Characters / Haruhi Suzumiya (The Character)

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Haruhi Suzumiya

Voiced by: Aya Hirano (JP), Wendee Lee (EN)

"I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, sliders, or espers here, come join me. That is all."

An eccentric, hyperactive young girl who enrolls in North High in her first year. She starts off the plot by roping in an unwitting Kyon into forming a club with her, the "Spreading Excitement All Over the World With Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade", or the SOS Brigade for short. Her eccentricity stems from the fact that she can't come to terms with the fact that she's not a special person, so she spends every day trying to look for something out of the ordinary.

In an ironic twist, Haruhi is unwittingly a Reality Warper sought after by several factions who have an interest in her — the very students which she recruited in her club, and the very people she wanted to look for: an alien, a time traveler, and an esper.

The story essentially revolves around the antics caused by her powers, directly or indirectly, and the Character Development which ensues within the SOS Brigade.

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#-B

• 20% More Awesome: In The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon declares that Haruhi's ponytail makes her "36% more charming."
• Academic Alpha Bitch: She gets good grades in all her classes like it’s nothing and believes that she should be in charge of everything.
• Academic Athlete: She is excellent at P.E. and does her homework effortlessly.
• The Ace: Nothing is difficult for Haruhi Suzumiya. She is beautiful, gets top grades in class, was invited to join every club in school (and she abandoned them all one by one when she got bored), and during the sports festival won every single event personally. Subverted in that she's generally known as "that weird chick" instead of The Ace, but she does prove her talents every once in a while. Kyon complains during the Endless Eight arc that the gods weren't being very fair when they divvied out the stats. All of this is perfectly justified, of course, since she's a subconscious Reality Warper.
• Adaptational Heroism: In The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, while retaining a mildly manipulative attitude and blasé outlook towards rules, Haruhi is less selfish and abrasive, and her actions never quite get as heinous as they could be in the original series.
• Adaptational Intelligence: Downplayed. While Haruhi is never an idiot in any media, in The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan because the focus isn’t on making sure Haruhi stays oblivious to her powers, she is overall shown to be far more aware of her surroundings and overlapping with Adaptational Heroism, is far more sociable, better at getting along with people and a far more effective planner when it comes to activities that her friends actually enjoy participating in, rather than simply going along with out of fear of her powers and bad temper.
• Adaptational Personality Change: Haruhi is still very excitable and ever-ready for pursuit of the mysterious, but her Jerkass behaviors are dialed back in The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, and so, while retaining her independent Genki Girl and Cloud Cuckoo Lander character, she develops a Big Sister Mentor/Cool Big Sis dynamic with Yuki. In some instances, Haruhi even serves as the Straight Man to Ryōko's antics. Sasaki says that Haruhi comes off as completely different to her classmates at Koyouen, seeming like a model student that everyone looks up to, although she does point out that the way Haruhi seems at North High is in all likelihood her true self.
• Adaptational Wimp: The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan has not given any hints that Haruhi possesses any powers of any kind. It also tones down her natural athletic abilities as well.
• Adaptation Dye-Job: To an extent. The light novels describe her hair as black, but the anime adaptations give her a dark brown hue instead. The novels's covers and illustrations, however, don't picture her hair solidly black either, which might have been the inspiration behind the change.
• Admiring the Abomination: Her reaction when she sees the Celestials destroying everything in the Closed Space.
• Agent Mulder: Or she’d like to be. She frequently mixes this with her inner Agent Scully. While on the outside she wildly pursues all manner of fantasies, her inner common sense prevents her from realizing the fantastic elements right beside her. When Kyon tries to spell everything out to her, he gets shut down and scorned, because this would be "too easy". Itsuki later theorizes that deep down inside she just wants to have fun with friends.
• Agent Scully: While she wishes she could be an Agent Mulder, she is ultimately revealed to be this. She remains oblivious to the weirdness she's causing partly through the efforts of Koizumi and company, but also through her buried skeptical streak that prevents her from readily believing the supernatural things she longs for and professes belief in actually exist. Her skepticism is so resilient that in fact even when Kyon outright tells her what's going on, in Sigh, she refuses to believe him, though she claims it's just that his version is "too obvious".
• Allergic to Routine: She gets bored easily and loathes routine, leading to her changing things up at random and constantly seek out interesting things from mysterious transfer students, murder mysteries, and aliens, time travelers, and espers.
• All of the Other Reindeer: It’s notable that Haruhi attempts to inflict this trope onto herself. She would distance herself from everyone and constantly belittle them as not worth her attention. Eventually she starts to grow closer to others and loses this status.
• Aloof Dark-Haired Girl: Subverted. She may fill the aloof and idealized parts with her personality contrasting her good looks and talent making her seem unapproachable and has dark brown (or black, depending on the version) hair, but it's really because she's just too eccentric to connect with anyone else. That is, until Kyon comes along, and her conversations with him inspire her to cut her long hair shorter and reveal her true Genki Girl personality.
• The Aloner: Before meeting Kyon and starting the S.O.S. Brigade, she didn’t have a friend to speak of and showed little interest in any of her fellow classmates or people in general. Later on, she starts to grow more social with others and learns how to empathize with people better.
• Alpha Bitch: At the beginning, she viewed everyone else as beneath her, and treated her brigade members as if they were property rather than actual people. She stops being this to some degree after Character Development sets in.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: In-Universe, every single character, including Kyon, has different interpretations both for what Haruhi actually is and why she behaves the way and does the things that she does. This mostly shows up during Kyon's conversations with Koizumi. For example in Astonishment they debate whether Haruhi's unwillingness to be late is about making Kyon wait or simply about arrogance.
• Always Someone Better: Zigzagged. At first it appears that Haruhi was the better to literally everyone else at literally everything, whether it be sports, academics, music, etc. However, it’s never made completely clear how much of this is natural talent and how much of it is a byproduct of her Reality Warper abilities. At the very least, Kyon is certainly the better to her whenever it comes to empathy. Yuki is also shown to be better at her whenever it comes to actively using and controlling Haruhi’s own powers after she obtains them, though she had the benefit of knowledge.
• Ambiguously Evil: Back whenever she was arguably a Villain Protagonist, it was somewhat unclear just how much of her behavior was active maliciousness and how much of it was due to her warped mental state, bordering on possible sociopathic disorder. As she’s softened up, in the present day, it’s also not entirely clear just how she would react to discovering the true nature of her powers, but the general consensus is that it wouldn’t be good for anybody.
• Ambiguously Human: It’s been a subject of much debate both in and out of universe just what Haruhi actually is. Some believe her to actually be the God of her world, others believe that she’s just an extremely powerful human girl. Regardless, the fact that Yuki’s alien overlord could only interpret her as someone who “creates data” and nothing more clearly indicates that she is not normal.
• Ambiguous Situation: Numerous points, but these are the two biggest:
  • A big ambiguity that is touched on occasionally but never truly addressed is whether Haruhi is a god or not. It's one of the early theories that Koizumi presented, and a large number of fans assume it to be the case, but even Koizumi himself doesn't know if it's true or not. He says it's just the worst case scenario that his Organization is acting on. Or at least that he claims it is acting on.
  • At the end of the first season (which in chronological order would be the sixth episode), it is left very vague as to whether Haruhi recreated the world or not. Kyon and Koizumi don't know either. There is really no way to know for sure, only that the events surrounding the moment when it would have occurred, if it did, really did happen.
• Ambition Is Evil: “Evil” is a bit of a strong word for her maybe. But her competitive nature and drive to outdo everyone and be the best at everything she does is definitely what brings out her most negative traits.
• Anchored Ship: The Love Dodecahedron between Haruhi and Kyon seems to come down to this. (1) Haruhi likes Kyon. (2)And will subconsciously rewrite the universe out of jealousy. Kyon won't admit his (very apparent in the later novels) feelings for her and the second points keeps anything else from happening. Everyone seems more or less okay with the current situation.
• Anti-Hero: Initially, at her worst, Haruhi could really only be considered a hero by her association with the main character. Even ignoring the existential threat to the entire universe she unknowingly possesses, Suzumiya has done some truly rotten things of her own volition. She routinely sexually molests a female classmate. She blackmailed the computer club into giving up a brand new computer, threatening to mark them as rapists using falsified evidence. She delivered a flying kick to the president of the same club with almost no provocation. She tricked an underage classmate into drinking alcohol without her consent. Not to mention her complete lack of awareness of the personal views and emotions of the people around her, or the hell she puts them through. On the other hand, as Character Development kicks in Haruhi dose some admirable things. She volunteered to fill in for the missing bandmates of the school music club so the seniors could play in their last school festival. For all the pain she causes, she happily accepts requests to find missing people, solve the mystery of sick dogs, or to believe a person with an unlikely story about a parallel universe. The later novels went into this more than the anime, but her subconscious traits have a positive side. Her friends and the power she gives them are beneficial; they fight to protect the world and the lives of people, often from threats that did not originate from Haruhi. This is in sharp contrast to the counterparts they eventually encounter, who engage in kidnapping and attempted murder to carry out their missions. A particularly dire threat to the world is thwarted by Haruhi herself, who subconsciously creates an alter ego aware of her own powers. Wrap your mind around that one.
• The Anti-Nihilist: Whenever she was little, she realized just how small and insignificant she was in comparison to the grand scheme of the world and that she, like most people was living a very ordinary and uneventful life with nothing that made her special, at least as far as she knows. It was this revelation that inspired her to make her life as extraordinary as possible and carve out a unique meaning for it.
