Coming soon: You Have to Wait

I love time loops and I hate The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. Correction: I’m indifferent towards the Haruhi anime; it’s the fans I hate. So this summer’s Endless Eight arc has been like Christmas every day. Some background:

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is about a high school girl, Haruhi Suzumiya, and her high school club, the S.O.S. Brigade. Except not really; Haruhi, unbeknownst to her, is a Godlike-being with the power to recreate the universe on a whim, and the other club members are actually robots/time travelers/Espers/dimension shifters sent to this point in time to study and/or placate her. If this sounds like an interesting set-up, you’re mistaken; what should be It’s a Good Life: The High School Years just turns into so much unflavored moe. The anime is based on a series of light novels, giving fans a convenient list of things to complain got left out.

Endless Eight is a 30-page short story about a two-week time loop at the end of August, right before school starts. Haruhi, you see, doesn’t want summer vacation to end – she’d rather enjoy the Obon festival, go to the beach, visit hot spring, etc. – anything with a costume change, basically. And because Haruhi gets what she wants, the S.O.S. Brigade has endured these two weeks over 15,000 times – almost 600 years. The key to breaking this loop turns out to be one of the characters finally doing his homework. But until he learns to hit the books? (Bell)

The first episode of the Endless Eight arc was a straightforward adaptation of the short story. Everyone has fun in the sun, a few characters are suspicious this might have happened before, nothing is resolved, and Kyon fails to do his homework. It’s not until the next episode that things start to go awry.

It’s the exact same episode as last week. The same script, the same characters, the same scenes, the same ending. Nobody learns anything new. No one is any closer to uncovering the secret of how to break out of this time loop. It’s just last week … this week.

Except – and this is the greatest “except” in the history of both anime and time loop fiction – it’s not. The script has been re-envisioned by a new director. The characters have been redesigned with new outfits. The show has been reanimated from scratch. Even the voice actors have rerecorded all their lines. By another way of thinking, it’s a completely new episode — albeit, one with absolutely no new content.

Episode three does the same thing. So does episode four. Fans, amused at first, have turned sour. They were looking forward to seeing the The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya arc animated, and at the rate KyoAni is burning through episodes, that’s never going to happen.

Five, six, seven, eight.

After two months, it ends. A once-thriving fanbase has been reduced to ashes and tears. Most have long since declared the series anathema; the few that toughed it out are filled with self-loathing at their capacity for abuse. Nobody knows why Endless Eight continued as long as it did. Intentional sabotage from within? An producer with an unchecked artistic bent? A misjudged thought experiment? Tens of millions of yen and thousands of man hours were spent … on what, exactly? It’s over, now, but nobody knows for sure.

Endless Eight is beautiful.