Haruhi Suzumiya/Fridge

Fridge Brilliance:


 * Throughout the series, Nagato seems completely robotic, with no emotions whatsoever other than in their battle against the computer club in a strategy game, and even then, Kyon has to point it out for it to be easily noticed. Then Disappearance happened. Suddenly, incredibly minor things she's done through the whole series make sense and imply emotion.
 * ...Care to elaborate on that?
 * Speaking of Disappearance people assume that Yuki gave Kyon the Emergency Escape Program because She wants him to be happy but on closer inspection of the story mechanics and time travel she had to give him the program because he already went through with it (having gone back in time three years to the Tanabata festival and showing up shortly after his past self was frozen in time). Not doing it would create a paradox, as would Kyon failing to follow through on it.
 * The movie version of Disappearance gives a subtle hint that Kyon was never alone in the hospital before it's revealed that Haruhi stayed with him the entire time, if you look closely next to his bed in a pair of girl's shoes.
 * Her coat is also clearly seen hanging in the foreground on several shots.
 * The weird thing is that her shoes are on the opposite side of the bed than the one she's sleeping on. What was she doing when no one else was around?
 * During The Disappearance Of Haruhi Suzumiya, One possible reason she went to these lengths is because of what she experienced during Endless Eight . So how could the anime possibly replicate something like that? OH!  -- User:Shotgun Ninja
 * Can it really be called "brilliance" if, no matter what your justification for doing it, the viewers hate hate hate it with a venom unmatched by the even the most unreasonable Fan Dumb? Making your fans suffer two months of nothing when they've been anticipating this series for years just so you can claim you're Doing It for The Art is not widely regarded as a good move. -- Arcane Azmadi
 * When I finally read the Light Novel that contained the Endless Eight arc and found that it wasn't nearly as long as the anime had stretched it out to, I wondered where the name came from (since in the anime version, the obvious assumption would be that it had something to do with it being .) Then it hit me that -- Spiri Tsunami
 * Or you could just push over the 8 to discover infinite possibilities.
 * Art doesn't have to be popular, or liked. Personally, whatever my own opinons on Endless Eight when I finally get round to watching it, I'm rather gratified that there's a company out there, an anime company no less, willing to do things so unambiguously for the art rather than for commercial profit. Hats off to Kyo Ani for having the balls for it is all I can say. -- Osric
 * The thing is, they actually got a profit from it anyway (While E8 didn't sell as much as other Haruhi episodes, it still outsold most animes). Otherwise they wouldn't even try, since Kyo Ani are trolls, but not stupid. So no, they didn't do it for the art, they only did it because they could get away with it, that's why a studio like Anime International Company (Random pick) would never do this. (Not that AIC hasn't done bad things either, but not like this).
 * That's still not doing it for profit. Whether they actually profited from it at all is a bit irrelevant; if it obviously wasn't going to be maximum profit, then that means another motive's involved. And actually, what's more likely: that they did it for the art, or that they did it just to be dicks? Well, depends on your position on the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, I guess...
 * 1. How do you know that they didn't know it would not be maximum profit? That doesn't necessarily mean there was another motive, either. If they did know, then it could be that the motive was profit, but they resigned themselves to less than max because they believed they wouldn't reach max. 2. You're the one that brought profit into this, so it's a bit silly to dismiss it as irrelevant once someone argues that point.
 * Not to mention the Light Novels never needed to do this and they made 's actions understandable just fine. - User:Guest Of Dishonour
 * Some more Fridge Brilliance here - just because something is justified, doesn't mean you have to like it. For example, . Besides, the anime happens to be very experimental in its approach to the series, doesn't it? - Umiyuri Papaeyra
 * Would you like to sit and listen to all the lectures that characters listen to? No, and because of the same reason fans don't need to watch through eight same sequence over and over, and we are pretty much Kyo Ani's guinea pig and that's supposed to be anything positive? Also, what kind of creator/studio intentionally makes the audience suffer just to get appreciate their upcoming works better? Oh, and get this, in the original LN, the SOS Dan did different things every loop (granted, after like what, 15k times, SOME of them has to be similar). Higurashi series did the loop just fine WITHOUT being agonizingly repetitive. To below poster, just want to say, was it worth it?! - dRoy
 * Find the differences in each loop! I've seen it as a present to me as a hardcore fans.