• Anti-Role Model: With her selfish, callous, petty, manipulative, and borderline sadistic behavior, it is clear people should not look up to her by any means. If she existed in the real world, she would either get expelled from school or sent to prison, if not both.
• Anti-Villain: Haruhi as a person is quite awful in terms of personal respect and to a peaceful society. She can’t personally be blamed for it, but her powers are an extreme threat to everything, and frequently manifest in destructive and corruptive forms. From this perspective, she is a villain on both a petty and macrocosmic scale. Yet, Haruhi does what she does not out of a sense of malice, but a deep personal desire to find something extraordinary hidden in a boring world. Over the course of the years she grows from an unhappy, selfish, socially isolated individual to having friends, being content with the excitement found in a normal universe, and interacting with people in a more positive way. The series is vague about the nature and extent of her powers, but it is implied that there are other, worse forces around, which she fights against.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!: Whenever the SOS Brigade plays a strategy game against the Computer Club, Haruhi’s orders and fighting style basically amount to this.
• Awakening the Sleeping Giant: Haruhi Suzumiya will be unknowingly used by Kyon like this if Nagato's alien boss tries to harm her. Haruhi, everyone's favorite obnoxious Reality Warper, doesn't even know there is a conflict. But in Disappearance, Kyon determines a way to convince her aliens exist, and there's little doubt that she would effortlessly annihilate them if she knew they were after one of her club members. This comes dangerously close to happening in a later novel. In Surprise/Astonishment Haruhi's subconscious beats the Anti-SOS brigade and solves the plot by herself. In the finale, she summons a giant in Closed Space while sleeping.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Haruhi Suzumiya has had many of these moments throughout the series with Kyon.
  • During Remote Island Syndrome (anime only), Kyon and Haruhi are exploring the island in the storm, and they hold hands as Kyon admits to himself that he feels safer with her there. At the very end, he tells Koizumi that he knew the murder was fake from the start, since Haruhi would never wish for someone to actually die.
  • In The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon wakes up in the hospital, where he was apparently in a mini-coma for three days. Koizumi tells him that at Haruhi's orders, they've been taking shifts watching over him so that no matter what, someone familiar would be there when he woke up. Haruhi herself, however, insisted that it is her duty to watch over her subordinates, and spent all three days curled up in a sleeping bag in the corner next to Kyon's bed. And he wakes her up by gently caressing her face.
  • In The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, Kyon risks his life to save Haruhi from falling to her death as part of an attempted Kill the God attempt. When that plan falls apart [[because a Diving Save doesn't really help in this situation]], he's at least thankful that they'll die together.
  • After the aforementioned deicide incident in Surprise, Kyon is bouncing around time, and ends up in Haruhi's bed, on all fours on top of her. Not only does she not freak out or throw him out, but she was the one who sent him there in the first place.
  • In a different sense, Haruhi also has this relationship with Mikuru. Haruhi usually molests, dresses up, and tortures poor Mikuru, but there have been scenes where the two of them show they really do care about each other as friends.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: As a natural consequence of her Didn't Think This Through attitude, Haruhi sometimes finds herself with results that she really didn’t want as a result of her actions. A notable example is during the club trip, where her constant desire for some kind of mystery to solve leads to a mystery surrounding the murder of the mansion’s master.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: That's the whole point of the Kyon/Haruhi ship. However, they're an inverted couple, in that Kyon is closer to a male Tsundere who wouldn't usually dare beat up the universe's equivalent of a deity, while Haruhi is the Jerk with a Heart of Gold. Now, if only Haruhi would lose the strong belief that love is for lunatics *coughTheseuscough* and Kyon to stop proclaiming his crush on Mikuru(which becomes more of a Running Gag as the series progresses) and admit that he wants Haruhi, after the tons of evidence he drops in his monologue.
• Beneath the Mask: Haruhi's jerkish, emotionally distant, surface hides a much more cheerful, kinder, and sometimes even humbler girl on the inside. Her actions during the ENOZ concert and her reaction the following day, shows her capability for compassion whenever she really feels like showing it.
• Berserk Button: An upskirt directed at Mikuru, be it ever so accidental, has set her off at least once. Also, when she sets a specific time for you to show up for one of her club's events, she absolutely expects you to be on time, even if she sets a ridiculous time limit of 30 seconds.
• Beyond the Impossible: Haruhi’s powers defy and warp reality in ways that aren’t natural and she isn’t even aware of it.
• Big Eater: Though not seen on-screen, the quantity of food she consumes impresses Itsuki. She even develops a tactic for hitting the cafeteria: arrive near the closing time to get all the leftover for free.
• The Big Girl: She’s the physically the shortest member of the SOS Brigade and believes herself to be The Leader while demoting Kyon to this status, but in actuality this is a role she often fills as the most athletic member of her team. Whenever the Brigade finds themselves in a baseball match, before Yuki alters the baseball bat, Haruhi is the only one to score any points. She’s also the one who carries their team in a race and when playing a game against the Computer Club, her strategies amount to Attack! Attack! Attack!.
• Big Good: Her status as The Leader of the S.O.S. Brigade makes her this on the micro scale, and her being the reason that the other cast received their powers and were brought together in the first place also makes her this on macro scale.
• Big Sister Instinct: As time has gone on, she has developed this for all her fellow members of the S.O.S. Brigade, but especially towards Yuki. When she thought Yuki had gotten sick, she insisted on carrying her (over Nagato's own protests). She also defended Yuki's Literature Club from the Student Council President, and when she got sick, Haruhi ordered the Brigade to report to her apartment daily to take care of her.
• Black-and-White Insanity: Initially, Haruhi is incapable of believing that she could ever be wrong about something. If anybody ever disagreed with her, it was simply because they weren’t as knowledgeable about something as she was. This quickly proved to be very harmful in a series that has more White and Gray Morality.
• Black Hole Sue: An in-universe deconstruction. The plot literally revolves around her, but because of her Selective Obliviousness she never really seems to figure this out. Considering one of the possible scenarios should she ever find out about her powers, this is probably for the best. It can also be theorized that the universe essentially bending over for her is what caused her screwed up personality in the first place.
• Blessed with Suck: As the novel series has continued it has been hinted that Haruhi herself is entirely an innocent victim of Cursed with Awesome that Kyon has imposed on at least two instant goddesses.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Haruhi appears to be incapable of realizing that other people have feelings besides her own, and in general bases most of her decisions off of whether something will be either exciting or boring to her.
• Book Smart: She gets excellent grades without any real effort.
• Boyish Short Hair: At the beginning of the series, her hair is long and reaches to about her waist. However, after a talk with Kyon about her hair, she cuts it to just about her shoulders. This is an indicator that she cares about kyon’s opinion as well as a way to further reflect her tomboyish personality.
• Brainy Brunette: Good grades, brown hair.
• Break the Cutie: While Haruhi is closer to a Broken Bird she still has elements of this as well. She learns, rather painfully, that she isn't all that special, and in her quest to make her life special, goes on the hunt for aliens, time travelers and ESPers after some inspiration from Kyon. This leads to her general sociopathy, and her obsession with cosplaying Mikuru. A good part of the plot is her learning how to be a good person again, as noted by Kyon.
• Break the Haughty: A major part of Haruhi’s development is learning that she can’t keep being so arrogant and controlling and expect people to want to listen to her.
• Broken Ace: Haruhi is very attractive and athletic, gets excellent grades, is bright, cheerful, charismatic, a superb cook and is generally good at everything she does (especially music and studies) except normal human social interaction, an area in which she seems horrendously lacking — she knows about it, but doesn't see the point. She's also utterly frustrated and unsatisfied with her life and dangerously out of touch with reality, as well as so spoiled and pushy that she treats other people like toys (poor Mikuru)... She gets better in later books after character development, with Kyon even noting how she has become more sociable to their classmates in general, not just the SOS Brigade.
• Broken Bird:
  • Think of the 'breaking' event as the baseball game, and the aftermath when she realized she was really nothing special turned her into a total jerkass cloudcuckoolander for three years, possibly re-creating the universe while doing so. The SOS Brigade is formed and she has a small, reflective moment where she describes the above ("being angry and cynical wouldn't stand out!") but gets no real emotional resolution because Kyon doesn't know what to say. Kyon also notes that she's coming out of her shell and he thinks she's not becoming a better person, but returning to being a good person.
  • She appears to be one when Kyon first sees her in the alternate world in the Disappearance film. While she seems normal, you can clearly tell she's not very happy with life.
• Brought Down to Normal: After Yuki rewrites reality, not only is Haruhi turned into a normal human, but she also gets Put on a Bus for a time.
• Brutal Honesty: Unless it's related to her Tsundere traits, never expect Haruhi to hide how she really feels about something.
• The Bully: Until about halfway through, she was definitely this character type. She constantly bullies Mikuru for her own amusement and for fanservice.
• Bully Turned Buddy: She becomes this for pretty much every member of the S.O.S. Brigade, but especially towards Kyon and Mikuru who arguably got her initial treatment the worst.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Despite being an unstable Cloudcuckoolander, she is fantastic at almost everything, and people acknowledge it. She really shows her class, when it comes to things that have nothing to do with the SOS Brigade activities, as Kyon points out in the first chapter of Vol. 10. And she actually does wear bunny ears!
• But for Me, It Was Tuesday: Haruhi Suzumiya is challenged to "a duel" by the Computer Club president in retribution for her cruel Kick the Dog moment against him way back when.....but by this point, Haruhi had honestly forgotten all about that.
• But Not Too Bi: She makes it very clear right from the start that she doesn't care about the gender of the one she is with, as long as they're not an ordinary human being. However, aside from her touchy-feely behavior towards Mikuru (which isn't treated seriously, since it's largely Played for Laughs and Fanservice), she doesn't really show any romantic interest in girls, and it seems as though only boys have confessed to her.
• Byronic Hero: She’s very intelligent, charismatic, and passionate about what she does, but is also very difficult to get along with and has very few people she shows her softer side towards.

