Haruhi Episode 05 Review

Troubles are hard.

04Index06

Why I watched it:

My God said I needed a different approach.

How it works:

Apparently I'm a fucking great critic, because I predicted this as early as episode 02. Haruhi is God. Full stop. Not just some random shitty god like they have in Hinduism (God is a delusion), but the one creator of the entire world as we know it. It must be hard for porn artists to work with Haruhi, because it's both blasphemy and child porn, and those two laws get you banned from every country in the world. Except Antarctica. Penguins don't give a fuck about your morality.

What better way to express this idea than by sharing it through three exposition dumps in the same fucking episode? I know this anime was adapted from a novel, but you're supposed to make the audience watch instead of read, or listen if you're one of those freaks that knows both English and Japanese. The same series that focuses on creative and interesting new camera angles for almost every situation is the same series that will gladly stop all sense of pace and put you into storytime with Kyon and friends, the end result being a picture book as directed by Stanley Kubrick.

We start out the episode into a segway from the episode 03 [the one with the computer theft], where Yuki talks for five minutes about some science fiction bullshit about Haruhi being a data manipulator. Later, Mikuru talks for five minutes about some science fiction bullshit about her having to observe Haruhi's actions in case some Bad Thing<super>TRADEMARKED</super> happens in the future. Cool fucking beans, but Itsuki's five-minute esper monologue made both of these scenes redundant, explaining these ideas more succinctly and in a more intriguing, SCP Foundation type of way. That's ten minutes we could have saved doing literally anything else - but knowing this anime, we'd have just spent it sexually harassing Mikuru.

Remember in my episode 04 [the one with the baseball] review when I asked if this show was about religion? That was a joke. And so was the joke about Haruhi being a god in episode 02 [the one with The Gang forming]. Has media gotten so predictable that I can see through the plotlines before the show can? Apparently this show was one of the most influential Japanese animations to have ever been made, so I guess this is like yelling out the ending to Romeo and Juliet. I didn't even give a fuck about this show until Digibro recommended it - I just gleaned words from Wikipedia plot descriptions as I tried to organise the god-awful chronological ordering. That's not cheating, you nerd. It was a necessary evil, and you would get more spoilers on a /h/ thread.

I don't even have to go over what happened in the episode. The whole plot of the series can be summed up by God being a high schooler, her gathering some spooks to a clubhouse, and those spooks trying to appease her in a cosmic bid to avoid her destroying the entire world. I would think this would be something you'd want to share in the penultimate episode, not before the series is halfway over, which is like if we were playing Bioshock and we turned into a Big Daddy before we even met Andrew Ryan.

I guess the plot got excited and decided to share the entire story without regard for human life. It's a real buzzkill when you're pretending to put together the pieces of a puzzle for the last four episodes and then have it all spelled out for you just like that. Now I just know the anime is going to turn into wacky, slice-of-life fun as opposed to a mystery with characters that we have to learn about over time, and not just archetypes in order to make the jokes work.

I don't know which is worse - having the series spelt out for you in brutal detail before you got the opportunity to appreciate it, or having it never be revealed at all as you desperately try to reconnect the pieces of a conspiracy. One is like getting a boner in gym class, and the other is like watching Lost. You can't win.

What I feel:

Like Nick Denton after the Hulk Hogan sex tape verdict.

Do I feel betrayed? No. I expected this to happen. All I know is that I'm losing hundreds of millions of dollars the desire to look deep into this anime, when this episode has shown that it will be happy to simply spell it out to me like a dog you're trying to potty train.

So if this anime doesn't end up as a generic slice of life after most of the foreshadowing has been taken out of it, I'll be surprised.

What I learned:

I would much rather have figured things out for myself, than to be spoon-fed information that I would have learned if you had just given me a few more hints. It makes all the little pieces of foreshadowing (please help me find a synonym for this word) look petty when you throw all of it away in favour of launching a spunk cannon full of plot at my face.

Mikuru's voice actor isn't getting paid enough for this shit.

It's interesting how the anime is still focusing so much on the sex appeal of Haruhi and Mikuru, despite their characterisation being as such that Haruhi shows a disdain for any real relationships, and Mikuru's as such that she's too pusillanimous to actually get fucked, or whatever the end goal of a romantic relationship is. It worked when we were expected to see through Kyon's eyes and understand what he thought of the girls, but when you focus all your efforts on sexualising our main characters, all the audience is going to see is a sexualisation.

It's interesting though that the anime seems to respect women the same as they do men despite showing off more legs and titties, showcasing that a lot of men are sex-driven idiots the same as some women are either assholes, pussies, or stoics, just the same as some men are relatively normal and polite. I get the idea that at some point in time, feminists pointed to this show as an instance of a "strong female protagonist". I'm assuming those same feminists missed that the premise of the show is that a woman will literally destroy the world if she doesn't get her way.

Besides, pointing to Haruhi as a shining example of feminism is like me pointed to her as a shining example of lesbianism; there's some basis to the claims, but it just doesn't add up. If we're supposed to respect Haruhi as a strong female character, then that's asking a lot out of a woman who stops at nothing to get what she wants at the cost of everybody who she isn't friends with. She's a motivated douchebag, and the only reason we're expected to like her is because our other characters have to deal with her shit while she harasses innocent young men with Mikuru rape.

But then again, it's hard to see her as a character when she's God. It's kind of a tall order to make us treat Almighty Haruhi as just another one of the crew.

I was wrong, it is religious - Froghand.

Today's page was updated on August 23, 2016!

Ain't nobody know my troubles but Har-u-hi...