Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya - Ep.#00

[timepiececlock]

It's a good thing someone on my flist warned me strongly about the first episode, because it is very bad. Incredibly offensive and fairly stupid. But, once you realize the joke of what you're really watching, and WHY it is so bad, there is a kind of demented humor in it. Every time the fourth wall is broken (about every 45 seconds) you get a clearer idea of what's really going on and, more importantly, the kind of "people" who would actually go to lengths to make it, and make it this bad. I like how the one boy keeps accidentally showing up in the wrong scene, and the narrator's rambling tangents and narrative skips. The main girl (Haruhi presumably?) is really a terrible actress.

"Combat waitress" puts me in mind of Ranma 1/2's Ukyo and Shampoo. The product placements are kind of amusing too.

::halfway through::

Actually, the narration is getting fairly funny on a consistant basis now. It's a blatant but amusing commentary on all bad anime tropes. The comment about the villain appearing in the window made me chuckle out loud, which is more than a lot of anime gets out of me.

This whole thing reminds me of this history project I had to do in high school where student teams made a video "news report" from a historical era, and one guy who was doing his scene started going off on this long, improv monologue about a runaway horse and cart that was running over serfs right and left and leaving in its wake a path strewn with adults, children, pets, farm animals, produce, etc. We had to record it three times because the rest of us, behind the camera, kept breaking out into belly-laughter off-screen.

Comments

[flutingfrenzy.livejournal.com]

Oh! Also a warning! You may find Haruhi's treatment of Mikuru, and the other characters' tolerance of it, extremely offensive. I certainly did. I mean, there are actually some in-text mitigating factors to draw on if you want to rationalize it away, but even when I do that (and man, do I ever try), I just keep coming back to the image of crying, traumatized little Mikuru curled up on the floor while everyone else just stands there and shrugs their shoulders and GAH thinking of something happier now.

Otherwise, I loved the series. Go figure.

[rashaka.livejournal.com]

I'll keep that in mind, thanks. I'm watching episode 1, and I can already tell that Haruhi is pretty insensitive. And rude. But her dynamic attitude makes her more interesting than most female anime characters who have "inner strength" but are a wet blanket on the outside. This is an early guess of her character, but I don't think Haruhi would know what a wet blanket was, and if she got one she'd throw it at someone's head.