ENNUI!

In revisiting Haruhi Suzumiya, I'm recognizing what is probably its most compelling trait in its demand of understanding a teenage girl's emotions. Like Catcher in the Rye, it looks at the exhausted and isolated state of being that adolescents are often forced into, asking that the viewer try not to approach them with dismissal. Haruhi's raison d'être being an overwhelmed response at the impossibility of being an individual in a world with billions of other individuals pushes her into a nausea of identity, through which she desperately rejects anything that seems conformist; her crisis is a banal one that feels apocalyptic to her, but society will beg youths to stay passive about this relationship with oneself. By literalizing the crisis into the fabric of reality as a whole, the SOS Brigade have to engage with their perception of young women, their ability to respond to other people's needs beyond the call for unobtrusive normality.