diary of infinity

I just finished watching the eight endless episodes of the Endless Eight arc of the new Suzumiya Haruhi series. A lot of people were screaming with rage and frustration at seeing the same events unfold eight times over: after all, we’ve been watching the same things happen over and over since June!

Well not me, I really liked it. If I like an anime episode I usually watch it at least eight times anyway ^_^;

So in the end we saw eight out of fifteen thousand five hundred and thirty two repetitions of the same two week holiday period. As Kyon noted, they had lived through the equivalant of nearly six hundred years worth of days, doing (almost) the same things over and over!!!

My thought is, well, actually I want to know what happened in the 15,524 repetitions we didn't get to see! No really! Like for instance, why does Kyon feel that he owes Yuki something? Something must have happened between them somewhere in the 2nd — 15,497th time through, since he didn't originally feel this way, but from the 15498th time onwards he always felt indebted to her.

ISTM that this omission of so much story leaves enormous scope for fanfic authors! If all the Haruhi fans got together they could easily create 15,524 fanfics to fill the gaps. That would be so cool!

Of the missing cycles, we only have definite info on iterations 2391 and 11054 when we know the festival wasn't attended. We also have general statistics on some other omissions and permutations.
One of the curious things is that the part time work was only done on 58% of the occasions, and yet it was done on all eight of the ones we actually saw, which by my reckoning has a probability of only 1.3% if we were witnessing a random sample. Furthermore, there were six variations of work, yet we only saw one of these, eight times.

This leaves me to speculate that the eight iterations we saw were somewhat anomalous for their uniformity, and that many of the unseen ones were probably very different and some may have been even too bizarre and shocking to broadcast. For instance, supposing in one they gang up and murder Haruhi in a desparate attempt to end the cycle? Or what if they did suggest all sorts of bizarre extra activities to Haruhi to occupy their final day. Visions of Roman orgies, human sacrifice, etc are conjured up. (Remember how in the film Groundhog Day, Bill Murray, certain that the day will be erased, takes to punching people, throwing himself off high buildings to certain death, all sorts of things.)

Well, for the mega fanfic project, I bags the one which leaves Kyon indebted to Yuki.... hmmm... what could possibly have happened between them in that two weeks that is now lost forever except in Yuki’s labrynthine memories.... oh yes, by decree I determine this this occurred in iteration 12167, so that one’s mine, hands off! (Of course this may be just one of many iterations which leave him indebted to Yuki...)