 * You don't sit through every lecture the characters get because most of the time the point isn't about how they're bored beyond all imaginable possibility. Endless Eight is different. The point is that not only is it boredom, it's boredom on a scale that we could never experience in this life. And yes, actually, it is positive that we're Kyo Ani's "guinea pigs", because if no one ever took risks, then everything would get rather boring.
 * Then what was the point of the repetition of Endless Eight? It isn't any more effective at getting the point across than the light novel, and you said yourself that this sort of boredom is something a person could never experience in his/her life, so it obviously can't induce that level of boredom in the viewer. So it's not making me feel what the characters or going through, nor is it more effective than the light novel. Seems pretty pointless. Also, "if no one ever took risks, then everything would get rather boring" is not even close to being a valid argument. No one's talking about not taking risks ever and avoiding boredom is not exactly the best argument for risks. Funnily enough, if Kyo Ani hadn't taken the "risk" of making repetitive episodes, Endless Eight would be a lot less boring.
 * Haruhi is her own God Mode Sue. -- Taelor
 * In The Melancholy of Suzumiya Haruhi, I always wondered why Haruhi never ever turned down a boy who asked her for a date, even if she subsequently dumped them five minutes later, and put it down to one of her many strange quirks. Then it hit me: she's a Reality Warper who causes anything in the universe to mold itself to her desires. Thus, the only boys who ever ask her out are the ones she already wants to go out with.
 * I kinda liked the final chronological episode of season one, if only for the fact that the makers actually had the balls to make an episode of a show which was at least 40% someone sitting and reading quietly. I watched it a second time and became enamoured with it when I realised the whole point was a) to show what a non-weird day in a television character's life is like, b) to show how bored the SOS Brigade would be without Kyon, including Kyon and the viewer. Observe - with nobody to philisophise with, Itsuki ends up talking to himself about the weather and his tea. Without Kyon to act as a Morality Chain, Haruhi ends up doing her worst to Mikuru, and doesn't have anyone to bounce/steal ideas off. Without Haruhi going totally nuts, Yuki has nothing to do but read, and hence no reason to talk to anybody. Without anybody to be pissed off at, Kyon is thinking about the weather. Without Kyon snarking, listening and accidentally suggesting ideas, the viewer gets really, really bored. Suddenly a hilariously boring episode becomes brilliant. - User:randomfanboy
 * When I found out about Yuki's abilities to travel through time (sorta), I wondered why on earth Kyon couldn't just ask Yuki to find out the future about Haruhi and what happens, etc. Then post-Disappearance, Yuki makes the decision to block out her ability to time-travel beyond the incident. Brilliant, Tanigawa.
 * About a month after I finished the series, it suddenly popped into my head that things make a lot more sense if Haruhi is taken to be a subconscious safety-mechanism imposed by Kyon who is, in actuality, the one with the powers.
 * You will become even more convinced of this when you read the prologue to the first novel, in which he imagines himself as ordinary sidekick to the mysterious transfering "alien/time traveller/whatever", as a way to be involved with powers despite his own evident lack of them. -- User:Dagger.
 * I couldn't stand Mikuru's voice in the dub of Haruhi Suzumiya, I like Stephanie Sheh but I thought her portrayal of Mikuru was going overboard with the cute, shy girl thing. Then I saw the Japanese version and realized Mikuru's voice is supposed to be annoyingly cute as part of her being a parody of Moe characters in anime. - User:Jade 826
 * A lot of characters are intentionally annoying; skilled authors will hide this fact well. The hope is that you'll associate them with someone you don't like and thus make the world of the show more alive for you. I don't think anyone will argue there's a shortage of those people. Upon realization of this fact, scrappy characters gain a little respect. They're there for a reason, and taking them away will destroy a large part of the show. It's still on the creator not to overdo it, however. ~User:Excel-2010.
