The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

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The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱, Suzumiya Haruhi no Yūutsu^?) is the name of the first volume in the Suzumiya Haruhi series written by Japanese author Nagaru Tanigawa and illustrated by Japanese artist Noizi Ito; currently, there are nine individual volumes. The story first appeared in The Sneaker, a seinen novel magazine.

Since the release of the first volume by the Japanese publishing company Kadokawa Shoten, Haruhi Suzumiya has spanned several different media types, all having been based on the novels that preceeded them. For instance, two seperate manga series were created, though the first was discontinued shortly after it started production, while the second is still currently running in Japan & has been licensed by YenPress who also have licensed the novels with Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. An anime was later created sharing the same title of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya though elements from other books appear in the series as well; it started airing in Japan on April 2, 2006 and contained 14 episodes in total. Though overseas licensing offers have been made, it was finally licensed for North American distribution by Kadokawa Pictures USA, who sublicensed production and distribution to Bandai Entertainment. Lastly, a radio drama was created along with a special fan concert. Currently a second season is in production.

1 Plot overview
2 Setting
3 Characters and episodes
4 Theme songs
5 Trivia
- 5.1 Official website related
- 5.2 Miscellaneous
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Plot overview

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya follows the lives of Haruhi Suzumiya and those who are caught up in her antics. While Haruhi is the character most central to the plot, the story is told from the point of view of Kyon, one of Haruhi's classmates.

Kyon is a first year in high school who had just recently been able to leave his fantasies of mysterious organizations, time travelers and fierce battles with aliens behind him along with required school. However, when he chooses to speak to one eccentric girl on the first day of high school, he unwittingly sets off a chain of events which drags him into situations entirely different from the real world in which he had convinced himself he was a part of. This turns his world nearly upside down as he is drawn further into a world eerily like the fantasies he had just managed to outgrow. At first it is unknown to Kyon that Haruhi Suzumiya, a fellow first year student, is at the center of it all.

Haruhi, being unsatisfied with the clubs already established, is inspired by Kyon to create one of her own which will satisfy her eccentric desires. To help start the club, Haruhi forcefully drafts Kyon, who only stays in the club to protect (or try to protect) other helpless victims of Haruhi's "voluntary arrests". However, it turns out that these are not simply helpless victims, but each has a specific reason to be there.

[edit] Setting

The anime is set in the town remniscient of Nishinomiya, Hyogo, as it is the site of the Kwansei Gakuin University, where Nagaru Tanigawa studied. Names of real train stations and baseball teams were altered in the anime, for example:

The Kitaguchi Station seen in the anime is actually the Nishinomiya Kitaguchi Station.
The Kōyōen Station (光陽園駅) is named after the real Kōyōen Station (甲陽園駅), only the kanji is different.
The school where all of them attend is actually Nishinomiya Kita Kōkō (西宮北高校).
The rival baseball team featured in Episode 4, Kamigahara Pirates (上ヶ原パイレーツ), has the same name of its real life counterpart, Uegahara Pirates of the Kwansei Gakuin University, only the reading of the first kanji (上) is different.

In addition, several scenes in the anime are faithful portrayals of the scenery in Nishinomiya. [1] Note: Link might not work

[edit] Characters and episodes

Main article: Characters

Main article: Episodes

[edit] Theme songs

[edit] Opening

Mikuru Legend of Love (恋のみくる伝説 Koi no Mikuru Densetsu)(Episode 1)

by Yuko Goto

It's An Adventure, Right? Right? (冒険でしょでしょ？ Bouken Desho Desho?) (Episode 2+)

by Aya Hirano

"Super Driver" ) (Season 2, Episode 1+)

by w:Aya Hirano/Aya Hirano

[edit] Ending

Sunny Sunny Fun (ハレ晴レユカイ Hare Hare Yukai)

by Aya Hirano (Haruhi Suzumiya), Minori Chihara (Yuki Nagato), and Yuko Goto (Mikuru Asahina)

Stop! (Tomare!) (Season 2, Episode 1+) by: Aya Hirano (Haruhi Suzumiya), Minori Chihara (Yuki Nagato), and Yuko Goto (Mikuru Asahina)

[edit] Chart history

Sunny Sunny Fun debuted at #15 on the daily Oricon charts (which tracks the best-selling singles in Japan) on May 9, 2006; Reached #2 on May 12, 2006. Peaked at #1 on June 5, 2006. Haruhi ED Ranking Top 1 On the weekly Oricon charts, it debuted at #5 with sales of 34,881 copies of the CD. One of the weekly Oricon Charts (Japanese)

