Information
- Member: 1stAgent
- Studio: FirstAgent Productions
- Title: Villainous Imagination
- Premiered: 2008-04-18
- Categories:
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Song:
- Barenaked Ladies Take It Back
- Anime:
- Participation:
-
Comments:
My opinion of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya seems to be a little different from most fans. Yes, it's hilarious. Yes, it has a bunch of fan service and plenty of cute quirks. But I got attached to it because of some deep, lingering philosophies in the series. The futility of Haruhi's take on existence and the notion that someone out there must be above that. One wouldn't watch an episode of Haruhi and consider it as existential as something like Lain, but both series feature a girl pondering their own purpose while unknowingly possessing the ability to destroy everything. Scary how that's overlooked in favor of gratuitous para para dancing.
Although the video doesn't bring up Haruhi's existential quandaries, it was created with that same mentality. That Kyon rather innocently stumbled into his situation and his purpose is to keep this crazy girl satisfied. Kyon's take on the every-boy role in Haruhi's roster of cliches is innovative in a lot of different ways. He's not completely innocent, he's not completely emo, but he is completely trapped. The girl is a god and if she gets bored the world ends.
With enough thought, the intended meaning of the song is likely about the guy saving the relationship from his own villainous imagination. But with the right visual cues it becomes a testament to the futility of Kyon's situation that, towards the end, Haruhi shares. They can't escape their fates and have to learn to enjoy them together... even if that still results in her terrorizing him.
Technically, this video was victimized by all sorts of problems. Several key codecs failed on me, preventing a smooth output that would have gotten it to a respectable-sized avi. As such, the video is not available as a download yet and was sent to conventions in an oversized mpeg container. But it does feature several editing breakthroughs that I was particularly proud of, including a section transforming normal scenes into the "home movie" style of episode one.