C-E

• Can't Act Perverted Toward a Love Interest: Since Haruhi is usually a Shameless Fanservice Girl, it's significant when she starts kicking Kyon out of the club room when she changes. Also, when they get drenched by the rain and have to duck inside a cave for shelter in "Remote Island Syndrome", she and Kyon are both shown taking off their shirts and shorts to wring them out. Haruhi also begins to do this with her bra, but stops before unfastening it. Even though she and Kyon are separated by a rock wall and he can't even see her.
• Can't Get Away with Nuthin': Haruhi constantly seeks to avert this, whose main specialty (considering the non-awareness of her own powers) seems to be beating this trope to death and beyond.
• Can't Take Criticism: She is so enamored with her own perceived perfection that anyone who dares to say that she is wrong can rarely get through to her.
• Care-Bear Stare: Double-Subverted. After Kyon laments that he'd like to have even a bit of Haruhi's super-confidence, she gives him a Death Glare and then supposes she has sent "warm energy" into Kyon's body. Kyon, in his usual snarky attitude replies "I felt like my life was in danger.." Nothing else more completely illustrates how out-of-touch Haruhi is with her own nigh-omnipotence. Interestingly, once the battle started, he got into the game to the point that he was shouting his attack orders at the computer. Wouldn't Haruhi think it a bit strange if Kyon had immediately burst into full hot-blooded confidence as soon as she stared him down? A delayed reaction?
  Itsuki: It sounds like someone's getting serious about this game.
• Celibate Hero: In the first book, Haruhi says that while she is a "healthy young woman, after all," she doesn't have time for sex, what with trying to find the people right in front of her.
• Character as Himself:
  • The anime credits her as the director. And not just director, but Ultra Director, as in her Show Within a Show.
  • The series composition of the anime is also credited to "Haruhi and her friends". In "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya VI", that credit shows right before Kyon wonders if Haruhi "wrote this scenario".
• Character Catchphrase:
  • "I'm so bored!"
  • Another one gets Lampshaded but ultimately subverted — in the first episode, Kyon notes that Haruhi has a habit of saying "totally", but the audience doesn't hear it enough for it to qualify as a catchphrase.
• Character Development:
  • Haruhi starts off as a self-absorbed, misanthropic loner, and later goes to a cheerful and hot-blooded, yet still quite sociopathic jerk who doesn't really get what she's doing wrong... which can still technically be considered an improvement.
  • In the later novels, she has become far more sociable, even to strangers.
  • In general she has also come more to terms with "this boring world" (and has come Out of Focus).
  • "We're not going to use your body to pay for what we need this time."
  • She also becomes more patient with other people.
  • During "Snow Mountain Syndrome," Kyon is surprised that she noticed he's been paying more attention to Yuki.
  • In The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan, her negative attitude about romance diminishes, becoming a Shipper on Deck for Kyon and Yuki. By the epilogue, she pointedly did not give her usual anti-romance spiel in response to Koizumi's Love Confession, but a challenge to make her fall for him.
• Character Tics: Haruhi has her famous "hairflick". Though this is only portrayed in the anime.
• The Charmer: Despite her abrasiveness, Haruhi has shown herself to have a knack for convincing others to do what she wants through a variety of different social techniques. In spite of her weird personality she still has people who are willing to follow her and stay by her side out of loyalty due to her overwhelming personality and sheer charisma.
• Chess Motifs: Haruhi along with the other goddesses are strategically as important as Kings however, are pretty much tactically useless.
• Childish Pillow Fight: Haruhi is shown to be extremely good at this during a club trip. Just before the murder mystery starts, Haruhi throws one into Arakawa's face unerringly. The Mood Whiplash is quite hard, especially if you haven't read the light novels.
• Child Prodigy: Haruhi is less than the age of eighteen, and is already smart enough to finish all her home work in two days at the start of a vacation.
• Classical Anti-Hero: As Haruhi slowly overcomes her more glaring character flaws, she slowly transitions out of less of being an outright Anti-Hero, and more into this territory, wracked with feeling unimportant and “boring” in the grand scheme of things and learning how to better connect with others.
• Clingy Jealous Girl:
  • Not really an example of one on the basis of her behavior; the most she's ever done is get annoyed and frustrated when Kyon pays too much attention to Mikuru. This is especially evident in the ninth volume where after being introduced to Sasaki, aka that weird girl Kunikida have been talking about, she started an outbreak of Closed Spaces. In Snowy Mountain Syndrome, she goes after Kyon for paying too much attention to Yuki, and she won't let his own sister stay with him.
  • During the baseball game in the anime, this trope is used subtly. After changing into cheerleader outfits, Haruhi holds Mikuru's hair in a ponytail style and wonders if she would look cuter this way. Then she quickly glances at Kyon, and remembers that he has a ponytail fetish (at least that's what he told her), groans a little, then decides against the idea.
  • In the episode "Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya III", she gets rather annoyed when Kyon gets picked to go with Mikuru during the toothpick drawing, and angrily tells him they'd better not act as if on a date. Later on, she has a very disgusted look on her face when Kyon and Nagato get chosen to go searching for stuff together. A few episodes later, it's implied that Haruhi will sometimes go to extreme measures, even Closed Space, if that's what it takes to cockblock Kyon and Mikuru.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • Kyon lists off the "Haruhi Eccentricities Numbers 1, 2 and 3" in the first episode. One of these is a different hair style every day because she has to express the color of each day in its own way. She slowly tunes these tendencies as the novels go on and appears to have completely settled down into a open, friendly girl in the flash forward sequence of Surprise
  • She also gets this first impression because she rants about dumping all her previous boyfriends because they weren't aliens, time travelers, or espers, seems to fit this trope at first... until her criteria turn out to be less farfetched than they seem....
  • She may still qualify, though, as she never realizes she's attending Uncanny Valley High. Even without the reality warping powers, she still does some pretty odd things — believing that wearing a Playboy Bunny suit at school to advertise her new club is a-okay, among other things.
  • Downplayed overall because, despite her outward wackiness, Itsuki Koizumi points out that Haruhi is a rational person who ultimately does not believe in the supernatural.
• Club President: Invoked by herself. The Spreading Excitement all Over the World with Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade, or the "S.O.S. Brigade" (original Japanese: Sekai o Ōini Moriageru Tame no Suzumiya Haruhi no Dan), is a deconstruction of the trope as it is not an official school club — no advisor, no funds, and they meet in the literature club's room (The sole member of the literature club doesn't mind). The reason for the club's conception is because Haruhi cannot find a club that suits her interests (mainly the supernatural). Later on, they become much more "relevant" to the school by offering counseling and investigation services for troubled students (most of which are set up by Itsuki to keep Haruhi preoccupied.)
• Color Motifs: Red, which serves to demonstrate her genkiness, passion, and her status as leader of the S.O.S. Brigade.
• Comedic Sociopath: Sexual harassment? Check. Regularly abuses her best friends? Check. Blackmails people with photos of scandalous events she orchestrated? Check. Abducts people just because she thinks they're interesting? Check. Treats people as objects and is generally incapable of comprehending the fact that other people possess feelings that differ from her own? Check.
  • While the series itself treats these actions as comedic, characters within the series (especially Kyon) see it as incredibly selfish and annoying... so part of the comedy comes from their reactions to Haruhi's antics.
• Comforting Comforter: In the anime-original episode "Someday in the Rain" Kyon wakes up in the clubroom with two cardigans over him. Haruhi demands hers back, but the owner of the second is up to the shippers. Haruhi doesn't show her sweet and gentle side often, but when she does, she can be kind and nice, even if she'd never openly admit to it.
• Competition Freak: Haruhi sees virtually everything as a competition, partially as a way to prove her own superiority over another. Merely saying the word is enough to get her to come running.
• Control Freak: She is incredibly bossy, expecting everyone else to follow the whims of what she believes and wants.
• Compliment Backfire: Every attempt to compliment her fails and she can't stand criticism so she winds up in the arms of the Silent Snarker.
• Cool Big Sis: Whenever she isn’t mistreating them or bossing them around, Haruhi is capable of fulfilling this role towards her fellow S.O.S. Brigade members. It becomes more apparent as she becomes more of a Team Mom towards them as well.
• Cool People Rebel Against Authority: Surprisingly downplayed. Haruhi doesn’t actively seek to break rules, she merely does so if they will bring excitement to her life. Of course given that it often does, for the most part Haruhi doesn't listen to anything or anybody, instead much preferring whatever she wants to do at any given time.
• Cosplay Otaku Girl: Not your typical Otaku, but Haruhi takes considerable delight in stuffing Mikuru into various cosplay outfits, much to the latter's distress. To be fair, she also cosplays once in a while, most memorably during the School Festival in which she performs with ENOZ while in a Playboy Bunny outfit.
• Cruella to Animals: Unfortunately, her bumbling henchman Kyon can't figure out how to get 101 hamsters.
• Crossdresser: Debatable, as the tracksuit Haruhi wears when sneaking into North High in Disappearance is technically unisex. Then again, it is Kyon's tracksuit.
• Crucified Hero Shot: Gets one at the hands of Kuyo near the end of Surprise Vol. 2.
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Haruhi serves as this for the God-Mode Sue. The universe literally bends around her to ensure that she always gets what she wants, and she is on a fundamental level much more powerful than anyone else in her story could ever hope to be. Not only does this make her an arrogant jerk who is fully convinced that she can do no wrong, but also leaves all the other weaker people around her secretly terrified of her and scheming to make sure that she never discovers the true nature of her powers.
• Decoy Protagonist: Despite her being the title character and the person the story revolves around, Kyon, at volume 4 onwards, is clearly The Hero and he is only the Supporting Protagonist in the sense that the reasons for some of the strange stuff that happens is because of her emotional state.
