涼宮ハルヒの憂鬱 - The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

Just to refresh your memories, my plans with these 'reviews' is here. So, on to the behemoth of Haruhi!

Cosplay. I fucking love cosplay as I'm sure toon-fetishists the world over do, and in this sub-genre of Japanese culture, I particularly love the Haruhi cosplay. Not because of any particular love of Haruhi, though I do LOVE Haruhi, but because when I was there (I know, always harping on about the good ol' days) every second cosplayer was a Haruhi. So of course it has a special place in my heart. Add to this the school-girl fetishism and the oddly militant armband and Haruhi is a perfect cosplay wet dream.


The interesting thing about this is that it has very little (read: none bar the character's faces) relevance to the series. The series is set in high school, the characters are younger than they appear here and they're only involved in a band in one or two episodes and even then, it probably has more to do with Yuki's skills than anything else. But the point is that this well could be part of the series. This is a series in which, for the first eight episodes of the second season, viewers were forced to watch the same story eight times with only minor alterations (known as Endless Eight, this did nothing to harm the show's popularity as far as I can tell, a movie just opened in Japan after all). We've also been to space, back in time and in alternate dimensions, so this picture is a possibility, as is any picture, which is what makes this series so entertaining.


Hare Hare Yukai. Oh my God. This titles sequence was, for me, groundbreaking and means I will never, EVER abandon the fan-ranks of this show. EVER. I may have even practised this dance in the privacy of my own home in my own company. May definitely have. And it was awesome.