The hour of victory is near … it’s up to you to seize it.

Victory is almost theirs. They can taste it. That boiling blood of the fanbase.

Certainly Kyoto Animation and Kadokawa have stretched the majority of Haruhi fans almost to their breaking point with their 5th iteration of Endless Eight; or at least, the part of it I can see, especially in the otakusphere corner of blogs.

I took a dive through my feed reader earlier and saw approximately three kinds of posts:

1) Cleverly reposted summaries of the last 2 3 4 Endless Eight episodes. Probably too frustrated, too lazy, or both, to write new posts.

2) Generic rage posts about how [KyoAni / Kadokawa] is [mistreating / milking / abusing] their [franchise / fans / anime itself] and how [the director / Haruhi / Kyon / everyone involved] needs to [die in a fire / be fired immediately / be enlisted for immediate inclusion in Shubesuta doujins].

3) And once or twice, a defense of the show. Maybe not a defense of the content, maybe not a defense of Kadokawa / KyoAni’s choices, but a defense of why Haruhi is enjoyable.

Certainly I have no reason to be backing up, merely on content alone, a show that has aired the same content (roughly) five times straight, not to mention in its latest iteration the same scene four times in a row, ending on a scene that should be all too familiar to ‘fans’ of the first season’s Someday in the Rain.

But, why the hell not?

I guess I can consider myself in the contingent, a small one but definitely one that exists, of viewers that have been, more or less, broken by this amazing tactical maneuver. There are many kinds of broken: there’s Higurashi broken, there’s Mako-cakes broken, but this kind of broken is the more subtle kind of broken.

Not crying broken, either.

I explained it in my B-SIDE post on Haruhi a week or so ago – and I must thank all you commenters for the response to that post, I will get to it once I get all my thoughts on Haruhi together (i.e. ‘I’m lazy) – but I’m definitely the Diethard (Code Geass) kind of broken.

It’s not broken in that I’m going to end up stabbing someone or cross-dressing or whatever, but it’s that broken that makes you want to just follow a phenomenon and mark its every move, feeling like you’re following something that will go down in history – no matter what its motives or effects may be.

Tornado watchers, almost. That’s me and Haruhi. That feeling that, no matter how much it hurts, no matter how much we’re getting toyed with, no matter how much people try to apologize for and tear down Haruhi – that I’m seeing something that I won’t see the likes of again for a while.

It’s why I think of School Days so highly. I’ll acknowledge lolikitsune’s comment from last time that perhaps School Days contained more new content during its descent into insanity, both in and outside the frame of the anime; but somehow, I’m still finding new and strange things to poke it with each iteration of Endless Eight.

Why? Because KyoAni knows how to toy with viewers, with one of the favorite bits I like to chomp at – art style.

It’s why SHAFT has always a studio I follow closely, because especially with some of their recent shows and with some of their Shinbo shows, they’ve combined two of my favorite things: art which has meaning or maybe just pretense, and a taste for being balls-to-the-wall ridiculous (sup Zetsubou Sensei).

I actually still hope a.f.k. would translate those signs that Haruhi smacks around in the OP

KyoAni has been having some fun of their own with Endless Eight; some astute viewers may have noticed it with the first few episodes, how the color slowly drained out of the scenes, reflecting the dullness of repeating an event, oh, say, fifteen thousand times.

Endless Eight #4 (episode 5) had imagery all over the place, that one plane that depending on who you talk to, is the key to everything, or just a red herring. Iteration #2 seemed to have higher production values – or rather, a brighter, blurrier art style reminiscent of Clannad compared to the rest, which leads to speculation of different E8 episodes being animated by different teams within KyoAni.

But Endless Eight #5, the most recent episode 6 of the second season, is just a whole new bag of delicious confusion, with a art style that, to me, was quite jarring in comparison to how many of the previous episodes were presented. I imagine intentionally.

Yeah, this episode may have been the same as every other Endless Eight so far … if you close your ears. But if you take a critical eye to the art direction, you find that KyoAni pulls a few tricks that haven’t been seen so far in previous iterations. And it seems everyone is too busy giving up on the series to even pay lip service to this kind of stuff.

My first indicator that something was off was the fact that the shots seemed more kinetic than in past episode. There were lots of pans and the frames seemed to be moving a lot, cutting in and out between extreme close-ups and normal, faraway shots at quite a rapid pace.

KyoAni’s got the moe gun cocked and is waiting to pull the trigger. Curve that lip, Nagato, and we’re all dead.

After the swimming pool though, we’re presented with a shot that I think is a sign that KyoAni knows it’s holding back. It could annihilate half the otaku population right here, right now with Nagato. The tedium of Endless Eight is a barrier between us and the infinite fountain of moe that is Dissapearance Nagato. As I joked about earlier, they’re doing this for our own good.

But it seemed strange. Why such a strangely framed shot, with Nagato staring straight into our souls, lacking that dead-eyed look seen in previous episodes, reflecting the pool in half-closed eyes? And then, it seemed obvious.