• Defrosting Ice Queen: Happens in two stages (And we see a compressed version of it again in Disappearance). She starts off as a traditional Ice Queen, defrosts into a jerk and gets nicer from there.
• Depraved Bisexual: Haruhi openly stated she is bisexual, but sometimes she seems to take it a bit too far with Mikuru. At one point in the 8th novel, Haruhi also wrestled Kyon and stripped him of his blazer. The grappling techniques she used were mount◊ and guard◊. Kyon thought "Is stripping Asahina-san not enough for you, you perverted girl!?" and called it "reverse sexual harassment". It leads to a classic Not What It Looks Like scene.◊ In the novels, she also once actually reached up Mikuru's skirt before Kyon intervened.
• Desperately Looking for a Purpose in Life: Haruhi's titular melancholy comes from the fact that she's desperate for something so fun and exciting that it'll shake up her life. She's joined every club, dated every boy who asked her out (however briefly), and never lasted more than a week with anything but the SOS-dan, which she started herself. The irony here is that the things she's searching for are right there, and trying to keep her from finding out.
• The Determinator: If this girl wants something, she’ll do everything she can to get it and there’s nothing that anyone can do to deter her. In fact, trying to stop her will likely just make her want to get it more.
• Didn't Think This Through: One of her defining traits for better or worse. Due to her eccentric personality and desire for a constant thrill, Haruhi often jumps straight into things with little thought given as to what their natural consequence could be. Sometimes this actually results in something good, like performing on stage during a cultural festival, or bringing the S.O.S. Brigade together at all, but other times it can create serious problems.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Gets a detention early on following the Playboy Bunny incident (not for dressing as a Playboy Bunny in the first place, as she later dons the exact same outfit without interference, but for deliberately traumatizing Mikuru in the process; it didn't help that Mikuru was a second-year at the time, while Haruhi was a first-year).
• Disproportionate Retribution: Haruhi has a habit of dishing out punishments that aren’t exactly equal to her perceived offenses. Show up somewhere late? The penalty is “death.” Refuse to give her one of your computers? She fakes you committing sexual harassment and takes pictures of it as blackmail. Lose at a baseball game? She literally almost causes the end of the world.
• Ditzy Genius: For a girl as smart and generally talented as she is, Haruhi is capable of being incredibly dense at times:
  • The Day of Saggitarius showed that Haruhi is no Patton — she puts so much emphasis on being Hot-Blooded that she seems genuinely perplexed and irritated that "All ships charge!" is not an adequate strategy to win a tactics-based computer game.
  • So-called "Ultra-Director" Haruhi Suzumiya couldn't direct her way out of a wet paper bag (see above for her inability to even grasp a concept as simple as The Climax) and "The Adventures of Asahina Mikuru" shows it. She thought it was brilliant; everyone else was... less enthused. At one point she fails to comprehend why characters always die at the climax of a story, and another time she complains that crabs didn't evolve softer shells so she could eat them easier. She also fails to realize that wearing a Playboy Bunny outfit at school would upset the teachers. Its only redeeming grace is Kyon's glorious narration. Yet Haruhi, without a trace of irony, proudly declares that it's worthy of an Oscar! Whether she's simply so arrogant that she thinks that anything she does is guaranteed to be genius, or whether her taste is simply so bad that she honestly believes this is impossible to tell.
  • And then there's her general Insane Troll Logic, such as pointing out that Tanabata wishes will take years to reach their destination due to the speed of light delay, but expecting that Orihime and Hikoboshi will be able to ignore the lightspeed barrier because they're gods.
• Divine Date: Haruhi Suzumiya is forcefully romancing Kyon, who isn't quite sure who he wants. The twist is that she doesn't know that she's a Little Miss Almighty Reality Warper, and everyone else wants to keep it that way.
• Does Not Know How to Say "Thanks":
  • She doesn't know how to apologize or thank anyone. However, at one point, Kyon tells her that her the one time he saw her in a ponytail it was "so cute it was criminal," and from then on whenever she really screws up, she puts her hair in a ponytail in the next scene, since it's the only way she can apologize.
  • She doesn't know how to accept gratitude either. After the concert in "Live A Live", she is thanked quite nicely by the band she helped out, and, though she handles it well in person, later feels disturbed and antsy for no reason she can think of. Kyon believes it's because the antics she usually gets up to are not the sort of things people would thank her for.
• Does Not Like Men: Haruhi was like this at the beginning, though she mainly doesn't like humans in general. Half of the time she barely acknowledged that men exist, or that there's some difference in social behavior between boys and girls.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: Is often on the receiving end of this trope without her even realizing it. Everyone who knows how her powers work knows to tread lightly around her as significantly angering her could lead to the death of them or maybe even the entire world.
• Double Standard: Haruhi is way nicer towards Itsuki than to Kyon, and never gives Kyon credit for what he does, but congratulates Itsuki for everything.
• Double Standard: Rape, Female on Female: Her overall treatment of Mikuru borders on sexual abuse, which would be more horrifying is Haruhi herself wasn't female.
• The Dreaded: While they try their best to keep it hidden, the other members of the S.O.S. Brigade are very wary of Haruhi knowing who she is, and what she is capable of. They genuinely believe that their efforts to deceive her are the only thing that is preventing The End of the World as We Know It.
• Dress Hits Floor: Done with her Kouyouen uniform in Disappearance.
• Driving Question: What is Haruhi Suzumiya? Where do her powers come from? What exactly happened during the mysterious event three years ago that drew most of the SOS Brigade members to her?
• Dynamic Entry: Haruhi has a habit of making these, one notable example is just before accepting the Computer Research Society President's challenge, she delivers a leaping kick to the head.
• Easily Forgiven: Kyon still forgives Haruhi easily after she drugs Mikuru and he almost punches her for it. This was her beginning path towards Character Development and he partially did it to avoid the universe being destroyed, although Haruhi didn't apologize for what she did.
• The Eeyore: Haruhi's inner workings appear to be quite this at or before the beginning and episode 6 particularly. Being fed up with the boring world, just wishing for something interesting to happen when it just doesn't seem to happen, despite her efforts. In the end (or rather in the middle), she's so frustrated she subconsciously begins to destroy the universe and create a new one. Of course, most of the time she's a genuine Genki Girl.
• Eldritch Abomination: It is theorized by some characters and very likely that if Haruhi ever discovers her powers, she will ascend beyond merely being a Humanoid Abomination and become this. She may already be heading that way now, given that Yuki’s alien overlord was unable to grasp her true form.
• Egocentric Team Naming: At first, it doesn’t look like Haruhi did this with her SOS Brigade... until you expand the acronym and find that the second S stands for Suzumiya.
• The End of the World as We Know It: What the other three members of the SOS brigade fear would happen should something drastic happen, particularly to Kyon, though it is a rather unusual condition for The End Of The World as We Know It to happen: if the title character becomes too bored with her life, she could inadvertently destroy the universe in a subconscious attempt to create one more to her liking. Not only that, the rest of the SOS-dan suspects that she has already done it at least once before — but obviously no-one can tell.
• Establishing Character Moment: Haruhi's very first line cements her character: "I have no interest in ordinary humans. If there are any aliens, time travelers, espers, or sliders, come join me. That is all."
• Even the Girls Want Her: May have occurred in "Snowy Mountain Syndrome", when the Brigade members are confronted with hallucinatory versions of the people that they fantasize about the most, Haruhi is revealed to be Mikuru's fantasy. Then again, which hallucination appears to which Brigade member is actually a formula worked out by Nagato to provide a clue to help them escape. Koizumi sees Kyon, and admits to being rather disturbed by the double's behavior. Sasaki has some Les Yay towards her as well.
• Everyone Can See It:
  • Haruhi likes Kyon, no matter how deep in denial he is about it. This is so obvious that alternate!Itsuki in Disappearance can tell just from Kyon's cursory explanation of how things were back before the world-switch. This is rather difficult to tell, given Kyon is an Unreliable Narrator and half the time he's lying to himself, the reader, or other people. This has created a large Will They or Won't They? among the fanbase, considering Kyon's being especially vague and there being a larger ulterior motive behind everything he does that would normally be counted as romantic feelings. However, given the 95% chance he's probably getting with her, Kyon refuses to acknowledge the relationship and says nothing on the subject. This doesn't stop all of his classmates from assuming that he's Haruhi's first love interest in a while, adding to Kyon's reputation for liking "weird girls"...
  • Sasaki figures it out immediately when meeting Haruhi. She then teases them about it.
• Everyone Has Standards: As amoral as Haruhi could be prior to her proper Heel–Face Turn, when the island vacation they had with Itsuki's uncle turned into a seemingly genuine murder case, Haruhi immediately dropped any and all of her antics and is just as horrified as everyone else. This is only further amplified when she ends up stuck with Kyon in a cave during the storm, and while thinking through the 'evidence', she comes to the horrific realization that Kyon, Itsuki, and the butler had likely accidentally killed their host by mistake, and chooses to keep quiet to spare them the horror.
• Evil Is Hammy: Back whenever she was a Villain Protagonist, she was just as much of a Large Ham, if not even more of one compared to the modern day after her Heel–Face Turn.
• Evil Laugh: Emits a creepy-sounding chuckle in "Snowy Mountain Syndrome" after learning how her rebellious spirit blindly shuns the mainstream in favor of the obscure. She also delivers a menacing laugh in "The Melancholy of Mikuru Asahina" as she reveals she may have a lead on what Kyon and Mikuru were up to in that story. Keep in mind that both times are after she makes her Heel–Face Turn.
• Eye Beams: In Sigh, Haruhi keeps coming up with colored contact lenses that each have a different type of eye beam. First is a laser, second is some sort of Razor Floss; Kyon states there are a few more, but the one we're shown shoots large metal spikes. The official English translation mentions four contacts: the blue, for Mikuru Beam; the silver, for Razor Floss; the gold, for the spikes up above; and the green, for miniature black holes.

