.  That’s Suzumiya at work and a spelling out of what she is actually feeling.

Yet as soon as she’s in there… she hides on the other side of the stalagmite.  Compare this to the second episode where she flagrantly disrobed in front of a room of people.  Why the change?  Because she is so so so scared that Kyon will reject her if she reveals herself; after being rejected by everybody else, it’s all she can think of.  This is why she is a “tsundere.”  It isn’t just a hackneyed trope, but the expression of a girl pulled between a desire for love and a fear that has been validated too many times.

The camera work supports this perfectly.  These aren’t fanservice shots, but her feelings.  She is about to remove her bra… then reconsiders and leaves it in place.  Meanwhile various angles are close up, but never showing her fully, emphasizing a particular physical intimacy she herself is feeling that yet is worried about out-and-out revealing everything.

5) Bunny Suits, Thankful Victims, and Asahina’s abuse

(When I wrote the essay I originally got part of it wrong.  In composing this note I realized that, and went back to correct it, stealing the best parts in the process.  However, I feel that I said it more fully here and that a little repetition won't hurt, so I'm going to leave it as it is, despite being partially duplicated.)

Okay, I lied, there's at least one more scene I need to cover in depth: when the band members come to talk to Suzumiya.  But to reach it we first need to go backward into all the events that lead to it.

First, to make it clear: the only reason that concert happened was because Suzumiya willed it.  She got the lyrics written for herself by another person, then had crucial members indisposed, then happened to be in the right place at the right time to replace them, then influenced Kyon to sit down in the auditorium, then made it rain to drive everybody inside to listen. 

Much of this is harmless, but in the middle of this there is one fact that stands out: Suzumiya sidelined these girls from their own concert.  It never matters how Suzumiya's powers work (they're plot contrivance, after all) but what they tell us about her wishes, and the truth is that she wanted so much to express herself that she trampled on other people.  It is the cardinal problem of her personality.  To answer why she does this requires that we go even further back.

Suzumiya inconsiderate because she is impatient with and disdainful of people.  It's important to realize this, that it's not that she isn't aware of how to be nice, or that she cannot be civil when she wishes, but that she feels that people are so awfully slow when it comes to just seizing the opportunities in front of them.  So much of what they do is fatuous and she doesn't want to play that game.

Moreover, she scorns doing so on many occasions specifically because she regards people poorly for disappointing her.  They aren't worth it.  This is what lies at the heart: she is both different and lonely, the two feeding on each other in a vicious cycle.  She acted strange and forceful, people laughed at her, she kept going anyway telling herself she didn't care what they thought, they just kept not caring about what she did, until it reached a point where she has decided not to value them at all.  She knows they don't like her so she'll just be that way to spite them, becoming an uncouth caricature of herself in the process. 

Asahina is the most extreme, and special, case of Suzumiya's disdain.  She is a girl who is useless to the n^th degree yet everybody falls all over her just because she's cutesy in face and demeanor.  Worse, the guy Suzumiya likes continually disappoints her by doing the same.  It's like people positively value mediocrity and it only confirms her low opinion of them, especially males.

This is why all of her uses of Asahina concern sexual attractiveness, and why so often Suzumiya joins her.  Suzumiya has Asahina to try on many different clothes to figure out what people want, mocking the shallow caricatures the other girl is forced to adopt, but she herself does not change; the bunny suit is her, and try as she might she can only wear her own nature.  So she forces the other girl to wear it too, embarrassing-dominating the popular one who is out of her element while showing off herself in comparison.  Let everybody know she is a total babe that is way better than what they value while flaunting their norms by being so brash.  As a bonus to all this, she even gets to passively express her disdain for humanity that such a stupid trick as sex appeal would work.  It's the paradox of isolation: even as everything about her behavior radiates a denigration of the people around her, Suzumiya is still begging for their appreciation and acceptance. 

So when the time comes, and the crowd is finally giving her the adulation she had dreamed of (despite being in her ridiculous but oh-so-her bunny suit), the bravado evaporates, the mic squeals awkwardly, and Suzumiya guiltily apologizes for being on stage.  She's not supposed to be there.  She doesn't deserve to be there.  It was profoundly selfish of her to do this to these girls, one of whom is a senior and so will have no more chances.  Or, I should say, she can feel that she was willing to do this to them, since she does not actually know of her own powers.  But she knows her own heart, and when those girls appear in the doorway her eyes go wide and then she looks away in shame.  As long as she felt painfully undervalued she could feel justified in returning the favor, but now the truth has been forced: it's not just people's incomprehension that has caused her to be disliked.  It has been her own unkindness too, and maybe she should think on that.