 * When the first seat-change happened in the first novel and Haruhi ended up behind Kyon again "coincidentally", I thought it was because of Haruhi warping reality slightly so she could be near him. Then I remembered that Asakura, as class president, had been the one to change the seats. Wouldn't she want Kyon to be near Haruhi to provoke a response from her? ~User:Aster Selene
 * At first, I was wondering why Yuki caused Disappearance. Then I read the 5th novel, and Endless Eight. So that's why... That didn't qualify as Fridge Brilliance for me, mainly because it was obvious to me that 594 years of the same 2 weeks would drive lesser beings to insanity. Skip forward to April 2010's Sneaker Magazine, where a preview of Number 10 came out., which is the equivalent of sending her to meet Cthulhu. Why did the Integrated Data Sentient Entity do that? It'll be a Fate Worse Than Death! Upon rereading Disappearance, I figured out why. Kyon stopped the IDSE from killing Yuki. There was a loophole though, which the Genre Savvy/super intelligent IDSE saw.
 * Rather look at Yuki's selection as this: Nagato has spent close to six hundred subjective years observing humans with most of that time in a state of And I Must Scream. She has dealt with insanity that the IDSE could not even fathom, wouldn't that, then make her the most ideal candidate for dealing with the Sky Canopy Domain? Rather than thinking of the IDSE as a child angry that something was taken out of its control it would be more likely to think of it as a computer using the most suitable resource available.
 * Of course, there's no reason why it couldn't be both.
 * Every time that Kyon copies a graphic designed by Haruhi an angel gets its wings, I mean a data-vore appears. Perhaps it's not so much a his/hers divinity, but a theirs.
 * (Note: unmarked spoilers for Disappearance, programming jargon) Yuki and Ryoko's actions in Disappearance didn't make as much sense as they should have. I realized she was bored and upset and angry and tore apart reality out of vengeance. But why did she give Kyon the keys back to his reality? And why did Ryoko still stab Kyon? But if you look at them as complex programs, rather than humans, it makes sense. Yuki is hard-coded to be a servant and an observer- but she is able to change who she serves and observes. It's also probably possible that they can re-hard-code themselves (or that the radical faction gave their interfaces this ability)- Ryoko Given her determination to kill Kyon during the first murder attempt combined with her seeming lack of emotion, it's perfectly possible that she re-wrote herself to kill Kyon at all costs (though the reason why might be irrelevant to her coding). Therefore, given her own existence and Kyon's presence, she's gonna go for it. This also explains why she didn't try to murder him at school 'later that day'- she had already done so, so there was no longer a need to kill him again.
 * At the Cultural Festival, when Nagato is reading people's fortunes, you just naturally assume she's able to get so incredibly specific because, being a computerized alien, she's a beast at logic. Although, if you recall, earlier on in the timeline, when Kyon needed to get back to his present time from three years ago (for the second time), Nagato synched her memories up with those of herself from the present day, which was beyond the Cultural Festival chronologically. Theoretically, that would mean she would have memories of the Cultural Festival also, even before it actually happened. I'm implying that Nagato actually used her future knowledge of the events in the Cultural Festival in order to tell people's fortunes.
 * So on the Tanabata that started everything, Haruhi drew a large patch of symbols on the school blacktop because she was really, really, bored. These symbols, along with the awakening of Haruhi's powers (both happening at around the same time), drew the attention of various aliens, time travelers, espers and about a million other things that we don't know about. Haruhi drew those symbols with the goal of alerting all the strange and interesting things in the universe that "I am here", much like how a person stranded on a deserted island would try to get the attention of passing ships and planes. So in other words, on that faithful Tanabata where the entire plot of the series was planted, Haruhi was sending out into space a distress signal.
