My impression of the SOS-dan (SOS brigade)'s members

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So this year, I first heard of Haruhi Suzumiya and found the series interesting, mainly for its premise of "Person acquires God-like powers but doesn't know it." Anyway, here are my impressions of the characters:

Haruhi Suzumiya: She is the title character and the female lead, but not the main character as I'm told--that award goes to Kyon. She's the one who got the God-like powers but doesn't know it. All throughout the series her true nature and the exact nature of her unconscious abilities are constantly discussed and questioned, with various hypotheses presented, none of which is necessarily more compelling than another. Apparently, through these powers she often gets what she wants. She is said to be beautiful, intelligent, and athletic, the combination of these traits possibly being a consequence of her powers.

She is well-known for her eccentricity and her desire to meet up with various paranormal phenomena, such as aliens, other-world people, people from the future, and people with supernatural powers. She gets her wish, but is apparently ignorant of that fact, as she thinks those paranormal people she meets up with are normal. She is also quite domineering, running her brigade like a dictator and at times really violating the rights of others. Her treatment of the person from the future Mikuru Asahina goes too far in my opinion. Haruhi treating Mikuru like she's a moe doll or something and at times molesting her have often left me uncomfortable, to the point where if I re-watch episodes, I'll skip those scenes.

Nevertheless, there are some times when her delinquency can be funny, like when they were filming the movie starring Mikuru and were at the shrine trying to make the doves fly away from Mikuru and she started shooting the doves with BB pellets, and then the priest came with a "You dang kids!" attitude and Haruhi shot the priest with BB pellets to cover her brigade's escape from getting in trouble. I could not help but LOL at the audacity Haruhi showed in that scene. There was also that scene with the fire crackers... I wish more scenes like this were done as opposed to the abuse-Mikuru ones.

Aspects of her character can be pretty scary, since she possesses God-like powers, which her brigade knows about even though she doesn't. Basically, the universe already revolves around her and the characters know it and have to try to placate her to prevent the apocalypse. The 3 paranormal members seem to have more or less given away their minds and bodies in service to Haruhi because they fear the apocalypse. Of course, this comes about because they are even more scared of spilling the beans to her, which seems like a self-defeating enterprise. This all makes me wonder: Is this the way God got started?

Kyon: The main character of the series, and for him we get only the courtesy of his nickname. This guy likes to complain a lot about his station, even though half the time he does nothing about it. Haruhi seems to like bossing him around the most, but also seems to have some respect for him and will occasionally listen to him, apparently the only person she'll listen to. He comes across as not being very honest with himself, like how he really likes all the time with Haruhi, but at the same time complains about it over and over. He seems to learn to be honest more with himself once he loses what he very quickly began to take for granted.

He is also the John Smith character who actually drew the white lines on the school grounds at Haruhi's direction on Tanabata 3 years previously. Now a lot of people assume that that's when Haruhi's data flare occurred, the time when the message was drawn, but that's not true. The time Haruhi's data flare manifested coincides with the point in time when Haruhi's time quake occurred that prevents time travelers, like our person from the future Mikuru, from traveling to any point in time before it. Because repeatedly Kyon and Mikuru were able to time travel to the time prior to when Haruhi got on the school grounds to do that Tanabata stunt, the data flare must have occurred prior to that time.

Yuki Nagato: Yuki is an alien, more specifically a humanoid interface created by the Integrated Data Thought Entity for the purpose of observing Haruhi and gathering data on her. She's really quiet, likely because she rarely sees any reason to talk. She seems to follow something along the lines of Benjamin Franklin's virtue of silence: "Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation." I think her tendency toward silence and, when she has to talk, toward deadpan makes her a funny character, giving the impression of someone who just does not give a you-know-what most of the time. She was particularly cool with the lines her character delivered in the Mikuru film: 私は魔法を使う宇宙人である。("I am an alien who uses magic.")ではその命も我々がいただこう。("Well then, we will take/receive your life, also.") There's like a certain awesomeness with the style of Japanese she uses, like with the use of である (played with in the Chibi Maruko Chan series as well, with regards to the narrator), with there being a kind of dry literalism that is delivered. One is further reminded of the maxim of speak only when it is necessary and only what is necessary.

(Anyway, I'll pick up this review in another post. I'm getting kinda beat now.)

(continued)

Yuki is the most powerful, aside from Haruhi, and most knowledgeable of the brigade's members. Her abilities clearly far exceed that of anything earth-based in the 21st century. She is able to identify and deal with problems quite effectively, like during the Mikuru beam incident. Though unfamiliar with 21st century earth technology, she is a very fast learner, going from trying to move the mouse in the air to "super-hacker" in less than a week.

Like the other humanoid interfaces, her emotional expression is limited. Nevertheless, she seems to be the least creepy of all of them. There are hints that she begins to develop emotions over the course of the series, at first in response to the "Endless Eight" arc in which she had to undergo the horrifying experience of knowingly experiencing the same 2 weeks over and over again for nearly 600 years! Her apparent boredom and annoyance with having to always observe Haruhi seem to lead her to "reset" existence back to normal, while giving Kyon a choice regarding what he wants. Kyon chooses to keep things the way they were. He shows loyalty to her nonetheless, when she is facing deletion for her actions, and she takes steps to make aspects of her existence less horrible, while increasing her independence.

Mikuru Asahina: A girl from the future, apparently the far future, from a society so advanced that she has no clue how 21st century technology works and thinks that telescopes made in the 21st century are not all that different from the telescopes made during Kepler's time. She time travels by means of a device called the TPDD, which Yuki describes as primitive. Both a younger and older Mikuru travel from different points in the future, and it appears the job of both is to maintain stable time loops. The younger Mikuru is a doormat while the older Mikuru is much more self-confident. Both clearly have a sexy appeal, the younger one also having a moe appeal.

I've already mentioned Haruhi's abuse of Mikuru so I won't go into that. I get the sense that as a character she's not really meant to be taken seriously. Her ignorance of 21st century technology, initially shared by the highly advanced Yuki, is played up as someone who is tech-illiterate, even though she's from a much more technologically advanced future and her job is to travel through time. Unlike Yuki, we rarely get to see her compensate by means of more advanced methods or technology to achieve her goals.

Itsuki Koizumi: He has supernatural skills when present in Haruhi's closed space, a special space closed off from the surrounding reality created by Haruhi (inadvertently) whenever she gets frustrated that also contain large anthropomorphic monsters that destroy the buildings within those spaces. He is also able to detect the presence of such a space and enter it (and also bring others in with him). He works for the Agency, a group of persons with similar skills who 3 years prior acquired those skills, knew what to do with them, and knew who gave it to them (Haruhi). The job of the Agency is to destroy the monsters in the closed spaces, which destroys the closed spaces themselves. Their fear is that if left unchecked, a closed space could cause serious damage to reality and reshape the world.

Itsuki, by transferring to her school and joining her brigade, seeks to preempt the formation of closed spaces by keeping Haruhi happy and having funny. Always with a perfect smile Itsuki turns himself into a doormat and does what Haruhi tells him to do.

Of the 3 paranormal members, Yuki, Mikuru, and Itsuki, Itsuki has the most expository dialogue and seems to like to talk, a lot. He often claims to be joking which just leaves the viewer confused, since he mentions seemingly deep things in his conversations. He likes to mess with Kyon a lot.