FLCL: Hit-and-Run Knowledge

“Nothing amazing ever happens here. Everything is ordinary.” In Kazuya Tsurumaki’s FLCL, a surreal paean to the multiplex nature of realities, Naota Nandaba, a somewhat precocious child, tells us life is like that in the small town of Mabase, whose skyline is dominated by a weird ‘medical factory’ that periodically shrouds the landscape with strange vapors, doesn’t seem to employ anyone, and may actually be a hostile starship. Possibly this explains why Haruhara Haruko, a creature not of this earth, appears on her Vespa one day and brains him with a guitar. After that, robots erupt from Naota’s skull from time to time, obviously using his head for a portal into our world, which ought to be fatal. Haruhara even moves into his house, which probably also ought to be fatal.

The motives of adults, be they parents and teachers, adult robots or space creatures like Haruhara, seem more enigmatic than they are. Haruhara is not just chaotically portalling robots from otherwhere and elsewhen through Naota’s cranium on a whim. Well, OK, maybe it is a whim, but she’s definitely looking for one particular robot; or rather, the biosoftware in one particular robot: Atomsk, the slickest star-system thief in the galaxy. Atomsk, who brings new meaning to the word kleptomaniac, is quite likely to pilfer the entire planet unless someone diverts him. Assuming the planet survives destruction long enough to be stolen, that is, since Atomsk is by no means the only threat in the galaxy. It is left up to Naota’s somewhat indifferent skills to rise up and defend the planet, averting a sticky ending to life as we know it, one way or another. This is something he can do, either because of or maybe in spite of the wreck Haruhara has made of his emotional life. When the cosmic dust finally settles, Naota makes one last fateful decision: to want to be a bored, idle punk trudging the concrete reality of the dull little town of Mabase. It’s what he’s best at. Perhaps things just have to be that way when literally everything is ordinary.

And again we might wonder, why defend this reality? Mabase is ugly and corrupt and for the most part rather poor. It’s beyond pollution; nothing remains of a natural world but the weed patch next to the river, by the highway overpass, where the dropouts gather to drop out. But the threat of Atomsk and Haruhara’s skull-busting robot extraction experiments are even worse than drudgery and ugliness. Things were at least a little better before they showed up. All the ordinariness involved in flunking out offers at least some prospect for a little modest hope. Day-old curry bread, anyone?

Defending Yourself from Reality:
Welcome to the NHK

We’ve all said it: “Gosh, if only my household appliances would stop talking to me!” But then, would you have any friends at all? And yet… what if they’re not telling the truth.

Fortunately this is the least of Tatsuhiro Sato’s problems. The huge, vague and inexpressively sinister jinbo known as the Nihon Hikikomori Kyokai (or, more exactly, not known, since it’s supposed to be a secret) that both comprises and threatens social existence is absolutely certain to get him whether he accepts the warnings or not. Maybe he can hold the inevitable at bay a little longer if he stops leaving the apartment. Maybe the best option is to turn off the lights and curl up in a ball. But does that really help anything?

Possibly Tatsuhiko Takimoto, creator of Welcome to the NHK, is implying that the NEETs of the world (Not in Education, Employment or Training), more simply called hikikomori or total dropouts, should consider moving forward, NHK jinbo or not. However, it’s the very nature of reality to slip and slide around you, so even your most bright-eyed, optimistic, promising schemes are quickly absorbed into the NHK conspiracy. It all started right before Tatsuhiro dropped out of college, when the first girl not to be his girlfriend, the eerie one, turned him on to the thrill of hunting for conspiracies in the vast Information Sea of modern electronic reality. Alas for her, and shortly also alas for him, it was no game. Little conspiracies are eaten by bigger ones, and so on ad infinitum until you get all the way up to the NHK itself. Yes, it was all chuckles until the terror set in.

