Breaking Stereotypes

Posted: May 20, 2009 | Author: flomu | Filed under: Uncategorized |4 Comments »

Let’s be honest here.  Did any of you even spot this in Haruhi (episode 4) when you watched it for the first time?  I know I didn’t.

Reminiscent of Kyon reading the SOS Brigade’s creed while Haruhi and Mikuru get dragged away while trying to distribute flyers, these two collective scenes show a very stereotypical romantic anime encounter.

In the first screenshot, the girl and the guy touch hands while helping with the net, and both of them immediately flinch, back away, and blush.  This is probably the most stereotypical scene in romance anime (maybe a tie with the “I’ll protect you” line?).  In the second screenshot, the guy approaches the girl, who slaps the guy and runs away.  This, too, is a very stereotypical scene present in many anime (though even more cliched would be the “asking out leads to girl saying yes” response rather than the embarrassed/pissed response shown here).

We’ve got two pretty obscure stereotypical scenes in episode four of Haruhi… so what?  Great job for noticing something that doesn’t really matter.  I don’t care if Lelouch reads the Divine Comedy.

Well, the point is that they’re obscure.  They get what, five seconds total in a series spanning over eighteen thousand seconds? (Yes, I used a calculator for that.)  And on top of that, the girl and the guy are very small on the screen.  Finally, Haruhi and Kyon are talking in the first and second screenshots, respectively.

It’s as if KyoAni wants to play down these two scenes… and they do!  The viewer is distracted by the more important dialogue of Haruhi and Kyon to really notice, or even care about, the little [literally] drama taking place outside the school building.  KyoAni is purposely drawing a contrast between the average romantic, slice-of-life, school life comedy and Haruhi.

In this episode, those two stereotypical scenes that take place outside the school building are ironically much less interesting and unique than the events that go on inside the school building – episode four is Ryoko Asakura vs. Yuki in the classroom.

Haruhi is definitely not a stereotypical anime.  It’s obviously a romantic comedy with school life and slice-of-life elements, but it’s nowhere close to the normal romantic comedy like the one outside the building.  In the same episode that we see the couple outside the building go through the love-at-first-sight and the rejection scenes, we also witness Ryoko dying at the hands of Yuki and an older Mikuru visiting Kyon to say “Snow White.”  The sharp contrast of these two different anime – the one outside the school and the one inside the school – bltantly show that Haruhi is radically different from the average anime.

Though you’d expect a romantic comedy to contain the “love at first sight scene” that is depicted in the first screenshot, we instead get a now-famous “aliens, espers, and time travelers” line that shatters the gray world that the anime starts out in – Kyon’s “normal” life that could might as well have turned out to be like that story outside the school building.

Neither do we witness a “rejection scene” or its “acceptance scene” counterpart.  The closest we get to this is Kyon’s declaration that he likes ponytails, and Haruhi dissolving her “new world” in episode 6.  At first glance, that one line could be considered anticlimactic as hell.  But if you think about it, it suits the anime perfectly.  What better way to portray the “normal” rejection/acceptance scene that happens outside the school in episode four than to have an abnormal climax?

While the mini-climax of the outside drama occurs as the girl slaps the guy and runs away, Kyon looks on and quickly turns away (not out of embarrassment – it’s just that he’s not paying much attention) while thinking (above picture).

As if the fact that Kyon is talking isn’t enough to show the normality of the average romantic comedy in comparison to Haruhi, KyoAni also decided to put in this nice little stereotype-breaking line in.

It’s like KyoAni is mocking the average romantic comedy.  The “letter in show locker” event took place earlier in the episode, and Kyon nearly got killed by Ryoko.  This second one leads to a different Mikuru than the one Kyon is thinking of as he reads “Mikuru Asahina” on the letter.

The first letter probably didn’t fool many people.  Kyon even says that he “doubts it’s a love letter,” so we are fully prepared for some veering off of the path of stereotypes.  The first letter alone broke the “letter in shoebox leads to confession of love” stereotype that we see in every other romance anime.  Though we were prepared for something to happen, this nonetheless shook us up and made us reconsider the usual scene.

The second letter brought this to a whole new level.  Kyon insists that he knows who sent the letter, and we see “Mikuru Asahina” on the letter.  This shattered what remnants of stereotypes still lingered in the viewer’s mind.  Kyon even mocks the shoebox letters as some kind of “fad,” suggesting that this second letter may actually revert back to the stereotype.

By taking these two parts of this episode together, we get a clear picture of Haruhi and what KyoAni is trying to say: Haruhi is not your average anime.  Instead of following the stereotyped elements of the romantic comedy happening outside the building, Haruhi goes by its own rules.  We get action, danger, foreshadowing, etc. in place of a love confession – what more could possibly say “this ain’t an ordinary show?”

 

P.S.: I’m sorry if this post went off-topic (I felt that it did, though I can’t be arsed to re-read it).  Also, I’m kind of using the obscure stereotypical scenes vs. the shoebox “love” letters –> Ryoko + Mikuru as a generalization for the entire anime’s diverging from stereotypes.

kbai *falls asleep*

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