(For more love-remembering et al. in the 12 Days project, see: otou-san, schneider, doctordazza, Gargron, Scamp, zaon47, kevo, rabbitpoets, drmchsr0, Pontifus, ghostlightning, 53RG10, Vii, Seinime, _ETERNAL, FuyuMaiden, Eater-of-All, Shinmaru, calaggie, yumeka, Nazarielle, Cuchlann, Jinx, Janette, stringedsonata, animewriter, prototype27, and probably more in the days to come~)

Something was strange.

I somehow got that feeling.

I was sitting in front of the computer, half-watching an episode of an anime of no importance to me. I was half-interested in one of the cute meganekkos, and was about to go search for pictures of her, when I somehow got the feeling that I was about to get some great inspiration for a post.

Write write write.

“CCY, blog post.”

12 Memories of Anime 2009
#02: Endless Eight [The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya's Fanbase]

Don’t need you to tell me that.

Oh man, Endless Eight. What can I say about you?

The time loop which has occurred over and over in many other forms of fiction (for example, the American movie Groundhog Day), done As You’ve Never Seen It Before.

Which is, to say, the exact same way. Every single time.

The same plot developments.
The same events.
The same script, the same dialogue, everything.

“Kyon-kun, denwa.” every time.
Swimming at the ‘shomin pool’, every time.
Mikuru crying buckets in the park at night, every time.
Stargazing on the rooftop, every time.
“Oh well, I’ll just leave it to tommorow’s me,” every time.

Well, almost. But can you consider the payoff from that one episode – that ‘redemption’ after seven episodes of repetition, of identical scripts and scenes – seven weeks of waiting, seven weeks of watching Kyon giving up on solving the mystery – can you consider it worth it?

Of -COURSE- it was worth it.

You can say it was the same events, the same dialogue, the same plot and everything, but … yet … it was still so subtly different.

It would be “Kyon-kun, denwa”, but would Kyon have a future sight of recieving the phone call every time?
It would be swimming at the ‘shomin pool’, but would Kyon have that sense of deja vu or even be able to recall the entirety of some of Haruhi’s lines here?
It would be Mikuru crying in the park, but … just how many buckets would she cry? And just how long would it take you to imagine Itsuki next to her, in bed, smoking a cigarette?

OK … that was a bad example. But maybe what I pictured every time Kyon would pick up his phone in the middle of the night.

But what’s my real point? I’m sure those examples failed to wow you. Yeah, of course there’s minor changes, but even those minor changes don’t change much, and it’s nothing close to Higurashi levels of revelations and understanding each time through. Endless Eight is practically static, plot-wise.

And you can argue whether or not the anime is of useful value or not. The varying art styles may have provided enough diversity for pretentious tossers like me, but there were still the down episodes which really seemed not much more than baiting the fans. And aside from the art style, there’s not a lot you can say in favor of Endless Eight, right?

Well … that doesn’t stop it from being incredibly, incredibly fascinating.

Reason number one is simple: because it will take a very, very long time before you see a stunt like this pulled ever again.

The sheer guts, the sheer stupidity, the sheer insanity it must take (pick your adjective) the people at KyoAni to make a move like this, to break every rule of common sense with arguably what was one of the hottest franchises of the decade … is simply amazing.

It can spawn – and it probably did, among anguished fans – thousands of discussions of why it was done. To kill off the overhyped fandom and restore sane expectations? To express the tedium Nagato must have gone through in those episodes? To continue being as bizarre and off-the-wall as the first season of Haruhi (anachronic order, natch)? Just because it seemed like a good idea at the time?

I, like you, will probably never know the answer. But I’ll always continue to be fascinated by the question, and I’ll always continue to prize this sort of diversity and, if you will let me call it this, creativity in anime. It’s pushing the envelope – even if it wasn’t in a direction that fans liked. And that’s something important.

I can see the counterargument to that already, that just because it is ‘new and creative’ doesn’t suddenly pardon it for its sins of being, arguably, uninteresting. You may in fact be right.

You may in fact also be the reason why Endless Eight was so interesting.

Yes, because Endless Eight wouldn’t be half as interesting without a community to experience it with. It’s more interesting, perhaps, watching someone watch Endless Eight, than watching it itself.

Maybe my pleasure is a bit sadistic, but you could almost call it a good social experiment, right? How much of the fanbase’s patience can you test before pushing them over the edge? 10799 people completed Haruhi. Only 1103 dropped it. (With another 7700 still watching and 1700 on hold.)

Although, its rating dropped from 8.5+, one of the top 50 anime on MAL, to 6.95, rank 2297 and just below Puni Puni Poemi, White Album, Akane-iro no Somaru Saka, and Bible Black.

The reactions themselves, would you call it ‘showing one’s true colors’? I guess here are mine here. But the death threats, the desperate explaining (or imagined explaining) of KyoAni’s rationale, the maniacal laughter of a person driven mad … it’s all … interesting, in a sense.

Would KyoAni, the great king of Japanese animation, benvolent provider of Haruhi and Key anime, suddenly become a demon? Could their reputation be tarnished? Would the faith in the shrine of Haruhi Suzumiya suddenly vanish?

Perhaps to put it in a standpoint that makes me seem less like a douchebag, Endless Eight created -discussion-. It made the otakusphere come alive with all sorts of debates, speculation, flame wars, memetic posts, everything.

This was the sense of being -alive- in the otakusphere, that opinion, that -passion- that Endless Eight invoked, one way or the other (ye olde phrase ‘love and hate being two sides of a coin’). It made some of my best work – my favorite posts, and apparently many people’s favorite video.

It was the kind of crowd-stirrer that only has been seen before in other controversial groundbreakers like School Days, or, on a good day, the OEG. And it was something that I couldn’t help but watch with all the enthusiasm of a Diethard, knowing that whatever I was seeing – both on TV and on my comptuer – that it was something incredibly unique.

Maybe it’s all easier for someone who was less attached to the Haruhi fandom, like I was, such that I don’t have to differentiate between ‘once in a lifetime’ and ‘once and never again’. As such, I can clearly just classify Endless Eight as one of the most -memorable- occurances of 2009.

But, this story isn’t done yet. Not until Haruhi truly ‘Dissapears’ will we know whether the fanbase has just taken a brief vacation, or packed their bags for good…

CCY