F-J

• The Face: Of the SOS Brigade and always out to promote it. Kyon notes that she 'knows how to get answers' peacefully from the apartment keeper during the investigation of Asakura's disaperance. She knows how to be social and charming, but she doesn't know why anyone would do so. Even after Character Development, she retains her belief that courtesy is for the boring. Thus, in practice the trope is inverted as she either steams rolls people with blackmail and/or her personality, if she's not outright ignoring them—meaning the earlier incident at the apartment, among her nicer moments chronologically, before the end of Sigh, would likely fall under Pet the Dog.
• Fantastic Racism: Haruhi initially displayed this towards her own kind, wanting nothing to do with regular “boring” humans. Of course there’s the possibility that Haruhi may in fact not be human at all, so the racism may not be directed towards her own kind after all.
• Fatal Flaw: While Haruhi excels at nearly everything she does, this simply makes her personal flaws more apparent.
  • The fact that her powers lead to her continued success has made her into a spoiled brat, who thinks that she always knows best and that everyone should have to do what she says.
  • She’s also a terrible bully and loses it when she doesn’t get her way.
  • She always jumps into what she wants to do whether it’s good or bad in the long term. If it’s good, no problem. But if what Haruhi wants is bad, the others have to stop her. And because she’s a bully, she will always resist being stopped.
  • Another source of conflict is something that Haruhi isn’t willing to admit: she wants to be loved. Specifically, she has a crush for Kyon, however her own aggressive nature always pushes him away until he feels that he has no choice but to reciprocate the feelings.
  • She is also likely the most powerful person in her entire universe, but constantly remains blissfully unaware as to just how powerful she really is.
• Faux Action Girl: Invoked in-universe. She can deliver a flying kick to the head to the Chew Toy, but she can't be called on to help with the fights that are being kept from her because...they're being kept from her.
• First-Name Basis: With Kyon, though it's not his real first name...It's more a Japanese cultural thing; it's perfectly normal for teenage Japanese girls to refer to one another by their given names but to boys by their surnames. More of note is the fact that, whereas she uses affectionate honorifics for the other Brigade members ('Mikuru-chan', 'Yuki-chan', 'Koizumi-kun'), which indicates some degree of closeness but is still fairly unremarkable given Haruhi's Genki Girl personality, she refers to Kyon with no honorific whatsoever, which, particularly for a girl, indicates a remarkable degree of intimacy, similar to the traditional First-Name Basis in English.
• Foil: Arguably the whole point of the Haruhi/Kyon relationship is how their opposing personalities come to a balance:
  • Kyon and Haruhi have such opposing character traits, philosophies, attitudes, etc., that there are significant amounts of Wild Mass Guessing supposing that they are some sort of "foil-power". Or Haruhi chose Kyon exactly because he balances her out. Or opposites just attract. Or they are gods of chaos and order. Pick one, if you like.
  • Kyon and Haruhi are foils to each other, but their characters are more complex than these arguments suggest, and the foil is correspondingly more elaborate. Kyon is always going on and on about how he'd like an ordinary world, yet he's secretly delighted at the fact that there are aliens, time travelers and espers. Haruhi acts like she's completely convinced that aliens, time travelers and espers exist, but this is a form of denial of her skepticism that they do, and a way of avoiding her disappointment at the ordinariness of her life.
  • However, when you add Sasaki, it looks more like Haruhi and Sasaki are foils whereas Kyon is the middle ground. Haruhi believes in the supernatural and represents chaos but also creativity, freedom, spontaneity and change. Sasaki believes in logic and opposes emotions while representing order but also conformity, oppression and stability/consistency. Also, although both of them see love as merely a mental illness, while Haruhi is attracted to both guys and girls, Sasaki claims to have never felt anything of that sort.
  • She's also a foil to Mikuru in at least two ways.
  • And don't forget Yuki, who unlike Haruhi, is cool and silent.
  • Can also foil Itsuki, who is wise and calm, while she's more impulsive and reckless.
  • To Ryoko, who seemed bright and bubbly, unlike Haruhi, the Aloof Dark-Haired Girl. And Ryoko is the true evil psychopath while Haruhi is a heroic normal girl deep down.
• Forgot the Call: There are scenes that indicate that Haruhi is up against a mental block as opposed to just being totally clueless. Note how something stops her in midstream here: "I'm the brigade chief and director and ... Anyway, I won't allow you to go against me!"
• Friendless Background : Kyon is her first friend since elementary school according to Taniguchi. The other brigade members warm up to her eventually, but Kyon is still the only one who wasn't ordered by a superior. In her case, it's by choice, since she isn't interested in ordinary humans. The change after she makes a friend is pretty impressive. Even after the Brigade start to know her on a personal level, Kyon is the only one of them who trusts her on a personal level.
• Friend to All Children:
  • She appears to love kids and enjoys playing with them, as evidenced by her antics during Endless Eight. She is clearly fond of Kyon's little sister, who likes her back in return.
  • In the novels, it's revealed that she tutors an elementary school boy who just happens to be the future inventor of time travel.
• Fun with Acronyms: The SOS Brigade's full name is Spreading Excitement all Over the World with Haruhi Suzumiya Brigade, or Spreading Cheer to Our Student Body Brigade according to Kyon.
• Genki Girl:
  • Interestingly this only happens when she first meets/talks with Kyon. When we're first introduced to her, she just seems like a weird girl, but after Kyon feeds her the idea of starting her own club, she suddenly perks up and gains a lot of enthusiastic energy, invoking this trope (and probably one subtle reason why she likes him).
  • Further, in the Disappearance film, when we first see Haruhi, she has almost the same dejected personality prior to Kyon's talk in the series. After talking to her and Koizumi a little in the cafe, she suddenly starts to perk up and act the same exact way as old world Haruhi.
  • In the 9th/10th novel, Yasumi absolutely qualifies and her true identity is eventually revealed to be: Haruhi's subconsciousness.
• Genre Savvy: Haruhi sees everything in terms of TV and anime tropes, even where they might not otherwise have been. She borders between being a wrong and being an accurate Genre Savvy. Since she is an all-powerful Reality Warper with unstoppable willpower, she actually makes herself become accurate.
• Girlish Pigtails:
  • Haruhi invokes this with Mikuru's waitress Cosplay outfit, in order to enhance the Moe in Mikuru's look.
  • Haruhi herself, before cutting her hair, also used to wear pigtails on occasion when she entered North High, as part of her routine of changing hairstyles according to the day of the week.
• Giving Someone the Pointer Finger: She does this a few times in a non-homage context, because she's loud, brash, and doesn't care about personal space.
• God: Zigzagged and ambiguous, but still implied. Itsuki Koizumi theorizes that Haruhi is God. She possesses godlike abilities, true, but he's not completely sure that she's actually the creator of the universe, just noting it as a possibility. However, he's a bit biased, being an esper who received his powers from Haruhi; the time travelers and aliens are quite firm that despite Haruhi's powers, she is not God.
• A God Am I: Subverted and/or reversed: the character with godlike powers, Haruhi, has no idea she has them. Her delusions of grandeur are just that.
• God-Mode Sue: An in-universe deconstruction of the trope, as she has the powers to make everything happen but her personality works against it. The main reason she gets away with as much as she does is because people who are aware of her power are too terrified of the damage she could cause to stop her.
• God Is Dumb: She has no idea what she's doing to reality.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: It has been strongly suggested that if Haruhi ever discovers the true nature of her powers, that this will be the end result for her and The End of the World as We Know It for everyone else.
• Good Is Not Dumb: Zigzagged. She aces all of her classes as though they are nothing, and appears to be able to convince anyone to do just about anything she wants through a variety of different social techniques, but also appears to be lacking in common sense when it comes to some areas.
• Good with Numbers: She has been shown to do well at all of her subjects in school to the point that she was able to complete all of her homework in just two days over a vacation and was able to calculate that the people at her first baseball game was just a small percentage of Japan's population.
• Green-Eyed Monster: As Haruhi realizes her feelings for Kyon, she becomes more jealous over him. To what extent? When Haruhi sees Kyon wrestling with Mikuru over a computer mouse, she becomes jealous and literally creates an alternate reality (a closed space) in which she and Kyon are the only inhabitants, so that she can have him all to herself.
• "Groundhog Day" Loop: Haruhi causes one to occur during the Endless Eight arc. Haruhi, who has godlike powers, (though she is kept forcefully unaware, due to others fearing what a person like her would do should she realize she has such abilities) wishes at the end of the summer break that summer would never end. This accidentally causes a continuous loop of the previous two weeks every time she makes the wish. Which she ends up doing 15,532 times. Each time, only Yuki completely retains total memory of the previous loops, while the others, except for Haruhi, suffer from déjà vu, eventually all figuring it out the situation, except for (obviously) Haruhi. Only by forcing everyone to finish their summer homework does Kyon manage to make her not wish for summer to continue, finally ending the loop.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Underneath her aloof exterior it quickly becomes apparent that it doesn’t take much to get her riled up.
• Have We Met?: Haruhi Suzumiya asks Kyon this during their first conversation. She has in fact met him before, but Kyon hasn't; he will meet her three years ago a couple of months later.
• The Hedonist: Her goal in life is to make the world more exciting.
• Heel–Face Turn: In an inversion of the Moral Event Horizon trope, Haruhi Suzumiya becomes more sympathetic toward the end of the second light novel, Sigh, as well as its anime adaptation following a close brush with Kyon's fist for not only spiking Mikuru's drink and leaving her open to possible rape but also calling her her toy.
• Heel Realization: Suffers this in Sigh over her treatment of Mikuru, especially since Kyon was so furious at her for it that he had to be physically restrained from punching her out. Directly after this is one of her biggest Pet the Dog moments, and she becomes much nicer after this. Made more obvious in the anime rendition, where she looks away from Kyon as he calls her out and it's clear she's fighting back tears.
• Heroic BSoD: Comedic use in Episode 7 of Haruhi-chan when Haruhi had Kyon go Scavenger Hunting for "A barrier of the heart", and Kyon grabbed Koizumi.
  Haruhi: "A barrier to the heart", why him?
  Kyon: So, Koizumi. I love you.
  Haruhi: Gack! [insert metaphor for her world shattering]
  [scene change]
  Kyon's Sister: Attention! Haruhi-chan has fainted so we're taking a break!
• He's Back!: In Disappearance, after Haruhi is told about the club, she proves that she still has what it takes to be a leader and gathers them back in the club room to start the club again.
• Hidden Depths:
  • Underneath her initial cold and aloof exterior is revealed to be a very eccentric girl who is as passionate about everything she does as she is skilled. And that’s before you even get into her powers…
  • Despite her wild and unpredictable nature, there do appear to be a few principles that she is willing to honor; she addresses adults in a respectful manner, uses conventional etiquette, and emphasizes the observance of traditional holidays.
• High-School Hustler: A rare female example. One of Haruhi Suzumiya's many strengths is the ability to get away with practically anything, up to and including extortion, indecent exposure, commandeering an entire room, and press-ganging members, and make the SOS Brigade end up in a better situation by the end of the episode. Her peculiar brand of conscientious amorality tends to help with this. The fact that she is possibly God probably helps a lot more. However, this trope is probably played straight. Her "recruiting" of Asahina in Disappearance (where she can't cheat) is a good example: She flings the door open, claims to be from the Student Council Intelligence Agency... and drags an upperclassman out. No problem.
• Hostile Show Takeover: Haruhi, despite only being a student of North High for a little while, quickly takes over the Literature Club room, and brings in much of the antics that define the series.
• Hot-Blooded: Haruhi Suzumiya approaches this on occasion, mainly when she's accepting a challenge (like in "The Day Of Sagittarius") and particularly during her fight with Kyon during the SOS film about her abusing Mikuru. But hey, maybe it's just megalomania!
• Humanoid Abomination: It has been hinted that Haruhi might be one of these, due to her reality warping powers and her bizarre mental state. Whether she is this or just a really powerful human, she at the very least is capable of subconsciously creating them as demonstrated by the presence of the Data Interfaces.
• I Am Who?: Haruhi has Reality Warper powers of which she is entirely unaware, and considering the type of person she is, her friends want to keep it that way. Fans often say she's God in Human Form, but within both the novels and anime, this is directly stated to be just one unconfirmed theory among many for her powers, and one considered to be extremely unlikely by the one who brings it up.
• Iconic Outfit: Haruhi's outfit, complete with her yellow hair ribbons and school uniform, is so iconic that it has become a considerably famous in-joke in the otaku community that you can recognize her simply by her color scheme. Said joke even made it into Ragnarok Online with the skill icon for Gloomy Shyness◊ (also translatable as Melancholy).
• Inexplicably Awesome: A plot point; no one knows how her powers work or where she got them. Itsuki says that one day he realized he had powers, and that she gave them to him.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: It turns out that what she most enjoys is hanging out with her fellow brigade members and doing ordinary high school activities together, like playing baseball, doing summer activities or helping them do their summer homework. So Haruhi is really I Just Want to Be Normal posing as I Just Want to Be Special.
• I Just Want to Be Special: Much of her more extreme actions are driven by a desire for a more extraordinary life; this stems from her parents taking her to a baseball game as a child, and she realized just how many other people were in the stadium and that this was just a fraction of Japan's population. While she was initially disappointed to learn that this made her just as ordinary as everyone else, she still clings to the idea that there must be at least one person out there who's truly interesting and unique, and she desires to be that person. If only she knew she was truly a reality warper (or maybe it's better that she doesn't).
• Important Hair Accessory: When she's first introduced, she has a habit of changing her hairstyle every day, tying up more and more of her hair each time with an increasing number of hair decorations. After Kyon asks her why she does that, she sticks to her trademark yellow hairband from that point on since that was what she was wearing when he asked her.
• Important Haircut:
  • Haruhi cuts her hair after meeting Kyon, about the same time she changes from being antisocial to being outgoing and happy. Before that, she changed her hair based on the day of the week, with a full-blown explanation as to why. It's implied she did this to get Kyon to comment on it.
  • Haruhi can sometimes be seen holding her hair in a ponytail after Kyon claims to have a thing for girls with ponytails in a "dream," with the most obvious example being that she has her hair in a ponytail the very next day after said "dream." In fact, at one point, when deciding on whether or not to put Mikuru's hair in a ponytail, Haruhi looks at Kyon and immediately drops the idea out of jealousy. She does it again the day after Kyon blows up at her over her mistreatment of Mikuru during the shooting of their movie.
  • In the Disappearance arc, the alternate-timeline Haruhi still has long hair and is still snarky and antisocial. This shows how much of an impact Kyon had on Haruhi in the old timeline.
• Indifferent Beauty: Subverted, she knows she's beautiful, but doesn't care so much about it, chopping off her long hair without a second thought. That said she isn't completely oblivious of it either, and she won't hesitate to exploit her good looks, if it means publicity for the SOS Brigade, dressing up as a Bunny Girl while handing out flyers.
• Indirect Kiss: While shooting their film in "The Sigh of Haruhi Suzumiya", Mikuru offers Kyon water from the bottle she's been drinking from. Haruhi immediately grabs it from him. Later at the end of the arc, Haruhi drinks from the same cup as Kyon in a café, though it's mostly just to spite him. We never see if Haruhi had this trope in mind or not.
• Inferiority Superiority Complex: When she was a little girl, she thought of herself as special until her parents took her to a sporting event and she saw a stadium full of people. She realized then just how many people were alive in the world, and how utterly unremarkable she really was. It's downplayed (in fact, no one may even know it but Kyon), but her forceful and loud personality and attempts to have adventures are a conscious effort to make herself unique. This is partly what led to her developing her jerkish Large Ham persona that she uses to boss around the other SOS Brigade members, as well as her desire for an extraordinary life. The real irony, is that she's the only one who doesn't know that she is truly is unique (and might possibly be God)
• Informed Attractiveness: Is said to be beautiful on cosmic levels, but her overall design doesn't immediately make her seem any more or less attractive than any other female character.
• Insane Troll Logic: She will make extreme leaps of logic to make things fit her way.
• Intelligence Equals Isolation: At the start of the series, she had good grades in all her academic classes and absolutely zero trace of a social life.
• It's All About Me: Haruhi Suzumiya has this going on. Especially when she drags a senior, and sexually assaults her. And drugs said senior with sake for an amateur movie and mistreats her (It's funnier than it sounds). Let's just ignore the fact that when taking her powers into account, it technically is all about her. Eventually she undergoes a little bit of Character Development from Jerkass to Jerk with a Heart of Gold.
• It Amused Me: The reason Haruhi does anything is defined by this trope. And considering her god-like powers, one shudders to consider what she would do if she were aware of them.
• Jerkass Realization: Has this for the first time after Kyon chews her out and nearly hits her after her treatment of Mikuru, kick starting her Character Development.
• Jerk Jock: A female example. Haruhi is passionate about sports, at one point even leading a team, and even after her Character Development never completely loses her jerkish nature.
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: She's originally completely self-absorbed, and there's the fact she can destroy the world if she's seriously naysayed — or bored. Granted, she doesn't know she's got said powers... but due to the disregard she shows even towards her closest friends, it's much better to keep her Locked Out of the Loop lest she decides to intentionally screw over humanity on a whim. However, she develops the "Heart of Gold" part after Character Development. She's still selfish, bossy, and arrogant, but she does treat the Brigade members very well (like after Kyon fell into a coma in Disappearance and when Yuki fell sick because of the Sky Canopy Dominon in “Snow Mountain Syndrome”). It's also seen in the end of the beta storyline of Dissociation.
• The Juggernaut: In the words of Kyon, "stopping Haruhi from running off was pretty much impossible, and I mean that in every sense of the word".
• Jumped at the Call: Exaggerated; she didn't even get one in the first place. From a certain point of view you could say that she made the call.
• Just Eat Gilligan: Haruhi Suzumiya is an odd example where the possible solution is actively prevented by the cast. Haruhi is, unbeknownst to herself, a Reality Warper, and they don't want her to find out because she might bring about The End of the World as We Know It. But she's come close to discovering her powers numerous times, and she's reset the universe once or twice accidentally, so they're only delaying the inevitable. If they just told her directly, at least it wouldn't happen suddenly and unexpectedly. Maybe she could learn to control or suppress her powers consciously. Kyon tries to tell her, but she doesn't believe him, but he later invents what he thinks is a surefire way to convince her. Several novels later, he still hasn't tried it. Also, nobody ever thinks of trying to either attempt to remove her reality-warping powers or simply killing her before she discovers she has the aforementioned reality-warping powers (then again, the latter option would be very drastic). Although given the nature and extent of her powers, neither would likely work, so her friends might as well make contact with one of a magical being she thinks is real like a fairy and wish Haruhi out of existence.
• Just Friends: Haruhi and Koizumi are merely friends, no matter how much the latter may want to be more; she befriended him while he was adjusting to a new school, and eventually he was charmed by her and fell in love with her.

