Reflections on Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu and anime fandom

As the ending credits roll for the final episode, I struggle for words that adequately describe the joy that is Haruhism, and fail miserably. It defies genre conventions, yet is a paean to them. It is, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, a tipping point in animation. I would rank this in my top ten favorites along escaflowne, last exile and hachimitsu to clover.

Before I say any more about the series, some perspective on anime fandom is in order.

At the most basic level, anime is base (pun not intended). It consists of the lowest and most primal of distractions (anime is best known for gratuitous violence and ecchi fanservice) and consequently appeals to the lowest common denominator: yaoi fangirls and 4chan /b/tards. It operates on the same mental wavelength as pornography, sitcoms and summer blockbuster scifi action movies: there’s just not much thinking required.

Yet what is most defining of anime is not simply its base appeal. Anime is often also wish fulfillment fantasy, the same thing that sells soap operas, romantic comedies, and other it-could-happen-to-you stories. Thus the perennial anime staples like the harem genre which not only caters to all sorts of fetishes, but also places the audience-surrogate protagonist in the happy position of being fought over by any number of girls. Other clichés include having a loving sister that wakes you up in time for school, fixes all your meals and walks you to school, and always being the hero that rescues his childhood love. Unsurprisingly, my favorite is tsundere – the taming of the shrew. Anime is wish fulfillment and does not apologize for the blatant way in which it seeks to gratify the repressed desires of its target audience. And we know from Freud that wish fulfillment is the function of all human dreams – the struggle for dominance between the primitive, unconscious desires of the Id and the waking-world realities of the Superego.

One might consider that the base and primitive appeal of anime seems to undermine the efforts of anime fans to claim an aesthetic, pseudoauteur appreciation of the medium, complete with in-depth analysis of narrative structure and character development, and a full understanding of the genre and its history. And charts that would warm the black hearts of management consultants. While those would be appropriate for a study of the (sub)cultural phenomenon around anime and its appreciators (also, the market phenomena of the free-rider-plagued fansub community), when applied by anime bloggers (and some of them certainly apply it well, far better than I do) it seems somewhat like an a posteriori justification to perhaps obscure the less erudite foundations of their interest in the subject (which I am sure they wouldn’t tell someone they just met). I am, of course, most guilty of this.

Yet I would argue that an awareness of the primary appeal of anime gives one a perspective that adds more levels of appreciation, not dissimilar to literary, artistic, or gastronomic pursuits. At some level anime fandom becomes ‘meta-plebeian’ (who comes up with this pomo crap anyway?), a celebration of wish fulfillment as a fundamental aspect of human desire. We must make the distinction between one who enjoys Naruto, Bleach and Gundam Seed (bleah, not I) because and not in spite of their flaws. Ok, not a good explanation since I can’t think of a single person who fits the profile.

To return to Haruhism, suffice to say that it stands on its own merits, but its appreciation is so much more enriched with a full understanding of the genre and its conventions, which it manages to simultaneously break past and nod at (it even speaks in the secret code of otaku). It is great in the way that Ergo Proxy (an export product) is not. It is post-anime: multilayered complexity, non-linearity without incoherence.

As the 4-channers would say, I can’t wait for MOAR. 2^nd season KyoAni!