(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 a MAD about two anime of no importance to me. I was half-interested in the song that was playing the background, and was about to go look it up 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
#03: Endless Eight [The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya S2]

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 (the Naku Koro Ni series, from an anime standpoint), done As You’ve Never Seen It Before.

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

The same events.
The same dialogue.
The same realizations, plot developments, everything.

“Kyon-kun, denwa.” every time.
Haruhi introducing her underlings, every time.
Mikuru crying buckets in the park at night, every time.
Those club activities – the cicada catching, handing out flyers in frogsuits, all that – 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 letting Haruhi walk out the door – 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 Haruhi introducing her underlings, but would Kyon have that sense of deja vu or even be able to recite the entire line himself?
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.

But artistically … oh man. Way more than enough to keep it fresh.


Maybe it wasn’t enough for some people, nor was it brilliant every episode, but for me, I was having a blast a lot of the time, seeing what animation tricks KyoAni would pull out of its hat. Since definitely, each episode was not alike in that regard.

Remember the second iteration? The one that looked like it was done by the team behind all the Key works, with a decidedly softer and brighter tone?

Or the fourth one? All the airplane references and non-sequitur imagery, the hints that couldn’t be more glaringly obviously pointing at something … or glaringly obviously pointing at nothing.

Maybe the fifth Endless Eight, which almost seemed like it was from Kyon’s point of view, with plenty of first-person, high-motion shots, culminating in the brilliantly (or at least, ridiculously) dragged out scene of Kyon rotating in the clock, for thirty seconds.

It was all just bizarre enough to be incredibly intriguing, trying to answer all the questions that were posed as a result, even going into the quite meta:

What was KyoAni trying to say with all these shots? Was there a message that they were trying to show in the subtle deviations of the show each loop? Or even, more simply, why?

What was it that Kyoto Animation wanted to do with Endless Eight!?

Maybe these were questions spawned not just from my intrigue with the show, but also some sort of subconscious confusion and discontentness. Rather, since I wasn’t able to find material from the show to think about, I had to travel into the fourth wall, between KyoAni and Haruhi. And did I find an answer?

I don’t really know. We might never know. I’ll leave it to another me to figure that one out…

CCY