Then there’s the other girl who isn’t his girlfriend, Misaki, who offers to rescue Tatsuhiro by resocializing him. Is she from the NHK too? Or is she another NEET hikikomori dropout who’s just pretending to be normal? If so, it’s not working because she’s not even slightly normal. At any rate, under her inept and panicky tutelage, and aided by his former schoolmate Kaoru, who has risen to the very top of hikikomori anti-society by training himself to leave his apartment in broad daylight and walk all the way to the comic book store without freaking out, Tatsuhiro takes the first steps toward defending himself from reality. He and Kaoru will design dating-simulation software and become very rich. They will be able to afford huge, luxurious new apartments and never come out at all. Kaoru will write the code. Tatsuhiro will lay in the shrubbery with a camera and stalk girls to provide research material. No, wait, that’s a dangerous waste of time. The internet is already full of girls. Six gigabytes of porn later, Tatsuhiro’s computer crashes. Don’t try telling him there is no NHK jinbo.

The list of things that are only funny because the viewer is not a NEET evolves and deepens throughout this series in ways that deserve not to be spoiled by a mini-review. The comic potential in two guys who have never actually been on a date writing a dating sim seems obvious, but have a heart—this wouldn’t be funny if it happened to you. The idea of funding a software development enterprise by earning and selling virtual items to other players inside World of Warcraft seems quite hysterical, but that’s because your idea of funny is sort of cruel. In fact you’re probably part of the NHK too.

Reality: Where Does It Come From?
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

If you’re going to defend reality, it might make sense to establish the first line of defense right at the source. Basically, when half-assed things like reality go wrong, they often go wrong out of the gate. But what is the source? Well, you might not believe it, even if you were told. Like Kyon (an apparently uninteresting high school freshman whose sang-froid turns out to be almost superhuman), you will have to be shown. That is the premise behind Tatsuya Ishihara’s The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya (also translated as The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya on my internet pirate copy). It turns out that the source of reality is Haruhi Suzumiya. Now it may be that’s only true for the moment. Presumably it wasn’t true before Haruhi was born—one supposes—and reality or some version of it may evolve different sources at another time. But those possibilities are beyond the scope of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which is only concerned with the reality at hand.

Haruhi doesn’t know she’s the source of existence. All she knows is that she is frequently bored and/or sad. She’s tried every club in school. All very dull. So she founds her own club, the SOS Brigade (Suzumiya Haruhi's Brigade To Greatly Enliven the World). The purpose of the SOS Brigade is to seek out and enjoy things that would not be dull: aliens from outer space, time travelers, and individuals with extraordinary ESP powers, for instance. No one seems likely to volunteer to belong to any such society, so Haruhi, mainly by force and intimidation, shanghais enough people to found her brigade, beginning with Kyon, who is too indifferent to resist.

In addition to being quite unaware that she is the source of reality, Haruhi is too busy being the president of the club to notice that her abductees are actually not what they seem—that they are in fact plants, secret agents sent across the depths of space and time specifically to join the SOS club in order to defend reality from the consequences of Haruhi’s boredom. It seems that when Haruhi gets sad enough or bored enough, she tends to re-imagine the universe—which of course makes the old universe simply go away. In fact, the abandoned universes tend to have never existed from then on, which is dreadfully inconvenient for the sentient beings that might have inhabited them in what we might call BHM time (Before Haruhi’s Melancholy).

So that is why, on long slow rainy afternoons in the SOS Brigade club room at the high school, you will find shy and bookish Yuki, who in reality is a very high-ranking Data Integration Thought Entity sent by the Integrated Data Entity that controls the universe, with the specific mission of keeping Haruhi from getting bored and accidentally replacing both the universe and the Integrated Data Entity with some other arrangement. Mikuru is also there, sent back from the far future, whose inhabitants would, if possible, like to continue to exist. Poor Mikuru, she had no idea how hard this mission would prove to be—but reality must be defended, whatever the cost. And there is Itsuki, on behalf of “The Agency,” a shadowy organization whose ESP-endowed members have a preternaturally vast awareness of reality. His extrasensory perception is of a magnitude that can detect the sorts of cheese-holes that develop in reality whenever Haruhi’s mood starts to deteriorate, so he can battle the monsters therein, in hopes of avoiding the sudden collapse of space and time. Yes, everything that exists and much that doesn’t is poised on the knife’s edge in that room; the tension is palpable as Haruhi sighs and taps her pencil eraser and wonders why life is allowed to be so very, very dull.

Apparently the newest release of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya has strung the episodes of the series in chronological order, for the benefit of American viewers. I don’t suppose that will hurt anything, but it was a very arbitrary decision. Fortunately the Wikipedia entry contains the real order of the series episodes.