The Mike Toole Show

Whatever Happened to Haruhi Suzumiya?

I was there at Cowboy Bebop have been quietly materializing on store shelves all over the world, except in America. So it was only a matter of time.

Now, we've got Cowboy Bebop in high-def (well, 1080i at any rate) on the horizon, and all's right with the world. But that got me thinking—Bebop's unquestionably one of the biggest anime franchises, period. When Escaflowne, which, like Cowboy Bebop, have landed neatly on FUNimation's release slate. Number five on that list? Well, who but Haruhi Suzumiya?

“ANNOUNCEMENT: I have a crush on Haruhi Suzumiya.” That's what the livejournal update of a buddy of mine stated, back in mid-April of 2006. I it vividly, because as spring brightened things up, it seemed like everygoddamnbody had a crush on Haruhi Suzumiya. This was probably when digital fansubs were at the height of their power; I also seeing a bit-torrent tracker ing over 20,000 seeds for a single episode of the TV series. Digital fansubs were never a big part of my anime-viewing diet, though, so I was content to watch the phenomenon grow from the sidelines. Before the year was up, Bandai would let fans know that they'd partnered up with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, breaking the news via a series of odd viral videos, the ASOS Brigade. Interestingly, Bandai Entertainment is gone, but the ASOS website lives on, imploring fans to BUY HARUHI STUFF at a site that no longer exists. Like I said before the title splash: unfair.

By the time the DVDs arrived in spring of 2007, Haruhi-mania (or, more appropriately, Haruhi-ism) was going full blast, with Noizi Itō's light novels, does a wonderful job of capturing the milieu of high school, as a cadre of bored teenagers coalesces around the title character, a pretty but bossy and eccentric girl who brazenly takes over the school's dying literature club, blackmails herself a computer, and turns the whole affair into the SOS Brigade, a new school club dedicated to hunting down aliens, ESP s, and time travelers. Of course, Haruhi Suzumiya is surrounded by people like this; she's just too amped up to notice it.

But I resisted the series at first. It was too popular, right? And it was yet another high school sitcom. I mean, how could it possibly live up to the hype? What was the deal with the mobs of people doing the dance from the closing credits (conventions great and small used to have s promising to teach the whole thing), and the red “SOS-dan” armbands, and the t-shirts and posters with the great big H, and the girls (and a few boys) walking around conventions who'd carefully pinned their hair up with a bright yellow ribbon, just like Haruhi? The dread specter of moe was now a constant presence, but only Haruhi was brazen enough to spell out precisely what it meant, and try to describe its appeal. But in spite of the cultishness of the fans at the time (that summer, I'd witness a gray-haired, fiftyish woman attempting to explain the difference between the show's broadcast order and DVD order to a hapless fellow shopper at Best Buy), the series was easy and fun to watch. Looking back, I particularly appreciate its thoughtful, unobtrusive approach to science fiction—SF elements are baked in there pretty heavily, but are understated, rarely shown directly, almost clinical. The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya dabbles in time travel, but it feels less like Doctor Who and more like Primer.

There was a second season for Haruhi, and some comedy ONAs, but after surging for a year or two, the momentum for the Lucky Star. The prophet Robert Pollard tells us, “As we go up, we go down,” and that certainly happened in Haruhi's case. The anime series did get an impressive victory lap, a lengthy and ambitious film based on the Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya novel; I figured I'd check it out when it got cheap. It never did, though. It just went out of print, exactly like the rest of the Haruhi Suzumiya anime. See what I mean? Unfair.



I still wanted to see it, though, so I set up my eBay alerts and Mikuru's blubbering, bashful adorableness—than the film's dialogue itself. Watching the movie, weirdly enough, left me wanting more.

It's a little misleading of me to talk about this Haruhi business in the past tense. It's kinda over as a fad, but Tanigawa and Ito aren't finished with the novels. In fact, the English edition of the most recent book, The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, is set to be published in November. The manga adaptation is spinning down, but that's got to be at least partly because it's all caught up with Tanigawa's source material. And there's still a tiny stream of Haruhi goods, like last January's Goth Lolita Haruhi. If you've got a shelf of Haruhi figures, you're probably pretty exhausted, because there have been hundreds, but they just keep making ‘em. At the end of the day, I just find it fascinating that the anime franchise has effectively disappeared, just like the character herself in the movie. (I'd wanted to title the column “Kadokawa; at Otakon, I only spotted three Haruhi cosplayers among the thousands wandering the halls, and I kind of miss seeing her. So bring on the Resurrection of Haruhi Suzumiya! Even if it means another deluge of youtube dance videos.