K-O

• Karma Houdini: Character Development or not, there have been times where Karma seems to love giving Haruhi Suzumiya the longer end of the stick. From groping Mikuru, to blackmailing the Computer Club, to spiking Mikuru's drink and calling her Haruhi's toy, many come to wonder why she hasn't been suspended/expelled/arrested. She did almost earn a punch from Kyon for those last two offenses (the last straw being the "Mikuru is my toy" thing), which prompted her immediate Heel–Face Turn (even more immediate in the anime version), so this could be a subversion. Doesn't stop her from molesting Mikuru in "Someday in the Rain" just for old time's sake, but then again, that may just be the author confused about the timeline he had set up in Anachronic Order.
• Kick the Dog: A lot in the first few episodes, as well as the Sigh arc. Examples include framing the computer club for molesting Mikuru so she can blackmail them into giving her their best computer for free, and forcing them to swear loyalty to her when the club failed to get back said computer. Naturally, this is Played for Laughs, but in the 2nd novel, there is a definite scene that crosses the line: During the filming of the Brigade's movie "The Adventures Of Mikuru Asahina", Haruhi (with the help of Genki Girl Tsuruya) puts tequila into Mikuru's drink, so she would act more realistic for the kissing scene. The next thing she does is to punch Mikuru on the head simply because she still wore her colored contact lens. She then continues to punch her several times because the "contact lens is supposed to fly out when your head gets smacked." After Kyon understandably yells at her that Mikuru is not her toy, she seriously replies "Well I've decided, Mikuru-chan is my toy!". This makes Kyon explode and try to punch her, but he is stopped by Koizumi. After Haruhi realizes what Kyon was about to do, she still doesn't get it, confronting him even more. This also shows just what a sociopathic Jerkass Haruhi can be... though soon she starts to get better.
  • This is softened in the anime adaptation, where Haruhi does declare the same thing... but when Kyon is about to hit her for making Mikuru cry and Itsuki stops him, her resulting Heel–Face Turn comes a bit sooner — she does understand that she was wrong, almost immediately stops arguing with Kyon and then stares away from him (with tears in her eyes). Kyon, thanks to Itsuki, realizes that it's not in him to be physically violent.
• Kill the God: A near-victim of this during the climax of Surprise Vol. 2.
• Lack of Empathy: A deconstruction. What if a god, a being far above humanity — which it can destroy or remake at will — was put in the body of a human? What if she forgot her power, but not her Blue-and-Orange Morality?
• Large Ham: She has some very hammy moments, particularly when she's waxing lyrical over her plans for the SOS Brigade.
• Laughably Evil: Haruhi used to be a self-serving, borderline sociopathic Villain Protagonist whose number of Pet the Dog moments could be counted on one hand, yet still managed to be very entertaining through her Large Ham tendences, over the top mannerisms, and overall bizarre behavior.
• The Leader: Of the SOS Brigade. Or in her words, "Super Commander". Her personality makes her a headstrong/charismatic type.
• Leader Wannabe: On the other hand however, despite her desires and delusions, Kyon is the real leader of the Brigade (level-headed variant). This is most obvious when comparing both of their interactions with Yuki. While Yuki follows Haruhi's orders, she makes no attempt to hide the fact that she considers Kyon a higher authority; he has explicitly countermanded Haruhi's orders a few times. She also tends to (silently) ask him for permission whenever an odd situation arises.
  Haruhi: Okay, Yuki, wreck her with your magic!
  Yuki: ... [looks over at Kyon]
  Kyon: [narrating] No. No. No. I shouldn't even have to tell you that.
• Leeroy Jenkins: In the Deep-Immersion Gaming episode "Day Of Sagittarius". "ALL SHIPS ATTACK!"
• Leitmotif: "How Promising" is used pretty often and when it starts playing it usually means Haruhi's about to pull some harebrained scheme again.
• Little Miss Almighty: Haruhi Suzumiya thinks that she's an Ordinary Highschool Student, but she has universe-level reality warping abilities that she is unaware of, and everyone strives to keep it that way. At least one faction within the story believes that she actually is (a) god, as does a portion of the fandom. She even provides the page image.
• Locked Out of the Loop: There are multiple secrets being kept from Haruhi.
  • There's an alien, a time-traveler, an esper, and Kyon trying to prevent her from realizing that she's omnipotent, in fear of what she'd do with the power. True, she does, after Character Development at least, soften up into being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, but, well, that still leaves her A: as at least a part-time Jerkass and B: she doesn't tend to think before acting. Yeah, even being Locked Out of the Loop doesn't prevent her from using her Reality Warper powers, but at least it's unconscious and relatively minute in scope while she's oblivious — if she knew she could recreate reality at will, she could exhibit much more drastic manifestations of her power.
  • They also must keep it a secret that they are an alien, a time-traveler and an esper because they fear if she had proof they existed, she would subconsciously create more of them, or even stranger beings, or who knows what else might seem "fun" to her.
  • In fact, the idea that Haruhi is God incarnate is just what they think Haruhi's secret is. Or rather, it's what Kyon and most of the readers think, thanks to Itsuki "Completely Trustworthy" Koizumi. Yuki and Mikuru's factions have their own theories. They're all keeping watch on her because none of them are entirely sure what she is or what she's capable of, but they're all pretty confident that letting her find out about and/or overuse her powers would be very dangerous.
  • As early as the second book, Kyon goes against the advice of the others and directly tells Haruhi everything that has happened up to that point. She yells at him to stop messing with her. He never attempts this again, but does later threaten that he would in order to keep Yuki's employers in check.
• Lost Him in a Card Game: Haruhi bets Mikuru whenever the SOS Brigade are challenged to play a game against the computer club. The computer club wants to win back a computer Haruhi stole and offers three more computers should she win. Haruhi offers Yuki to balance out the bet, equating her with the three computers. When the Computer Club President is taken aback by this, she offers Yuki instead. And when Kyon protests her willingness to wager other people, she relents and offers herself — an offer which the Computer Club president very much rejects…
• Loveable Rogue: Kyon is careful to not ask where all the stuff in the clubroom comes from.
• Love Redeems: Whenever all of the dimensions are being threatened, Kyon saves them by giving Haruhi The Big Damn Kiss which is what convinces Haruhi to bring the old world back.
• Love Triangle: Elements of a love triangle gradually appear in “The Disappearance Of Nagato Yuki Chan”.
  • Haruhi supports Yuki's feelings for Kyon wholeheartedly, but there have been hints of her feelings for Kyon. It seemed chemistry was starting to bloom after Kyon pulls Haruhi out of the river, and she starts to feel something strange when Kyon pulls a John Smith-esque line. Later, Yuki walks in on Haruhi giving Kyon (obligation) chocolate during Valentines' Day, where Haruhi explains that she does feel a little bit of affection towards Kyon, stating that she "doesn't dislike him" to Yuki.
• Loving Bully: Haruhi makes the bullying aspect towards Kyon more than apparent, but is rarely willing to show the loving side despite the numerous signs. However, as the former does become more visible, the latter softens up.
• Magical Girlfriend: She's Kyon's Magical She Is Not My Girlfriend, and a inversion of the whole thing, as she epitomizes exactly what protagonist Kyon claims he doesn't want out of life.
• Magic Skirt: Never gets so much as a Panty Shot despite her reputation as an Shameless Fanservice Girl.
• Male Gaze: There's a lot of focus on her butt in the Endless Eight arc. Repeatedly. "Remote Island Syndrome" has a lingering shot of her butt under a miniskirt, and it looks like she doesn't have any panties on. Due to the randomness of the shot and the fact that she must have exposed herself to a bunch of people at that point, it can fall into Fetish Retardant for some.
• Manic Pixie Dream Girl: Subverted, then played straight:
  • Haruhi is a seemingly textbook example of the manic pixie dream girl, coming into Kyon's life, unknowingly introducing him to a group of supernatural beings and just making his life wackier and crazier than before. Only problem is that Haruhi is terrified of living a regular, unremarkable life, and is violently determined to make sure that doesn't happen. Along with the whole thing about her being God. She goes between relentlessly perky and hyper, vaguely sociopathic and having an existential crisis throughout the first arc (thus the Artifact Title 'The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya'.) Kyon finds her behavior to be irritating and obnoxious and wishes she had left him alone to be an Ordinary High-School Student. Subverted with Kyon being the one to inspire Haruhi to begin the SOS club and draw the melancholy out of her by making her subconsciously realize living a regular life might not be so bad. Via a kiss. In a way, the dull, snarky Kyon was Haruhi’s MPDG.
  • Then played straight in the Big Damn Movie, where when presented with the choice between a world without Haruhi and one with, he does everything he can for the latter, realizing that he really quite likes being a part of Haruhi's crazy life. This revelation is topped with tons of Ship Tease to boot. Despite this, Haruhi is clearly far more complex than your typical dream girl, so she still dodges the trope slightly.
• Manipulative Bitch: Whenever Haruhai wants her way, there’s practically nothing she’s not willing to resort to in order to get it, whether that be smooth-talking, blackmailing, intimidation or anything else that it may take.
• Maybe Ever After: In “The Disappearance Of Nagato Yuki Chan” by the epilogue, Haruhi and Koizumi are not an official couple, but he has made her aware of his feelings for her and she in turn has given him the ultimatum of getting her to reciprocate. While she hadn’t shown any prior interest, Haruhi does blush when Asakura comments that the challenge is Haruhi’s way of dodging having to answer him.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Several times, Haruhi endangers the universe without realizing it. It's strongly implied that she destroyed the universe 3 years ago, and replaced it with one more to her liking.
• Mistress and Servant Boy: To an extent, Haruhi and Kyon have this relationship, as Haruhi is the brigade leader and Kyon basically has the lowest rank. They even employ the Necktie Leash trope on occasion but they are generally more peaceful than others as Haruhi doesn't do harm to him for emotional reasons. In the later novels, Kyon seems to acknowledge her as The Leader.
  • This is definitely how the rest of the school views them. "Right, Kyon, you're normal. Sure. You're Suzumiya's minion and you're trying to pull that?"
  • Haruhi seems to think of them this way. In the movie after a long list of outrageous titles for Haruhi the credits say "Menial Labor: Kyon".
• Moment Killer: Will happily bend the laws of space and time just to keep Kyon from talking to other girls. Has berserk superhuman strength when he seems to be writing love letters to other girls.
• Mood-Swinger: Now she's a cheerful Genki Girl, the next scene she's abrasive, confrontational, dominant and almost narcissistic, after that she may become extremely melancholic. There are reasons for her mood-changes, but sometimes it just appears randomly.
• Motor Mouth: Once she gets excited about something and starts rambling about it, it’s a miracle if anyone else can ever get a word in, and whenever they do, she tends to immediately shut them down before carrying on.
• Ms. Imagination: She frequently melds her imagination with the Real Life through Reality Warping - and isn't even aware of it.
• Ms. Fanservice: While not as extreme as Mikuru, Haruhi herself qualifies. She is described as being quite the beauty, and she's much more of a Shameless Fanservice Girl on top of that. Her legs also get ample emphasis in the anime, be it thanks to the short skirt she wears as part of her school uniform or her trademark bunny suit.
• Ms. Vice Girl: Haruhi starts out as a jerkass Genki Girl and eventually becomes, well, a selfish jerk who means well and values her friends more than making the world exciting.
• Muggle in Mage Custody: Downplayed, as she isn't even aware that she's a "mage". But her fellow members of SOS Brigade are de facto her servants.
• Narcissist: This girl’s ego is through the roof. She believes her time is too important to be wasted with normal “boring” humans, creates an entire Brigade purely for her own amusement, shows very little sense of personal space or empathy in general, constantly harassing and bossing around her fellow members and never apologizing for it. At the very least, she does have the background to somewhat back it up, excelling at practically everything she does and being an all powerful Reality Warper, albeit unknowingly.
• Necktie Leash: Currently provides the trope image, though she mostly does this just in the anime. In the novels she leads him arm in arm. It shows character development for Haruhi when she stops dragging Kyon along by the tie and takes him by the hand instead.
• Never My Fault: Even Lucy van Pelt apologizes more often than Haruhi. Of course, Haruhi is never even told of most of the things she does. Most of the time, due to her Lack of Empathy, she isn't even aware that there's something to apologize for. This gets better, although the changes are very subtle.
• No Indoor Voice: Whenever she’s not being anti-social and actually does engage in a conversation with someone, she has a tendency to shout.
• Nominal Hero: Haruhi starts the S.O.S. Brigade precisely because she is bored, and is looking for entertainment. Later in the series, it is implied that she enjoys the company of her fellow brigade members, particularly Kyon.
• No-Sell
  Kyon: ...If you want to achieve faster-than-light travel, let Haruhi on your spaceship. She'll just simply ignore the theory of relativity for you.
  When I mentioned this to Nagato, the reticent pseudo-alien responded with the following.
  "Your belief is most likely correct."
• No Sense of Personal Space: Haruhi is inappropriately in-your-face with just about everyone and likes to grope Mikuru for Fanservice and/or her own enjoyment.
  • While she will order (or drag/kidnap) just about anyone, this trope is mostly restricted to Kyon and Mikuru, with the other SOS members being mostly immune; make of that what you will.
• No Such Thing as Space Jesus: Most brigade members question God being one of us, rather than above the clouds.
• Obliviously Evil: All she wants to do is make the world a less boring place. Unfortunately, for the rest of us, she doesn't seem to comprehend that not everyone shares her sense of fun, And perhaps more importantly, doesn't realize that her mere subconscious thoughts have a serious impact on the world around her.
• Obliviously Superpowered: Possesses reality warping superpowers that she's unaware of - in part because her friends are afraid of what she'll do if she learns about them, though that doesn't stop her from using those powers unconsciously, however. Ironically, she founded a club for searching for espers and other supernatural entities, not knowing that she herself is one.
• Oblivious to Love: Haruhi herself also seems to have this, despite more frequently being on the receiving end of it. She is oblivious to Kozumi's feelings for her. And Kyon's later on when he starts to return her feelings. To be fair, they are both trying to hide how they feel from her, but for different reasons.
• Occult Detective: Haruhi tries to be one, and initially founded the S.O.S. Brigade for the same purpose, completely unaware that what she was looking for has been right beside her the whole time.
• Odd Friendship: Haruhi has this with Kyon. Haruhi is an over-the-top, borderline sociopath who starts her own club (ironically at Kyon's suggestion) devoted to the strange and supernatural and Kyon is laid-back and doesn't believe in anything strange or supernatural. Despite this, they've become best friends who can trust each other with almost anything.
• Oh, Crap!: In Someday in the Rain Haruhi is bending over a sleeping Kyon. She has her best Oh, Crap! face of the series when he wakes up and she even holds it for about 10 seconds.
• The Omnipotent: Haruhi Suzumiya is absolutely omnipotent, unbeknownst to herself. And considering her behavior, it's probably better for the SOS Brigade to keep all paranormal stuff away from her in secret, lest..
  • How omnipotent? Most of the characters are not what they seem, and were sent by their respective factions to make sure she doesn't realize what she can do. If she does, or even if she becomes displeased with the current universe enough to deeply desire a different one without knowing she can make it so, the entire universe could be heavily altered or even erased and utterly rewritten... just like when she rewrote the universe into this one only a few years ago, even though it seems to have a vast history. The whole premise of the show is that she seeks the paranormal because she finds the 'normal' world boring - so they'd better show her the more interesting side of the world, or else. Ironically, she's surrounded by just the kind of beings she was hoping to find, herself at the top of the list... but her knowing any of that might lead to the bored Jerkass realizing she's God.
  • It turns out that her omnipotence can actually be given to other people, when she gives it to Yuki.
• One-Steve Limit: Haruhi is a very common name in Japan, but in the Disappearance movie, on December 18, no one at Kyon's classroom seems to know a single Haruhi. The novel explains that all of Haruhi's classmates from her junior high were out sick that day.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Whenever she seriously crosses the line and Kyon nearly strikes her, the cheerful and selfish Haruhi actually cries for the first time.
  • During the Remote Island Arc, when she comes face to face with what seems to be a legit murder case, she completely drops all of her usual antics and takes the entire situation very seriously, choosing to investigate what little they can find in the mansion and the island in hopes of pinning down who killed their host. She's also deeply horrified at the possibility that her friends and the butler might have accidentally killed their host by mistake, and decides to keep it to herself in hopes of sparing them the apparent truth.
• Orange/Blue Contrast: Somewhat. The covers of volumes 10 and 11 of the light novels are orange and blue respectively, and they're getting a simultaneous release which also matches Haruhi Saski’s color schemes and further shows how they are on opposite ends of...whatever.
• Out of Focus: Haruhi Suzumiya has had this happen to her in a lot of ways. Justified, in that keeping her unaware and uninvolved is practically the SOS Brigade's true modus operandi. For everyone's sake.