 * Remember that Kyon drawing the symbols occurred AFTER "the event", because he couldn't time travel to before "the event".
 * But Haruhi told him what to draw, so possibly her original designing of the symbols was "the event." Which, come to think of it, explains why Yuki could read it--Haruhi's creation of those symbols brought Yuki and the Data Entity into existence, and their language along with it. And that other time she drew something, there was another data explosion...hm...
 * This one is probably more like Obvious Brilliance to the Japanese viewers, but it kinda gets Lost in Translation: in Disappearance, it's very windy the night when, which turns out to be the source of that wind. The next day, half of Kyon's class is sick . Guess what the Japanese words for "cold" (the disease) and "wind" are.
 * Itsuki first notes in Sigh that big trouble is brewing if he stopped blithely smiling at everything. When does he first demonstrate this?
 * * The line Kyon shouted to Haruhi  What Haruhi's SOS-dan stand for: "Sekai wo ooini moriagerutame no Suzumiya Haruhi no dan".

Fridge Logic:


 * How can Kyon and Mikuru be morally "good" characters if they continue to associate with Haruhi after this? Also, supposedly Haruhi has had Pet the Dog moments after that, but isn't it arguably also Fridge Logic that an extortionist has good in her?
 * Mikuru's overall goal is to repair the fractured timeline. For that omelette, she's willing to break a few eggs. Kyon stays with the brigade (at that point) at least partly to reign Haruhi in when she starts going to far. And why shouldn't an extortionist have some good in her?
 * What they're dealing with is a little more important than a stolen computer. Or a molested time-traveler, for that matter.
 * A possible hole in the Stable Time Loop. In Disappearance, Kyon confronts and asks for that to be undone. Shouldn't she remember that meeting when they see each other at school? If this gets cleared after Book 6, then just say that and leave the explanation out.

Fridge Horror:


 * Disappearance. Alright, so Kyon's decision at the end
 * (A summation of the rest of the posts, to make things less biased and flame war bate-ish, as well as cut back on the WMG): bad things happen to each member of the SOS brigade because of Haruhi, more specifically because of her powers. By reverting the universe back to "normal," i.e. Haruhi having the power, Kyon is at least dooming the others to lives that are worse off than in Yuki's version (as far as we know, anyway).
 * A point that should not be dropped is that the rest of the team has expressed faith in the innate goodness of Goddess Haruhi. She's no scary Carrie. - Hcobb
 * Another point: After everything is back to normal, Kyon hardly abandons Yuki. Indeed, his experience in the altered world and with Human!Yuki seems to bring the two closer than ever. Kyon's bond with Yuki is pretty much cemented permanently by the end of the story. -Sporkaganza
 * Remember that Eye Beams incident while making the film? See what the beam did to that board Koizumi was holding. Now imagine what would have happened if Nagato didn't catch the beam fired toward the camera.... ~dRoy
 * On the matter of the board, consider what would've happened if Mikuru had looked down a few inches lower. Little wonder that Koizumi drops his grin for a moment and actually looks shocked.~spinindiamond
 * Another bit about Disappearance. So Yuki remakes to world into one which she is happy in - where she's normal, there is no data-entity to control her life, Haruhi with no godlike powers to mess up the lives of Kyon, Mikuru and Koizumi and where Kyoko is her best friend - but the thing is, Kyoko ends up being a Yandere psychopath Les Yay Knife Nut. This Kyoko is not the data entity that she is with her powers, but is Kyoko by herself really that powerful to defy dimensional barriers just to destroy Kyon? Another even scarier thought: Since Yuki was the one who remade this world, wouldn't Kyoko then represent a part of Yuki's desires? Would this mean that a part of Yuki actually wants someone who will love her that badly that they will be all Yandere and possessive? How bad are Yuki's emotional problems from being a human but forced to act like a data-entity, always observing, always on the sidelines, never allowed to "interfere" or form any significant relationships?