La Biblioteca de Amestris

Every once in a while I find myself hearing God Knows, the song of one one of the most epic moments in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya by far. Why Haruhi Suzumiya keeps being a thing so many years layer? Why her lyrics keep hiting our playlist? I ask myself.

What is so different in Haruhi Suzumiya? What provoked this cultural phenomenon? I believe the answer to this question lays is in the genre of high scholar animes.

Anime series in such genre are super tractable. In the first episodes, we are introduced to the main character and a bunch of secondary characters -very likable-. The series may mostly take place during their last year or senior year before the graduation. Some non-transcendental plot will gather together the protagonist with the other characters. In the meantime, we may have different holidays and events taken from any average Japanese student such as the sports festival, the beach travel, the Hanabi festival, Christmas, summer vacations -with some homework sessions at the very last moment-. Some characters may question themselves expressly or by their action if all the effort is worth it.


Haruhi Suzumiya addressed what is really behind all these anime series. Moreover, it addressed what is really behind our very existence in this world. What makes us different from a drop in the middle of the ocean?

Say... Have you realized how insignificant your existence in on this planet? I have. It's something I'll never forget. During elementary school. When I was in sixth grade. The whole family went to watch a baseball game at the stadium. I wasn't particularly interested in baseball but I was shocked once we got there. There were people everywhere I looked. The ones on the other side of the stadium looked like squirming grains of rice all packed together. I wonder if every last person in Japan had gathered in this place.  And so I asked my dad, 'exactly how many people were in the stadium? His answer was that a sold-out game meant around fifty thousand people. After the game, the path to the stadium was flooded with people. the sight stunned me. So many people around me yet they only made up a fraction of the people in Japan. Once I got home, I got a calculator and did the math. We learned that the Japanese population was a hundred million and some in social studies. Divide fifty thousand into that and you only get one two-thousandth. I was stunned again. Not only was I just one little person in that sea of people in that stadium, but that sea of people was merely a drop in the ocean. I had thought myself to be a special person up until that point. I enjoyed being with my family, and most of all, I thought that my class in my school had the most interesting people in the world. But that was when I realized it wasn't like that. The things that happened in what I believed to be the most enjoyable class in the world could be found happening in any school in Japan. Everyone in Japan would find them to be ordinary occurrences. Once I realized this I suddenly found that my surroundings were beginning to lose their color. Brush my teeth and go to sleep at night. Wake up and eat breakfast in the morning. People do those everywhere. When I realized that everyone did all these things on a daily basis, everything started to feel so boring. And if there were so many people in the world there had to be someone living an interesting life that wasn't ordinary. I was sure of it. Why wasn't that person me? That's all I could think about until I graduated from elementary school. 

In order to find her own exceptionality, Haruhi began her this crusade. In order to find herself, she would need to find someone out of common, likely an alien, a time traveler, or an esper with psychic powers. Anything! Haruhi tried many other things while looking for her holy grail.

Do you perceive how brilliant is she? I find it unbelievable.  However, she failed. Failure after failure. Middle School passed and she could not find any of those. Like any other average Japanese student, she was about to graduate even without finding or experiencing anything out of common. Her last significant action was drawing some messages on the school's baseball field to communicate with aliens three years before the anime takes place. "My last act of rebellion." She probably thought. 

And then, our bystander appears. I am talking about Kyon, our hero. However, he is not the hero that Haruhi has been waiting for. Kyon is just a normal average student trying to finish his last years of high school in peace. He is just the opposite of Haruhi Suzumiya. While Haruhi looks for extraordinary events, Kyon wishes to finish his senior year without any incident. How could this work? Luckily for Haruhi and us, life had a different project for him and he was forced to do the opposite. He never asked for it, but he got involved in numerous inexplicable events around Haruhi Suzumiya. Kyon's dilema and his place as a mere unfortunate bystander in the world of Haruhi Suzumiya is a piece of art.


When we are introduced to the secondary characters, we understand the cruel irony of this anime for the first time. Haruhi Suzumiya already found her holy grail in her group of friends -Yuki Nagato, Mikuru Asahina, and Itsuki Koizumi -. All of them were sent by different secret organizations to stop Haruhi Suzumiya to become aware that she possesses destructive powers that can easily bend time, space, and even the whole universe. In order to so, they beg Kyon to keep Haruhi's life interesting because if she gets bored enough, she may imagine a new world, and they believe that by doing so, the current world and reality will be destroyed. Furthermore, do you remember the random garbage that Haruhi wrote on the baseball field? Through Haruhi's friends, we learned that the World was about to end when Haruhi Suzumiya drew the sky signals years ago! That cannot happen again.

First, Yuki Nagato is a "humanoid interface" created by a god-like alien figure to stop Haruhi Suzumiya to destroy the world. She was alarmed by the baseball field incident.  Second, Mikuru is a time traveler. She was sent to investigate why in the future they are not capable to time travel before the day that Haruhi did the baseball field drawing. Finally, Itsuki is an esper of a secret society. His society believes that Haruhi is God. And their very existence began three years ago when Haruhi made the drawing. All of them work together to avoid Haruhi becoming aware of her own central place. They agree in one thing. Haruhi cannot get bored of this World again and they rely this burden on, of course, our friend Kyon.


The whole mistery upon this day is who Haruhi Suzumiya is. The anime never takes a definitive stand about who is right. That is part of the game. Sometimes it depends on the perspective of each character. I feel that you could even divide the episodes and make different story lines and series. It's a headache, but a well made headache. From Haruhi's perspective, she is just another human being, but not for the rest.

I believe that what is brilliant in this anime is Kyon. We are limited to his own perspective and conclusion about everything surrounding Haruhi Suzumiya. I like that he is sarcastic and very exceptical about anything surrounding the paranormal. Kyon also evolves across the serie, in fact, he seems to be only character evolving during the serie, which sometimes makes you thing that maybe Kyon is the real corner stone of what is going on. This is just a personal theory.

To conclude, I strongly believe that should watch Haruhi Suzumiya. There is something about it and people like it because of different reasons. I offered some of those in this entry, but there are people who actually enjoy how kawai and fun are the episodes and the character, and I agree with that. The designs and personalities of the characters make this anime very enjoyable. I don't think you will regret watching it. Especially, the following video, which I think is one of the most iconic moments in the history of anime, the concert of Haruhi Suzumiya singing "God Knows." I hope you enjoy it.