[edit] Trivia

[edit] Official website related

Edit this trivia

The official website of Haruhi Suzumiya once reflected what had happened in episode 7 of the anime. When it did, the title and the SOS Brigade logo were corrupted just like in that episode. Sometimes the logo changes to ZOZ Brigade and the title would not be corrupted, just as the website was when it was "repaired" in the end of the episode. When the page was not corrupted, the counter reads 29819, matching episode 7's counter. During the next few days some little animated Nekoman figures were shown on the page. The website is now fixed at ZOZ Brigade version permanently, and the counter started to generate randomly again.
The official website's main page's source also has a comment tag that appears as  when decoded to SHIFT-JIS and which reads as  in EUC-JP . It translates literally to "Data corrected by Yuki Nagato", reflecting Yuki's hack in the anime.
At the date of June 12, 2006, the top Google search result for SOS-dan is the link to the secret mikuru folder in the official website. This is possibly because fans are seeking image files after seeing Kyon hid Mikuru's photos in that folder in episode 10. There is a new hidden link (which can be revealed by pressing "Ctrl+A") which leads to the secret Mikuru folder in Mikuru's profile now (There are some images not shown in the page, namely mikuru01.jpg, mikuru01.gif, IMG_2668.JPG¹, and IMG_3096.JPG). The title of the page is "Mikuru Asahina's (Fascinating) Album"².
If you press Ctrl+A to "select all" on the SOS Brigade activity log (which is in fact a list of episodes), you can see there are 15498 episodes in total, which is a parody on Endless Eight of volume 5 of the novel series, The Rampage of Suzumiya Haruhi. You can also see the hidden words written by Yuki. The same thing also happens on some of the member pages, which also contains hidden messages from Kyon.
If you press Ctrl+A to "select all" in Yuki's profile you can find a link that opens a window showing the letter #5 that was delivered to Yuki in chapter 6 of volume 7 of the novel series.
Kyoto Animation's episode guide in their Haruhi anime section (not the Haruhi SOS Brigade site): Haruhi's message can be found by looking at the first character of every line and putting them together in a sentence.
There is another page of the computer computer workshop compkenb page.
In the first issue of unofficial SOS-Brigade mail, a new hidden page is revealed, a fictitious page made by computer club.
At the date of December 18, 2006, the official homepage was replaced by a HTTP 404 error page. The source code contains the comment "" (Criteria of activating the program: find all keys; deadline: 3 days after). These are references to the fourth novel, The Vanishing of Suzumiya Haruhi. The day which the website changed also matches the day which the world changed that mentioned in the novel.

haruhi.tv (March 11, 2009)

Around March 11, 2009, the site's homepage reverted to its original form: the SOS logo is the original, undistorted version and DOES NOT read ZOZ. The comment in the source code "Data corrected by Yuki Nagato" is GONE. The enter and mail links direct to "#". Schedule gives you a list of air times apparently starting April 2 (April Fools-this was a rerun, I think). The links at the bottom direct you to "fanclub/" and "haruchuru/" (the former homepage with Haruhi-chan and Churuya content). The keywords in the source also acknowledge haruchuru.

1. Discovered in HTML source code.

2. In first sight the title is only "朝比奈みくる写真館" (Mikuru Asahina's Album), but if you look into the HTML source code of the page, you will find the title is "朝比奈みくる写真館". "" means "comment" in HTML, and the text between them will not be shown in browsers. If it is "translated" into natural language, it would be "朝比奈みくる (悩殺) 写真館" (Mikuru Asahina's (Fascinating) Album). (The second comment (ｸ｡ｱﾜｺﾑ) is ignored here.) The second comment "ｸ｡ｱﾜｺﾑ" is in fact mis-interpreted, which is EUC-JP encoded but mis-interpreted as Shift_JIS. The orginial word is "検閲済", which means "censored". (Kyon probably wrote the title as "Mikuru Asahina's Fascinating Album" originally, but later censored by himself or someone else and wrote the comment, which is again a joke.)

Current state of the "SOS Brigade" Dan hompage" No links, except for the fan club and etc..; The Profiles of all of the characters have been removed, the main signia is SOS, and only the agenda link is still there. -This is most likely due to season 2 airing very recently. In otherwords certain occurences have yet to taken place in the most recently aired episode of the anime.

[edit] Miscellaneous

Edit this trivia

In episode 2 Yuki Nagato is seen reading The Fall of Hyperion, the second book in the science fiction tetralogy The Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. Likewise, she reads The Code Book by Simon Singh in episode 3, Phenomenology of Spirit by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in episode 5, The Woman in the Wardrobe by Peter Antony in episode 6, and Starplex by Robert J. Sawyer in episode 11. These books all have a connection with the storyline of each episode.
Yuki Nagato's "incantations" mostly consist of series of SQL statements, sped up and reversed.
Aya Hirano, the seiyū of Haruhi Suzumiya, drew illustrations of her original character NekoMan for the background of sponsorship credits every week.
There are two date-related lines in episode 2; "In the process, we reached the first day after Golden Week." and "So that makes today Wednesday." Considering "the first day after Golden Week" is May 6th that is Wednesday, the year of the story is estimated as 2009, thus "Three years before" is 2006. The anime The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya became a big boom in 2006, and we actually saw the "information flare" caused by Haruhi Suzumiya on the net (like this page or Youtube, for example).
The series invokes the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, which, in layman's terms, suggests that a person's consciousness directly influences the behavior of subatomic particles. While normal people would have no control over this process, Haruhi somehow does. Macroscopically, this translates into her ability to influence the outcome of any non-deterministic event -- the random selection of batting order, for example.
DVD Vol3 contains a secret /_MIKURU/ folder in the file structure, it contains the pictures Haruhi took of Mikuru.
In the second episode of the Kanon remake, there is a reference to the episode "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya I" in which Kaori Misaka (The character looks very similar to Haruhi in this scene) states to Yūichi, "That was a rather normal introduction," to which Yūichi responds, "If there are any introductions that aren't normal, I'd like to see them." making a reference to Haruhi's crazy introduction.
The last episode of Shuffle! Memories references Haruhi's introduction when everyone is trying to catch a mystical wish-granting fish and Mayumi says "I have no interest in any ordinary fish! If there is a God's fish, then come to me! That is all."
At the end of the last episode after the credits, the graphical drawing of Haruhi Suzumiya is in the same style as the drawing of Spike Spiegel used for the end credits of the last episode of Cowboy Bebop.
Yuki Nagato's name is a pun on Rei Ayanami from Neon Genesis Evangelion. "Rei" can mean "cold" while "Yuki" can mean snow. Nagato and Ayanami were both Japanese warships that served in World War II.
In 'Island Syndrome Part II' Haruhi imitates a scene from the video game, Phoenix Wright. She poses in Phoenix's famous 'objection' pose.

[edit] References

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya --Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 10 July 2006

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://wiki.sos-dan.com/wiki/The_Melancholy_of_Haruhi_Suzumiya"