The Disappearance of Suzumiya Haruhi, or Vanishment for those who like ANN.com, is coming our way, after the post-trauma effects left over from the Endless Eight arc we were subjected to in the 2009 Haruhi run. It’s all fine and dandy, but the estranged opinion of everyone was that character designs ever since K-ON! simply went to shit. It’s quite a strong sentiment. I didn’t do any research but it already seems like all it needed was a seeded thought of “suckage” and everyone went with it. Primarily, this has to do with popular opinion about the character designs of Kyoto Animation; I’d like to think it started earlier with Lucky Star.

True enough, it wasn’t until Lucky Star that the “moe-fication” of character design made everyone go bonkers. The biggest hint was the changed face design of Haruhi during an in-episode meta commercial of Haruhi that Kagami and Tsukasa were watching in.. whatever episode it was in.

K-ON! passes by with the occasional “art so moe” comments, some dismissing the changing art style that Kyoani chose. It wasn’t until the 2009 Haruhi run started to air. Message boards flooded with the usual internet banter and silly memes decrying the moe art direction. Who had not noticed that facial proportions were drastically improved since Air? Those were some horizontal faces. Ever watched Munto? I can’t really say that Air was badly drawn, but I feel that it too strongly resembled the art direction from its Key (the visual novel studio) counterpart. But we had hints of it since Haruhi drunk some suspicious liquid in a commercial. Reacting a bit late here, everyone.

I don’t think it’s really so bad to say that the art improved. It’s such a strong notion that the art went to shit, but all of it is just opinion. I’d like to say that not everyone is entitled to opinion. Why? Because they’re potentially [and probably are] assholes. There’s just no quarter to be given to these people. The only way to fight a stubborn person is to stay stubborn yourself, and wait for the other one to fall. In the case of our internet society, we wait until the others’ opinion fails. This is usually fun to observe, but Haruhism followers somehow are obnoxious beyond belief. Not even Naruto fans are this annoying. At least Naruto had some fight scenes animated by Norio Matsumoto.

And then this movie comes along. People looked at the art. It’s different than the 2006 and 2009 runs. But it’s suddenly better! It looks closer to the “original designs”. Original designs my ass. Haruhi was originally supposed to have straight black hair, and it absolutely looks nothing like Noizi Ito’s art style. It’s a little too easy that it still looks like it’s 2009 run, and I’m betting it’ll simply be a mesh of 30 percent hard-line face plate of 2006 and 80 percent curvy moe designs of 2009, with the polish of money behind the production. Did you really like the 2006 designs? The live performance scene. The one part where Haruhi’s face just started to look silly.

I’m derailing.

There’s no logical backup towards the trend of “suckage” of the infinitely moe art recently produced by Kyoto Animation. There’s simply just a large amount of people who hate it, and whose opinions seem to be only validated by their own peers who actually like it. Everyone jumped onto the bandwagon ever since they stopped producing adaptations from Key. Is that all it took?

Go watch your shitty Evangelion movies.

Kyonko + watermelon popsicle image by Punchiki (pixiv link).
Haruhi images from season 2006 and 2009.

-maserbeam