Haruhi Suzumiya

Overview

Haruhi Suzumiya is the title character of the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise, which began as a series of light novels before expanding into a highly popular manga/anime series, before then receiving several drama CDs, video games adaptations, and more. She is typically shown to be a frank, upbeat, and energetic girl who pursues her often eccentric goals with utter determination, often with no consideration for those near her. This is especially true when it comes to the SOS Brigade, a club she founded to find and socialize with aliens, time travelers, and espers.

Although Haruhi seems to be a regular high school student to outsiders, herself included, Haruhi has the power to subconsciously alter the world to her liking. Her inexplicable powers are attributed to a life-changing event three years prior to her high school days, when she attended a baseball game with her family. Upon seeing the masses of people inside the stadium, she developed a crushing sense of insignificance as her everyday life began to feel mundane and ordinary. Instead of giving in to her helplessness, however, she decided that there had to be at least one person living an extraordinary existence, and became determined to be that person.

While Haruhi often comes across as cold or indifferent towards others, and often treats them more like objects than people, she is also shown to care deeply for the brigade and its members. She puts a great amount of effort into promoting her association, including handing out flyers in a bunny girl costume and filming a student movie for school festival. However, her enthusiasm and lack of proper judgement often ends in humiliation and suffering for her members, especially Mikuru, who she often abuses as a dress-up doll in order to attract an audience. Still, she is very concerned with the well-being of her friends, especially Kyon, who she eventually develops feelings for, and whom she shows great loyalty to, even refusing to leave his side during his three day coma in The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Background

Haruhi Suzumiya is a freshman at North High High School where, during her introduction, she openly proclaims her disinterest in regular humans and instead invites any alien, time traveler, or esper to join her. To her disappointment, no one with those qualities approaches her, and she spends the first weeks of high school isolating herself from the rest of the class. During that period, many of her eccentric character traits can be observed, such as temporarily joining several school clubs only to quit immediately and changing her hairstyle every single day. Other oddities from her middle school days are reported by class mate Taniguchi, such as the time she painted a giant symbol on the school grounds using a chalk machine.

Haruhi only opens up to others after Kyon begins talking with Haruhi and gives her the idea to found her own club, since the existing ones don't satisfy her. Enthusiastically dragging him out of the class room, she forces Kyon to help her build the “SOS Brigade”, an unsanctioned association built for the sole purpose of finding aliens, time travelers, and espers, and having fun with them. Soon after the club's founding, it is joined by Yuki Nagato, Mikuru Asahina, and Itsuki Koizumi.

It's soon revealed that Haruhi possesses inexplicable, reality-altering powers, although she herself is completely unaware of these powers and their effects. Haruhi's powers are often directly linked to her mood, even creating "closed space" alternate dimensions when exceedingly frustrated, even risking the complete destruction and recreation of reality if she becomes sufficiently unhappy with the current world. To prevent any severe incidents, the members of the SOS Brigade constantly raise her spirits to prevent her from being bored, although Haruhi's competitive personality and zero tolerance for failure, make it an uphill battle.

Due to her powers, she is secretly observed by three distinct parties and their agents:

• The Integrated Data Entity, a being born in the universe's “sea of data”, sees Haruhi as a chance for auto-evolution, as it has become stuck in an evolutionary dead-end after absorbing all the data in the universe. Unable to interact with humanity directly, the Data Entity instead sends several humanoid interfaces on Earth to closely observe Haruhi, most notably Yuki Nagato.

• A future humanity who, discovering time travel, found themselves unable to travel into moments three years prior to Haruhi's high school years. Upon closer inspection, they realized Haruhi toe be the center of the issue, sending a time traveler, Mikuru Asahina, to investigate the matter.

• "The Agency" (also known as "The Organization"), a group of people who, three years prior to Haruhi's high school years, found themselves with psychic powers, and began to believe Haruhi was the source of said powers. Due to her world-altering powers, many Agency members think of her as a Goddess, some even theorizing that the world was created when Haruhi developed her powers. Their main goal is to maintain the state of the world in its current form by keeping her spirits up, most directly done by Itsuki Koizumi.

SOS Brigade

Haruhi is the founder and self-declared chief of the SOS Brigade ( Spreading Excitement All Over the World with Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade), which she built by invading the literature club's meeting room and forcibly recruiting their sole member, Yuki Nagato. After Kyon and Yuki, the third member to be enlisted was Mikuru Asahina, who Haruhi forced to join the club after finding her day-dreaming in the hallway, in part because of Haruhi's insistence that the brigade needed a moe character. The final member to be recruited was Itsuki Koizumi, a transfer student whose late transfer is reason enough for Haruhi to enlist him. Technically, the SOS Brigade is never officially sanctioned, however due to Haruhi's notorious mannerisms, the student council prefers to ignore the club and their activities whenever possible.

Ironically, while the brigade was founded to find aliens, time travelers, and espers, Haruhi is completely oblivious to the fact that each recruited member, with the exception of Kyon, belongs to one of these parties. The bibliophilic Yuki is, in reality, an artificial human serving as an observer for the Integrated Data Entity, Mikuru eventually informs every brigade member except Haruhi that she is a time traveler, and Itsuki confesses to Kyon that he is an esper. The subliminal precision in which Haruhi had so quickly gathered these parties is the first strong indicator to reality-manipulation abilities, however Haruhi refuses to believe it when Kyon tells her about the origins of the other club members, going as far as ridiculing his statement, arguing that supernatural forces have to be searched for.