P-S

• Parody Sue: She has probably become the definitive deconstruction/parody of the God-Mode Sue in Anime. She's brilliant and gets top grades without having to study (though also prone to doing stupid things regularly), she's noted to be stunningly beautiful, she's also in incredible physical shape (having in a short period of time been in, quickly excelling, and gotten bored with, every school athletic club, who are pining to have her back), and an entire organization exists with the sole purpose of keeping her happy and making sure that she never loses at anything (because they are afraid of her). She is also a literal God Mode Sue.
• Passionate Sports Girl: A girl who excels at athletics and has the enthusiasm and competitive spirit to match her skill.
• Perpetual Frowner: During her introduction.
• Personality Powers: Haruhi can change all of reality to fit exactly how she needs it to. This reflects her constant desire to control everything and her brief of being superior to others, as well as her needs to be the center of attention and to have an exciting life.
• Pet the Dog: As the series progresses, she reveals that she genuinely cares for her friends:
  • Most famously, the ENOZ concert and in the later novels... Valentine's Chocolate!
  • The way she deals with little kids, such as Kyon's sister, qualifies as well.
  • She gets an explicit version in book 8 also with Rousseau.
• The Philosopher: Haruhi will talk about her philosophy at various points only when alone with Kyon though. Like when she explains how she became the way she is in Melancholy or when tutoring Kyon in Suprise. She also knew the origin of Rousseau's name.
• Pint-Sized Powerhouse: Haruhi isn’t known for her size in comparison to the other members of the S.O.S. Brigade. It doesn’t change the fact that she’s a powerful Reality Warper, and even without that is still the most skilled athlete among them.
• Playboy Bunny: Provides the page image with Mikuru. As beffiting her attention-seeking personality, Haruhi frequently wears her dark-brown/black (it depends who draws her) bunny suit. At one point she even claims it's her favorite outfit.
• Plucky Girl: While she has motives and goals that aren't common for this trope, her personality fits it to a tee. She is cheerful, confident, charismatic, and if it wasn’t for her own personal flaws would be a very effective heroine.
• P.O.V. Boy, Poster Girl: Kyon is the POV protagonist, but Haruhi is the leader of the Brigade and it’s her behavior and actions that drive the plot.
  • It’s unusual here since Haruhi doesn't know what the plot actually is. She leads the SOS Brigade but never knows the actual stakes of a situation, or alternatively is causing the trouble due to her trying to decide what the plot should be on her own. Especially in the later novels, this results in Kyon taking action himself without Haruhi around to keep her in the dark about her possibly-world-destroying-powers.
• The Power of Hate: Whenever she is feeling particularly angry, it unconsciously manifests in the form of Closed Spaces and giant blue creatures called Celestials that destroy everything around them.
• The Power of Love: This is what saves the world from divine puberty. Kyon kisses Haruhi inside Closed Space and it convinces her not to rewrite reality.
• The Power of Creation: The thing that distinguishes Haruhi Suzumiya from Yuki and other Data Entities is that she can create data (which translates to physical matter and energy) from nothing, while they can only alter existing data. So she's a Reality Warper with The Power of Creation.
• Precision F-Strike: In episode 2 Haruhi forces the Computer Research Society President to abuse Mikuru against his will as Kyon takes pictures. When Haruhi tries to blackmail the club based on the "evidence" she has, the other members defend him. Haruhi is quick to respond (a crying shame the actual word got bleeped) by saying, "Then I'll tell everyone at school that all you geeks ganged up on her and fucked her!" The club is aghast at Haruhi's language (she swears in the Japanese version too; why else would there be a bleep midway through her line?) and her threat. Averted in the light novel when she simply says, "I'll say that the whole club gang-raped her!"
• Prima Donna Director: She becomes one while the SOS Brigade is filming "The Adventures of Mikuru Asahina."
• Private Tutor:
  • She tutors a number of kids from her neighborhood, including one who will end up inventing time travel.
  • In Disassociation, she starts tutoring Kyon out of the blue with no explanation. It takes him a while to figure out that she's trying to get his grades up so that he can go to the same college as she. In Surprise, when Kyon ends up a few years in the future, it's implied this plan worked.
• Puberty Superpower: Haruhi Suzumiya gained her reality-warping abilities at age twelve. Itsuki got his Psychic Powers at the same age, though in his case it wasn't a real example since he got his powers because of Haruhi subconsciously creating espers, and he just happened to be around the same age as her. Alternatively, it's also possible that Haruhi has had the ability to warp reality since birth, but she had never really questioned the way the world works until the age of 12.
• Puny Earthlings: Zigzagged. In the world of Haruhi Suzumiya, there are possibly-omniscient aliens capable of Rewriting Reality and surviving attacks which would kill a normal human... of course, this is softened somewhat by the fact that the most powerful being in the series is an otherwise normal human girl, or at least she would be if she knew of her powers. Of course there have been some hints given that Haruhi might not be entirely human, though…
• Put on a Bus: This happens to her along with Itsuki after Yuki rewrites reality so that she is the main character of the story with a crush on Kyon instead of Haruhi.
• Reality Warper: A unique take on this trope. Haruhi is an omnipotent being capable of bending reality, though she is not at all aware of this. The short list of people who are aware of this fact are her completely average and reluctant best friend Kyon, and a trio of supernatural creations of hers (and their respective employers). The four of them are forced to engage in random activities to keep her from getting too bored and causing The End of the World as We Know It by subconsciously wishing it were different. And telling her about her powers is not an option because who knows what she would do if she had conscious control.
• Real-Life Super Powers: Even disregarding her Reality Warping, Haruhi can still accomplish things through her sheer determination, and charisma.
• Really Gets Around: A mild example, since in middle school Haruhi had the tendency to date every guy who confessed to her. Even if the relationship would only last five minutes.
• Rebellious Spirit: Unconventional and breaks some social norms.
• Red Armband of Leadership: Haruhi Suzumiya, leader of the "S.O.S" Brigade wears several of these, declaring her as Chief, Ultra Detective, or whatever her current role is. She also makes an orange one for her deputy chief...Koizumi. You didn't seriously think she'd actually give Kyon a promotion, did you?
• Red Is Heroic: She wears a red armband, her Color Motif is red, and while it takes her a while, she does eventually manage to reach the status of hero.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Haruhi is the red oni to Kyon’s blue oni. Haruhi is a passionate Genki Girl, while Kyon is the calm voice of reason and a Deadpan Snarker.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: She could solve all the world's problems, but this would cause an overloading of excitement.
• Relationship Upgrade: When Kyon time-travels to the future in The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya, he's confronted with a college-age Haruhi who was apparently waiting for him to join her for a date, and is explicitly said to be looking at him in a way he'd never seen her do before.
• Renaissance Man: She's good at sports, bug catching, goldfish scooping, school, singing, and cooking.
• Rubber Face: She currently provides the page image and has been on both the giving and receiving end of this trope across different media:
  • She does this to punish Mikuru, for not following her nonsensical baseball signals in "The Boredom of Haruhi Suzumiya".
  • Haruhi in turn does this to Yuki in “The Disappearance Of Nagato Yuki Chan” when the latter starts getting apologetic about Haruhi doing everything for the Literature Club.
  • She’s finally on the receiving end, whenever Ryōko does this to Haruhi after finding out the latter had Yuki quickly sign a permission slip to allow her and Koizumi to enter their school for club activities despite not being students at the school.
• Savvy Guy, Energetic Girl: Energetic Girl to Kyon's Savvy Guy. Haruhi is a fanciful Genki Girl who constantly drags her friends into Zany Schemes while Kyon is a lazy, stoic, and snarky guy. It's hinted that Haruhi likes him but is too much of a Tsundere to admit it outright. Kyon doesn't really reciprocate but can't make this clear, as upsetting her too much could upend the world as they know it due to her Reality Warper powers.
• School Idol: Held in awe by all the students, who don't understand why she's so distant.
• Secondary Character Title: At first glance, it may look like Haruhi is the main character (she is after all the poster girl) but she's not. Kyon serves as the narrator and POV character for the entire series, becoming more and more clearly The Hero as events progress. He is only the Supporting Protagonist in the sense that many of the events that occur are a result of Haruhi's actions or emotional state.
• Serious Business:
  • A baseball game decided the fate of the world given that Team SOS-dan were playing against a really good baseball team. Their loss would aggravate Haruhi as she's a Reality Warper, and a sore loser, and would mean The End of the World as We Know It.
  • The Deep-Immersion Gaming duel between the SOS Brigade and the Computer Society, with Haruhi promising severe punishments to the Brigade if they lose, and Kyon getting into it by the end.
  • Come to think of it, Haruhi takes everything this way, game or no. Which makes it Serious Business for the rest of the SOS Brigade: if losing a baseball game means Haruhi will throw a world-destroying sulk, that really does up the ante.
• Shadow Archetype: Haruhi and Kyon to each other. Haruhi is the irrational Daydream Believer that Kyon learnt to suppress for the sake of order (and lack of disappointment) in his life. Kyon is the rational Agent Scully that Haruhi learnt to suppress for the sake of fun.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Haruhi's definitively got the assets, and she doesn't care if guys see her naked. While in any other anime the guys would be ectastic about the fanservice she gleefully provides, this is Haruhi Suzumiya, so Kyon concludes that mentally she views them as being the same as potatos. The point where she starts kicking Kyon out of the room when changing is therefore pretty telling on her part.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend: In “The Disappearance Of Nagato Yuki Chan” Haruhi bemoans having to constantly explain that Koizumi isn't her boyfriend, too. She doesn't view him as anything more than a friend, even though Koizumi wishes things were different.
• Ship Tease:
  • Haruhi's feelings for Kyon are rather obvious, to everyone but Kyon (who can't stop ranting and snarking about her), and Kyon's crush on Mikuru is hilariously explicit. The crush actually is returned by Mikuru, with occasional flirting between the two, but you know how the time travel-rules are...The teasing comes in with Yuki (to the point of blatancy in the fourth novel/theatrical film where she temporarily becomes a "real" girl...for Kyon) and Itsuki, who may just be doing it to mess with Kyon, aka Mr. Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?. If the 5th novel is anything to go by, Mikuru's feelings for Haruhi and Koizumi's statements on how charming Haruhi is and that he "envies" Kyon. And let's include the return of Ryoko Asakura in Disappearance. One has to ask himself why she, despite being a normal human, stabbed Kyon to protect Yuki.
  • In Surprise, the Disassociation tutoring scheme was to get Kyon's grades up enough so he could go to the same college with her, and as it seems College!Haruhi is very nice to Current!Kyon and College!Kyon calls her to go with him somewhere - a complete opposite from their current interactions. This means they're pretty much guaranteed to end up as an Official Couple sometime in the future.
• Shorttank: She is the closest the series comes to having this archetype; evidence of this includes a passion for sports, which is most explicit in "Boredom", and her wardrobe including cuffed jean shorts, as seen in "Remote Island Syndrome", "Endless Eight", and "Sigh".
• Signature Headgear: She's easily identified by her yellow hairband with two yellow ribbons attached to it. Without it, her character design is a very generic Japanese schoolgirl look (shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, school uniform), so the hairband highlights that she is a very strange and special person inside a seemingly normal person's body. Notably, she only adopts this style at the start of the story when she decides to found her club (cycling through a variety of distinctive and attention-grabbing hairstyles and accessories), and it's made clear only this Haruhi, in the company of these people, keeps this particular look—sometimes important given the nature of the story.
• A Simple Plan: Form a club, pass out flyers, win a baseball game, make a movie. There must be a conspiracy sabotaging each of her simple plans.
• Skepticism Failure: Haruhi causes skepticism to fail.
• Sleep Cute: In the novels, Haruhi and Mikuru Asahina are seen sleeping peacefully like this. It does give a good impression of their friendship, given that poor Mikuru usually is nothing more than an abuse doll for Haruhi. Kyon also comments on it, and also says that they could "rival each other [in looks] right now". Then he later remarks that that's because her mouth was shut, and she wasn't being her bossy self. This also happens in the second season of the anime in the second part of "Endless Eight".
• Small Girl, Big Gun: Haruhi invokes this trope during the filming of the movie by outfitting Mikuru with twin (airsoft) Desert Eagles. The results are about as awesomely, ridiculously hilarious as you'd imagine.
• Sociopathic Hero: While she has a Lack of Empathy and is motivated by overcoming her own boredom, she does still fight alongside the good guys and does at least to some point genuinely believe in what she is doing.
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad: In the Spin-Off “The Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan”., Haruhi seems to be stealing the spotlight back after Nagato herself stole it her own series, starting with a Chekhov's Gunman cameo in the first episode, moving to a flashback that makes her important to Nagato's recent past in the second, until finally stealing the show starting with her third episode debut. As of the fourth episode, the spotlight hogging has yet to show any signs of abating.
• Start My Own: Her motivation for this after Kyon talks to her a little about how people adapted or created things to suit their needs.
• Stepford Smiler: Demonstrates this after finding Nakagawa's written love confession to Yuki. She does it again in "The Melancholy of Mikuru Asahina". Kyon even mentions that her smiling is usually a bad thing (esp, for him an Asahina). She demonstrates a great Cheshire Cat Grin in the anime in Melancholy VI after Koizumi explains it's the End of the World; we see her stalking around the school grinning.
• Still the Leader: Downplayed most of the time. There's no chance of Haruhi ever losing her role as the Brigade's official leader, but whenever Kyon starts making plans or instructing the other Brigade members without her input, she still feels obligated to remind him that she's the leader and it's her job to give the orders (even though she usually just ends up going along with his ideas anyway). Kyon attributes this to her competitiveness.
• Story-Breaker Power: An extreme example. Haruhi is a Reality Warper who might possibly even be The Omnipotent. There’s very little if anything that could ever be a legitimate threat to her as she subconsciously warps reality to suit her needs. The main conflicts of the series either come from trying to make sure Haruhi never discovers her power or come at times whenever Haruhi doesn’t have her powers. If she ever did discover them and used them to their full extent, there likely wouldn’t even be a story anymore.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Haruhi and Kyon provide a number of subtle examples of this. Arguably the reason why Haruhi "chooses" Kyon:
  • In the very beginning of the chronological first episode, Kyon specifically mentioned that in the past he hoped that there are "aliens, time travelers, and espers". Guess what Haruhi ends up subconsciously creating?
  • In "Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody" there's a couple of superficially apparent false examples of this: Kyon tells Haruhi to go get the line marker before she explains what they're going to do (which visibly surprises her in the anime), and he also manages to guess the symbols are a message to Orihime and Hikoboshi without her explaining it. He has the advantage of, well, knowing high-school Haruhi, but her middle-school version seems surprised at John Smith's ability to understand what she's thinking. On the other hand, Kyon imagines the message scene when first told about it back in Melancholy. He actually got some of the details right, like her stealing the materials ahead of time.
  • In "Someday in the Rain" and Disappearance, both Kyon and Haruhi, upon being woken up by the other, think that the other one must have been drawing on their face.
  • In the 8th book, both Koizumi and a random passerby come to the conclusion that cats and dogs must be avoiding a certain area because there is a hibernating bear somewhere. In the middle of the town. In the same book, both Haruhi and Sakanaka's father use the nickname "J.J." for a dog called Rousseau. Maybe they had the same philosopher in mind.
  • In Sigh, Kyon accurately guesses why Haruhi wanted to make a movie.
  • When asked to think of a test for new Brigade members, Kyon comes up with catching 101 hamsters. When it turns out that's exactly the test Haruhi wanted to use, down to the number of hamsters, Kyon worries that his brainwashing must be almost complete.
• Subordinate Excuse: Haruhi uses this a lot to help out Kyon. It's her reason for staying in the hospital in Disappearance and she tutors him later in the novels. Interestingly, she can take care of Yuki because she's worried about her.
• Sugar-and-Ice Personality: The ice side is predominant from the beginning and has to defrost a bit before the sugar side becomes more apparent. Even after this, her softer side usually comes out only around specific people.
• Summon Magic: Every time Kyon copies one of her drawings, alien monsters appear.
• Super Power Lottery: Downplayed. Haruhi is a powerful Reality Warper, possibly even The Omnipotent... but she's Locked Out of the Loop and — limited by her common sense — only using her power subconsciously. Haruhi has definitely got a winning ticket, but time will tell if she ever cashes it in.
• Supporting Protagonist: Kyon is always the main character, but Haruhi is the main focus of the story and leader of the brigade.
• Supreme Chef: Oddly enough, Haruhi in Haruhi Suzumiya turns out to be this as part of her Team Mom persona later in the books. She says she learned because her mom is a Lethal Chef. When she cooks for a sick brigade member Kyon thinks it might actually work.
  Kyon: I could easily see your average cold virus fleeing in the face of this kind of power. Any bacteria with an instinct for self-preservation would be wanting out about now.

