Welcome to Maid Spin, the personal website of iklone. I write about about otaku culture as well as history, philosophy and mythology.
My interests range from anime & programming to mediaevalism & navigation. Hopefully something on this site will interest you.
I'm a devotee of the late '90s / early '00s era of anime, as well as a steadfast lover of maids. My favourite anime is Mahoromatic. I also love the works of Tomino and old Gainax.
To contact me see my contact page.
Since attending Aya Hirano's live a few weeks back I have been on somewhat of a Haruhi binge. To me "Haruhi" will always mean the anime first and foremost, but I've also started reading the LNs, and plan to get through them during my aforementioned time away at sea. But before I start getting my head into them proper, I decided a full rewatch was in order. I rarely actually do holistic rewatches of TV anime, preferring to dip in and watch a random episode here or there whenever it comes to mind; but this time I'm watching the whole thing front-to back. Of course with Haruhi "front-to-back" is itself a controversial topic: even men I know of high standing who generally hold pristine orthodox views folly at this hurdle. But for those who read this blog I am sure it is not alien of me to proclaim the inviolable truth that the only correct watch order is broadcast. Which is why I began my rewatch with sitting down to enjoy The Disappearance, which is by all most accounts the last act in the animated suite. You see since time immemorial I have watched The Disappearance film at Christmas-Time, sometimes with online watch-alongs and sometimes solo, but this year I will have no chance for such a broadband-intensive endeavour, and just so happened to have the perfect opportunity to watch it with a friend of mine two weeks ago which was too good to pass up. And so my rewatch began with what is still one of my favourite films of all time, not that it really mattered since the majority of the plot beforehand is seared permanently into my mind.
It was fun watching it with someone else rather than alone, which unlike any other film I love seems to be my default and preferred approach. This envelops the first of the two major themes which have ran through my rewatch: "community". Haruhi is, as I described two weeks ago, a series which more than any other embodies a specific subculture in a specific time. Almost no other series is able to both garner the mass-nostalgia of the select that Haruhi does while being as bewilderingly impenetrable as it is to modern newcomers. In literally spawning a new "religion" (or parody thereof), "Haruhiism" has managed to work its way into the calendar of my life more than any other person except perhaps Christ himself and Guy Fawkes. As well as my yearly yuletime yomp through The Disappearance, my friends and I also rewatch all of Endless Eight every 8th August either as our own little natsumatsuri, or maybe some form of bacchanalian protection against any time-based conspiracy which may be placed against ourselves. That is to say that the Haruhi series means a lot to me as a conduit for social interaction, a keystone series around which myself and friends or strangers alike can congregate. Although I'm not sure how universal this sentiment is in the wider world, I imagine it is pretty common, but then again maybe I'm a special case. It's hard to tell. But this brings me onto the second theme I have been thinking about this rewatch, that is the "personal".
I first watched the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya in Second Year (which is equivalent to Japanese Chuu-Gakkou Year 1), and it festered in my mind throughout the awkward years of puberty, thus ingraining itself deeply into my psyche. As I mentioned before I rarely properly rewatch stuff, so many of the details of the show and characters faded into base-memory even if the outline of the actual plot remained. I went through high-school and sixth-form (basically the English equivalent of Japanese Koutou-Gakkou) as a run-of-the-mill disgruntled yet vivacious teen, dreaming of better things. As a teenager who was both socially inept but boundlessly energetic (which I guess is the standard fare) I think the halcyon of the "SOS-Brigade" sequestered itself deep into my mind as some "New Jerusalem" which was eminently achievable through effort but distinctly unattainable in a world I struggled to navigate socially. I've probably (like usual) described this more obtusely than I ought to: I think the environment of Haruhi's club appealed to me so deeply that it became my ideal of social-life.
As is normal during a rewatch I was waiting for the big climax episodes to come around; the ones you remember being the best and most impactful. But just before I hit crescendo episode of The Melancholy (episode 15), I was hit by the more subtle episode 14, in which Haruhi investigates the reason for Asakura-san's disappearance (and drags Kyon along). Here Haruhi lays out her "melancholy", giving us an understanding for why she feels so despondent and unable to feel at peace with the world she has been given.
^ Have you ever realised how small your existence is on Earth?