6) The point of the show

I’m going to make a fairly strong statement, but I don’t think Haruhi is “about” anything grand.  Just like Suzumiya doesn’t represent any ideology, I don’t think the show is trying to prove a worldview just because it includes words like “God” (the very presence of “Haruhism” in the OP makes me think it’s there to mock people for unnecessarily elevating her).  Similarly, I think her sense of alienation is genuine, but she also isn’t old enough or deep enough to complain that this is all the world has to offer.  Anybody who says that at 15 is still immature.  Besides, that Suzumiya’s behavior gets better for simply having friends (of sorts) indicates she’s suffering from a very relatable loneliness, even if the roots are not those most people empathize with.

This is why my essay almost entirely neglects any speculation about her powers, existential angst, or any of the potential philosophical leads I could follow up.  Sure I’ll take the odd Gödel’s Theorem reference, but that’s just wrapping paper in the anime (this may be different in the LN, but if my overall thesis isn’t clear, I don’t think the two are the same).  What matters is how Suzumiya almost single-handedly turned a barren-drab room into a place of curiosities and memories, no powers required.  Despite being abrasive, she really does enrich the lives of those around her.

However, if pressed, I do think there is something one can learn from the series that is very insightful: how easily we are fooled.  We are easily fooled by categories.  We can’t live without them (the world is too information-rich for that), but in the process we sacrifice seeing, especially seeing people, in favor of stereotype and utility.  The only way this series worked is if we were preoccupied with what our expectations should be, both for it and Suzumiya, rather than asking ourselves what was in front of us.

The second point of fooling is ourselves.  Kyon is not a paragon of humanity.  He fails to stand up for Asahina, continually moans about how hard his (good) life is, insults his friends inside his head, and has a vastly inflated sense of his self worth and virtue.  That we so immediately identify with him is telling.  I don't bring this up to say that "Kyon is bad" or that "we are bad"; that would be a total failure on my part to represent the series.  Haruhi eschews polemic in favor of teasing, and I think it's better that way.  It's through a thousand good-humored pokes that it lets us know we’re not a whole lot better behaved than Suzumiya, and that we should learn to cut her some slack, and then maybe ourselves as well.

0) The point of the essay

A final note I put here because I believe nobody will ever read it, yet as always I have an insatiable need to explain myself.

My essay in its construction reflects something crucial in me, and a simultaneous resonance with its subject. Nobody is ever going to read it repeatedly to find the little details I agonized over, the small correlations and continuing side thoughts that constitute my personality. I didn't really write it intending for that to happen. After a while, when you've tried relentlessly and failed to somehow convey something essential about yourself you fall back on just entertaining yourself whether anybody else gets it or not. One day you catch yourself laughing at your own jokes, the only one in the room, and realize you are no longer surprised by that. That's just how it is.

In this I have a deep sympathy for Suzumiya. In temperament I am not like her, but the emotional response she has to continually being who she is only to be misunderstood for it is too familiar. The pride, the disdain, the anger and forlorn feeling at finding connection (especially romantically). In turn, my essay became like Haruhi. Most people don't realize they're being relentlessly mocked; they think they're in on the joke when they are the joke. That's the greatest part. And saddest. It is bizarre but when I wrote the last line in the essay I originally intended it to be funny, but when I re-read it I had a laugh escape me accompanied by a strange melancholy. Nobody is going to read that and realize that's the point of the essay. I could put it in a place nobody could miss, written in a way nobody could mistake, and still be guaranteed my secret would be safe. It's almost funny.

But there's one last part that I wanted to capture.  Haruhi derides its audience but it delivers kindly in the end.  It isn't misanthropic.  I wrote this essay as a joke to myself, one about its own readers ("you" had to be there, after all), but it wasn't with venom.  That people responded to it so positively was like my own little God Knows concert after nearly all the pieces I've written that had a real piece of me in them were ignored. I didn't think anybody would actually like it, and I still don't think many do for the right reasons. Just headbanging along. In this way I feel like Haruhi is the same. Somebody has played a grand joke on the anime community, one that we appreciate because it is in good faith... and that most will never get.