This episode was being told, even more than usual, from Kyon’s point of view.

Now, we get to stare at the phone as Kyon gives it a weird look when Haruhi calls. We get to feel just how damn close Itsuki’s face gets all the time. When there’s conversation, quite oftenwe’re right in the action – it’s a ‘tactic’, if I can call it that, used in visual novels. Put the player in the game and all that.

It’s probably why we don’t get the yukata shopping scene or else that 30-second-shot of the clock at the end would have been replaced of a 30-second-shot of Kyon watching Mikuru jiggle all over the place.

Yeah, more reason to hate KyoAni, I know.

But why here? Why Kyon?

Well, as they say, if I knew the answer, then I wouldn’t be asking this question to begin with. We could toss about theories about how maybe we’re supposed to be put in Kyon’s shoes and feel his hopelessness, a tactic used earlier with Nagato – it’s popularly thought the whole reason we’re getting this many Endless Eights is to convey the utter tedium Nagato is going through.

Your face is too fabulous

But what kind of tedium is Kyon having if he just stares at a bunch of googly-eyed girls (and Itsuki) all the time? Sure, we get the scene at the end where Kyon searches through the memory of Haruhi leaving four times, see his desperation then – but until then, there’s just nothing to feel.

Or maybe -that’s- the point. The reason this is repeating so often after all, one would believe (forgive me, it’s been a long time since the novels), is because Kyon isn’t stopping Haruhi at the end. Or in the middle, or really at all.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Kyon just doesn’t care; he could try to change what to him is -maybe- a time loop, but it’s just too much hassle, especially when dealing with an energetic girl like Haruhi. Best leave it to Mikuru, or Nagato, or Itsuki or someone else to do something, right?

After all, he has this feeling of deja vu, and the word of the SOS Brigade, and that’s it. Time’s looping. Sure. Whatever. He’s probably still in denial about kissing Haruhi in closed space, after all.

When Haruhi stands up to leave, he’s hit with another wave of deja vu and then the desperation hits, the belief that this is real appears, but of course it’s too late already by the time he’s reached that point. Doesn’t the phrase “too little too late” ring a bell?

I’m almost tempted to say the music agrees as well; the music in episode 6 (E8 #5) seemed rather off to me as well, never quite picking the right tone.

Note the bottle is full before and after Mikuru drinks; in before Sankaku’s “Haruhi Bottle Animation Fail” post

In the beginning, despite the thoughtful melancholy of the previous few episodes, it’s bright and peppy. During the cicada hunt and part-time job, it’s a tune full of bravado and energy. It’s blindingly enthusastic compared to the last few episodes, which were much more pensive.

When Nagato announces it’s the eleventy billionth time they’ve done all this before, it breaks into a piano tune that has traces of melancholy, but is very ‘visual novel’ in nature, reserved more for a touching event than a shocking one. What’s up?

I could make crack theories all night long, saying this ties into the whole ‘Kyon POV’ thing as well. Kyon’s not as worried as everyone else when it comes to this sort of realization – a little off-put, but in the end like any normal citizen, he decides to ignore things that are troublesome to him.

Is that good enough to be a message? I can’t say.

Certainly it’s very tempting to say that I’m overanalyzing and that KyoAni is just putting random wankage into Haruhi at this point to pretend they’re mixing things up, what with the planes and all. The clock scene at the end is a bit stranger and a bit tougher to explain, although it does seem very much in line with Kyon’s motto of ‘wait and see what happens’ (and just like waiting 2 weeks is a long time, so is waiting 30 seconds in a 22 minute show).

Strangely non-bored for Nagato, although many noted she had no book this whole episode

But in the end, I’m having far too much fun throwing out these conspiracy theories just as if I was watching ef all over again (tying it back to the title), wondering about whether the framing of characters within umbrellas is intentional and contemplating why this part is black and white and just why we have to watch a phone card count down from 100.

Certainly one show has more content than the other; Haruhi, to many, may seem a lot more like picking at nothingness than ef. Even if both had its detractors, I’m sure ef fans just got called pretentious, while Haruhi backers at this point must be nothing less than fanatic.

I prefer the term ‘maniacal’, thank you very much. “Characterized by uncontrollable excitement or frenzy.” That sounds about right.

After all, I’ve probably wrote more words combined in the last few weeks on Haruhi then they’ve written for the Endless Eight script. And I don’t care. Maybe it’s because I specialize in the insane, the ridiculous, and the time loops, that I’m having a ridiculously entertaining time watching Haruhi S2 for all the wrong reasons.

But as ghostlightning said in the posts I linked in the begininng; in the end, if I enjoy entertainment, whether for the wrong reason, or the right reason, what’s the problem in that? So maybe my passion can get through to you, and you too, can be utterly broken, in all the right ways, by Haruhi.

-CCY

I haven’t had a post with this many words yet

(p.s. that disc I smashed the other day for the Haruhi rage post, that was a blank CD. I actually own the R1s and was planning to fake-smash those, but it seems breaking a fan-sub disc had interesting connotations of its own)