Hmmm, I've only written around 1,200 words. I can't be done yet, can I?! Of course not. Another thing I enjoyed at Otakon was getting to meet Oreimo, or as it's called in English, That Show Where the Guy Plays Filthy PC Games With His Little Sister.



I can really see Kanbe's hand at work in Oreimo—his use of camera whip-takes and smash cuts, and the only occasional but hugely expressive action/fight sequences, showcase a director who's obviously been influenced by his mentor, Masami Ōbari. I asked Mr Kanbe about Obari, and the director was effusive in his praise, saying he learned a lot from Obari and loved working with the man. When I tried to draw parallels between the slam-bang fight scenes in Fatal Fury and the slam-bang fight at the end of Oreimo (am I the only one who looks at that title and sees “Or Elmo?”), however, the director looked worried, and assumed me he wasn't going for that angle in a series like Oreimo.

“A series like Oreimo.” What does that mean? Well, even moreso than Haruhi, Oreimo is an Zeta Gundam. She's big into gunpla. If the preceding sentences made perfect sense to you, congratulations! You're like me, and have been watching this crap for way too long. But yeah, fearlessly slinging around jokes and terminology like that, sans explanation, is a big part of what makes this an otaku affair.

The most fascinating thing about Oreimo is also the most disturbing thing about Oreimo—the thrust of the show's jokes is that our hero, Kyousuke, discovers that his pretty, overachieving, but aloof little sister Kirino is obsessed with dirty PC games where the object is to pursue and hook up with your little sister. Her liking porn isn't that weird, but that specific type of porn?! He has to hide her secret to protect her, but in doing so is drawn in—he starts playing (and enjoying) the games with Kirino, and as he learns more about her school and social life, he starts helping her out with other problems. This feels somewhat natural at first, as the viewer is told that the two were close as small kids but grew apart; maybe Kyousuke just misses his kid sister. Throughout these stories, the jokes and questions about whether he's really into his little sister, in that way, are more or less constant. Kyousuke, perhaps getting frustrated with being his troublesome kid sister's keeper, plays that angle up a few times, mortifying their peers. He's ostensibly doing this for laughs, but it gets less and less funny as the show winds down and he's faced with the prospect of giving Kirino, an unrepentant otaku, the “good ending” that they'd watched in so many PC games together. Skip the next paragraph if you don't want this to get any more spoiler-y.



In that way, Oreimo gradually takes the idea of incest-- a persistent and nearly universal taboo, one with both social and biological grounding—and turns it into a hilarious joke, with the “are they or aren't they?” subtext creating static right to the last moment. It's certainly audacious, but for me, it rings hollow—creator Tsukasa Fushimi creates an entire story where the gags wind up with “it's not really like that,” only to abruptly change directions in the dying few episodes. Maybe I'm just expressing my own frustration, since I enjoyed Kyousuke's awkward relationship with Ruri.

Still, I can't completely dismiss Oreimo out of hand. What's most interesting about the franchise, as my friend Carl Horn pointed out to me this year (Sword Art Online character artist Tetsuya Kawami; at the , he dutifully got in line for the Q&A and quizzed Mr Kanbe about the difficulties of switching studios, and that is why you go to the goddamn s with the people who make anime, kids). But what's made it stand out to me recently is its ascendancy—a lot of people have been talking about its ending—and how it developed as a franchise. Oreimo doesn't have the breadth of fans that Haruhi did at its apex, but just like Haruhi, it all started with light novels, then anime, manga, and an avalanche of character goods. Next year, the rising tide of whatever's coming next will have overtaken it. I wonder if it'll wash up on our shores again, down the road.
Since I've spent this t talking about a couple of prominent moe anime series, I'll close with this picture, which has been floating around tumblr lately. (Ha! Tumblr.)



The image is probably for laughs, but its message is clear—before moe, anime was somehow better. And the moe era, which isn't really defined, somehow wrecked things! Of course, I had to flip the formula.



Am I trying to correct the definition of moe or the “moe era” in this image? Nah, I'm just trying to reveal a universal truth: things didn't somehow go bad, they were always bad! And moe anime, like any other genre, is chock full of goodness and badness; it's what you make of it.

Alright, now that I've got you chewing on that, riddle me this: when do you think the “moe era” began? For me, it started with Love Hina in 2001; prior to that, I hadn't given the harem mechanics so skillfully employed by the series much thought. But in Love Hina, I saw fans flocking to a show that seemed kinda mediocre to me, all for an easy fix of cute girls and simple character relationships. Additionally, do you want Haruhi back? Or Oreimo? Who would win in a fight, Kyon or Kyousuke? Kirino or Haruhi? Popeye or Goku? Sound off in the comments!