For those that haven’t yet seen it, The Melancholy Of Haruhi Suzumiya is a really great show about a girl named Haruhi who seems to unknowingly have the power of God. She can do absolutely anything, however; her normal human common sense keeps her from actually doing things that, to a normal human, would be impossible. This is the only thing stopping the world from plunging into utter chaos. You see Haruhi is the type of person that is easily bored by everyday things. On her first day at her new school she introduces herself saying that she doesn’t want to talk to anyone that isn’t an alien, time traveller or esper. Because of her desire to see these strange things she has actually created these things in the guise of regular humans and forms them into a school club she refers to as the SOS Brigade. She, however; has no knowledge of what they are and they try hard to keep it that way, but the problem is that if Haruhi becomes bored the world will be consumed by darkness and Haruhi will create an entirely new world, destroying everything that remained of the current world. This is obviously a really bad thing, so they try as hard as they can to keep her entertained without actually revealing the existence of such things as aliens, time travellers and espers. If she were to encounter such things the universe would be rewritten because of her changed understanding of the world.
The writing for this show is very well done in that it manages to mix humor with seriousness very well and even occurring at the same time in the story at times. It makes for a rather unique show and provides a few interesting things to think on regarding the power of human perception and understanding based on only what can be perceived. I also found it rather cool that you can actually watch the episodes in several different orders to pick up extra things that you otherwise would not have noticed.
The humor is very spontaneous and is quite well done. I very much enjoyed when they were playing in the baseball tournament and used the magic pitch, some of the dodges were so ridiculous I couldn’t stop laughing.
Judging by the count of Nagato pictures in this thread I’m sure you can guess she’s my favorite character. She’s silent but deadly (no, not like a fart) and she’s really cute. A winning combo in my opinion. Nagato is the alien in the SOS Brigade–or more acurrately; a humanoid interface for the Data Integration Thought Entity, a group that is monitoring Haruhi and investigating the event 3 years prior to the show’s story that brought their attention to Haruhi. Not much is disclosed about this event but it has been called a “Timequake” by Mikuru.
Mikuru is the moe character that every show like this seems to require. It’s just not anime without moe in it somewhere. Mikuru is shy and seems to have a bit of a thing for Kyon, the other main character and narrator of the story. Haruhi often forces her into revealing costumes to go out and spread the word of the SOS Brigade. Haruhi’s ways of getting her into costume are often rather much sexual harassment and probably getting close to rape. Haruhi is a little on the insane side, in case you hadn’t yet figured as much.
If you haven’t seen this show yet I highly recommend you give it a look. It doesn’t get as heavily into advanced things like Quantum Physics as shows like Noein, but it does give you some really interesting things to think about and throws some humor into the mix to keep things fresh. It’s really great and I hope to pick up some DVDs of it when I’m a little less dead broke. >.>
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