30 Day Anime Challenge – Day 12

Day 12: Favorite Anime Scene

The anime film Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya was one of the best of its kind. It solidified and gave way to the popularity of the Haruhi franchise. There were a lot of scenes from this film which could easily be one of my favorites and choosing just one was just too hard.

So after much thought, I think the best favorite scene I saw in this movie was “Kyon’s Choice.”

If you have watched the anime series and this film, then you would know about a character named Yuki Nagato. Her character is an artificial interface made by aliens which is devoid of any emotions and seeks to only complete the task at hand: to observe Haruhi Suzumiya, the supposed-entity or “god” responsible for keeping everything in balance.

In this movie, it is revealed the Nagato altered everybody’s memories and change the world to its normal state. By normal meaning Haruhi is not a god, and everyone else in the series become normal human beings – no special abilities, no out-of-this-world talents, normal.

She did this to give Kyon a choice: whether to accept a world where everyone is normal and lead a normal life, or return to the original world where Kyon is mixed in a group of people that possess supernatural abilities and keep Haruhi’s god powers in check.

Kyon chose the original world.

What’s so good about this scene is Kyon’s internal monologue and the animation sequences while he goes on about his reasoning of why he chose the original world.

Throughout his monologue, he tries to understand why Nagato could’ve altered the world – which is a cliche reason since she is an artificial humanoid interface devoid of feelings. The sole problem of making artificial human interfaces in every media is that they tend to analyze everything but are limited to the prisons of their programming.

In short, the errors which Nagato was warning Kyon about was her bottled-up human emotions. You cannot devoid a human, whether artificial or not, of human emotion. Otherwise, it is not human anymore but an empty shell.

Kyon acknowledges Nagato’s suffering. How she could’ve wanted to express her own emotions but couldn’t because of the limits in her programming. He blames himself for trying to rely on Nagato every time something bad happens. Kyon is stuck in the idea that “Nagato can fix this, so let’s leave it to her” but doesn’t realize Nagato’s side of these decisions he makes.

Kyon understands that Nagato wanted to live in a normal world and understands the reason why he was the only one given by Nagato the choice to revert or maintain the current world – it was because Nagato trusted her to make the right choices.

This puts Kyon in a precarious situation – does he put Nagato’s feelings as a priority? Or does he want to suffer even more in the original world where he does not have any talents and is at the whim of those who do have them?

He acknowledges that he is, as well, tired of being the normal guy – how every situation in the original world was too confusing and too out of hand to be understood by his own normal mind. Kyon weighs in his own woes as well and factors it to his decision.

However, there was a big question to be answered: didn’t he, Kyon, enjoy the original world?

Yes, he goddamned did.

Despite being under constant confusion all the time in the original world, he found everything fun despite being sick, tired and confused.

In this scene, Kyon battles with his alter-ego which weighs in his suffering and how everything is so screwed up in the original world. He considers that Nagato went out of her way to do him a favor yet he still wanted the choice to revert or maintain.

Kyon’s alter-ego weighs in why the normal world which Nagato created is better and asks Kyon the big question, “Wasn’t everything fun?“

To which Kyon finalizes his decision and said strongly that he had fun.

Therefore, he chose the original world.

This scene was a great show of character development of Kyon and Nagato. We fully understand Nagato’s woes and Kyon acknowledges this as well. But Kyon also considers that such a normal life would be… too normal. There’d be no point in everything and he finds it fun – that’s all there is to it.

It was such a turning point for Kyon and Nagato as characters. An emotional scene where Kyon monologues with himself whether to choose a normal life or live the original life where he is confronted with weird sh*t everyday. It may sound selfish but I’ll be damned, he made the right decisions and swore to not repeat the mistakes he made.

I could say Kyon grew to much more aware of Nagato and factor her into every decision he makes rather than the usual thinking where Nagato can handle everything. It goes to show the Nagato, as a character, despite being an artificial being, is capable of human emotion and should be treated as human.

Actually I was considering picking out the “John Smith” scene for this but I don’t know. I felt like this scene weighed in much more than the John Smith scene.

also yuki nagato is best grill