Her reasoning is altogether juvenile; but this doesn't mean its unrealistic. I've always had a viscerally annoyed reaction to those who revel in such sentiments as Haruhi says here: "remember we're just a floating rock travelling Xmph through space", "humans are just lumps of flesh and electricity!", etc etc. But Haruhi is not saying this line in the sort of Reddit-speak defeatist solace which it is often used, but rather as the kernel of absolute discontent with the world from which she nearly decides to destroy it in its entirely and start afresh an episode later. This reasoning is in-fact the antithesis to the self-defeating and terminally weak points you will find parroted in a Kurzgesagt video or see embedded into the mindless collective-brain-mush of a BBC article. It is a fundamental flaw in the modern understanding of the universe which cannot be tolerated by any free soul, and duly warrants the end of the world. I say this as an adult with the full benefit of introspective sapience, but for teenaged me this rang the death knell on the standard "accepted" view of the cosmos, one from which I could and have not turned back.
As I have watched the development of the character of Haruhi Suzumiya over my rewatch, I have come to the slightly uncomfortable conclusion that I probably subconciously modelled large parts of my outward personality on her throughout my latter teenage years. My quite natural adolescent desire for "something more" from the world channelled itself into a distinctly Haruhi-esque outlook on the world. The realisation that the change I desired would not come around by chance and therefore I had to become the catalyst. I think this mindset overall got me into more trouble than good, but as always the good outweighs the bad in the end. Maybe my natural inclination towards controllism helped, but I think many of my actions over those 5 or 6 years can be traced to a desire to realise what Haruhi realised in the SOS Brigade. I know I'm going very off-piste and personal here but in my family there is a commonly spoken of "curse". This curse afflicts all male members of my family at some point in the former half of their lives, and involves them making some drastic (and usually ill-judged) decision which will alter the course of their life. I shan't go into details for the sake of privacy but many of these decisions are terrible and have resulted in betrayal, prison and even death. Who knows whether or not I will follow this path at some point but the older I get the more I understand these seemingly stupid actions. "Boredom", "Melancholy", "Indignation", "Disappearance". Its a combination of frustrations with one's lot in what I am ashamed to say is in quite an unbritish manner. This outburst of manly hubris is common to my blood and I can feel it sometimes in my own, bubbling away under the veneer of a Kyon-style incredulity and scepticism. This so-called "curse" is offset by our family motto: "Seek the Silent Country". These obtuse words come from my great-grandmother and by all accounts serve as a direct order from a matron to her wayward sons: a warning to stay clear of such world-changing and self-destructive impulses and to stay the righteous path toward modest obscurity. I am still undecided on the matter personally.
In the end I did manage to realise the SOS-Brigade dream of my 13-year old self. I ran the anime club at my university for a while and formed a group of longstanding close friends which I now recognise to be unfortunately uncommon amongst most of my peers. Although none of them were aliens, time-travellers nor espers (as far as I know), we did manage to build a storied few years together during university and a continued friendship until the present, even if we have all gone down separate paths career-wise now. If I'm being self-indulgent I could split those years up into several light-novels, each themed accordingly and with simultaneously mundane and epoch-definingly important memories or artefacts just like the Haruhi series. I suppose the main difference is that nobody who wasn't there would care to know. The fact that it is with these same "brigade members" that I still watch Endless Eight with each year I now see as far from a coincidence, but a weird manifestation of the fantastical desires of youth. As a teenager I felt like I was Kyon, cool and aloof from the world, but now I understand that version of myself to be Haruhi instead. Not Haruhi the beautiful girl-from-the-sky anime girl, but Haruhi the petulant, impulsive, angry and ambitious youth that both makes me cringe and want to return to simultaneously.
So what of the silhouette of Suzumiya today? If my teenaged self held the psyche of Haruhi, where does she sit now inside myself? It's easiest to say that she is behind me now, my adult self has moved past such sentimental passions. But on good days, when things go well and I feel charged up, the family curse again wells up in my soul and I feel the juvenile desire to destroy the world and make it new again at my own fancy. They say comfort is the death of all men (or at least I do), so every so often one must overthrow your own mindset and begin afresh as a matter of masculine pride. The world itself must on occasion stand to account and prove its own worth after all. As free men we cannot be expected to crack eggs into the tankard of the world.