T-Y

• Team Mom:
  • In the first chapter of Vol. 10, where she takes care of a sick Nagato. Also, when she plays with a bunch of kids in Endless Eight.
  • In "Snowy Mountain Syndrome," she almost overbearingly insists on caring for Nagato, even overriding Yuki's claims of being okay now.
• Tears of Remorse: In the anime, she sheds these after Kyon calls her out for her treatment of Mikuru. Albeit barely and she attempts to hide them.
• The Teetotaler: As of Disappearance, following a bad experience with alcohol in "Remote Island Syndrome".
  Haruhi: I'm never gonna drink again, as long as I live!
• There Are No Therapists: Early Haruhi hit a fair few points of the criteria for Psychopathy (or similar social disorder), and as far as we know, never gets taken for therapy of any kind, even though she really could have used it. Then again, you could make a decent argument that Kyon is acting as her therapist.
• Thrill Seeker: Haruhi defines her whole life around this trope. She is always looking for something new that can excite her and challenge her. If something doesn't meet that criteria, it is nigh impossible to get her to care about it.
• Token Evil Teammate: Initially, she is often seen bullying and bossing around the other members of the SOS Brigade, especially Mikuru. She gets better after her Heel–Face Turn toward the end of Sigh.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Overall, Haruhi is the most tomboyish member of the cast, to give some specific examples:
  • The most explicit such pairing is of boisterous, sporty and boyish Genki Girl Haruhi Suzumiya (who actually leads a sports team at one point) and sweet shy Girly Girl Mikuru Asahina.
  • Later on, Haruhi becomes part of two other pairings, once again on the tomboyish side of the spectrum with each; the girly girl in one of them is Sasaki, who has no desire to take charge of the Anti-SOS Brigade and is in fact a supporting character in its downfall, and in the other pairing, Haruhi is considerably more boisterous and less moe than her intended successor in the role of SOS Brigade leader, Yasumi Watahashi (who turns out to be a product of the branching that takes place during the Dissociation/Surprise arc).
  • Haruhi is also the tomboyish Jerk Jock to Yuki, who is more of a Bookworm.
  • Haruhi is also an Aloof Dark-Haired Girl compared to Ryoko, who is a Girly Bruiser.
• Tomboyish Ponytail: Every Tuesday of the week until that fateful Wednesday when Kyon asked her about her varying hairstyles, and then again briefly at the end of Melancholy and when disguising herself in Disappearance.
• Tomboy with a Girly Streak: She is loud, aggressive, loves sports, and is incredibly competitive, but also has a slight romantic side that she shows from time to time.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Early in the series she was insensitive and bullying, and she had little interest in her classmates beyond how she could use them for her own ends. After forming the SOS Brigade, she becomes more mentally stable and gradually connects with her other schoolmates, becoming more sympathetic to others and displaying a strong sense of responsibility towards the well-being of the SOS Brigade members, acting as the role of a Cool Big Sis as well as the Team Mom.
• Trash of the Titans: A good portion of the clutter in the Brigade's clubroom belongs to Haruhi, and she won't get rid of any of it. She once told the Computer Club president that she'll never give up anything that's in the clubroom, "Not even a week old can of soda with no fizz." Lampshaded by Kyon in the short story "Love at First Sight":
  Haruhi: Now listen here, Kyon. I don't ever waste anything I can use. If it can be reused, it should be, and so long as it's holding together, I won't throw it away. That's the spirit of environmentalism!
  Kyon: [narrating] I wondered if this was how hoarders got started on their hoarding.
• Troubled, but Cute: She was an anti-social troublemaking jerk who nonetheless still managed to be cute even before her redeeming qualities became more apparent.
• Tsundere: Haruhi starts as a Jerkass. Although she has had some character development, the degree to which she's moved from Jerkass to Jerk with a Heart of Gold, are up for debate. Not yet seen in the anime, but by the fourth book, she's spouting some classic tsundere lines. Although maybe this is just a case of her Genre Savvy nature causing her to deliberately act this way.
  • Haruhi is probably the poster child for tactic 4 (bossy), although 2 and 3 come up sometimes. She's fairly non-violent by the standards of this trope however (mostly because the series doesn't use comic violence). Most, she just drags people around.
  • Haruhi is also a Deconstruction: What would happen if a Tsundere acted that way toward everyone they knew, rather than just love interests? It's slightly more pronounced toward Kyon (she doesn't make excuses as much with the others), but not by much.
• Twice Shy: Haruhi and Kyon eventually have their Belligerent Sexual Tension turn into this. Itsuki lampshades it in the 10th novel.
• Unbroken Vigil: She never leaves Kyon's side while he is hospitalized in Disappearance.
• Unequal Pairing: Haruhi seems to really want to get into a relationship with Kyon, who is actively involved in a team effort to keep her in the dark about her true nature as a Reality Warper of immense power. If Kyon were to reveal the secrets to her, however, it would not equalize them, but rather put her clearly above him. Then again, to keep her in check he goes along with all her crazy schemes, letting her believe she is in command anyway.
• The Unfettered: Whenever Haruhi wants something, practically nothing can hold her back and there’s nothing that she’s not willing to do for it.
• Ungrateful Bitch: Kyon at one point remarks that it is typical for Haruhi to show no gratitude to the people who help her.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: If Haruhi ever learns the true extent of her powers and how they work, she could become this for the entire universe if it causes her to Go Mad from the Revelation. Of course, given the kind of person she is it’s just as likely that the “Unwitting” part wouldn’t apply in that scenario.
• Villain Protagonist: At the start of the series, she was basically an egocentric, jerkish sadist who was not above kicking the dog several times for her own amusement. She does get better over the course of the series though.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: In “The Disappearance Of Nagato Yuki Chan” Haruhi and Ryōko later develop this dynamic, as do Kyon and Haruhi. In the latter case, Kyon is put- off by Haruhi's antics, but does seem to understand her more than almost anyone else. In the former case, Haruhi will joke at Ryōko’s expense and Ryōko will often chastise or blame Haruhi when things go wrong, yet both of them can come to an understanding when dealing with Yuki’s efforts to convey her feelings and sometimes look to each other for support.
• Wager Slave: Haruhi invokes this on whoever is late (usually Kyon) in the form of "You're late! Penalty!" In a slight subversion, he just has to pay for everyone's lunch.
• Walking Spoiler: The fact that she even has powers at all is a major revelation when it’s first revealed. Nevermind when it’s shown just what the potential full extent of those powers are.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Haruhi Suzumiya, is kept Locked Out of the Loop regarding the fact that her friends are all examples of the very weirdness she seeks to find for this very reason. Already a Jerkass Tsundere, they're afraid that if she discovers that aliens, espers, dimension/time travelers and other such entities are real, she will manage to make the intuitive leap and realize that she is a Reality Warper of such power that she is, in all practical terms, a goddess. Given how much strain she can put on the fabric of reality even while she's unaware of her power, they naturally fear that allowing someone of her attitudes and ethics full control of her abilities would effectively bump her to Eldritch Abomination status.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Haruhi often gets called out by Kyon on her more sociopathic antics. Normally she just ignores him and even when she does back down she never concedes that she was over the line. But when she got Mikuru drunk and attempted to make Koizumi take her first kiss while she was out of it just for the sake of her student movie and followed it up by insisting she could do that because Mikuru is her toy, Kyon was so furious that he actually tried to hit her. Fortunately both Koizumi and Mikuru stopped him or the world would probably have exploded.
• When She Smiles: Haruhi herself starts out the series with a perpetual frown (hence the title of the first book, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya). In the novel, Kyon describes her first smile in Melancholy as like a "blazing sun," and the adjectives only get more colorful from there. In the anime, she really does look more beautiful on the rare occasions when she has a genuine smile instead of the >:D expression she usually wears.
• The Xenophile: As demonstrated in her now-famous introduction speech, she "has no interest in ordinary humans" and would much rather meet aliens, time travelers, espers and other such phenomena. What she doesn't realize is that she's unknowingly drawn those exact kinds of people to her club.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: A lot of what Haruhi does is out of a fear that she is just another regular “boring” human. The truth is, that she actually is one of the most powerful and unique people alive and that simply must be kept from her for the benefit of everyone.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: Recursively! Yuki's incomprehensible, hyperintelligent alien overlord is unable to comprehend Haruhi's true form; she's the only known being that can "create data" rather than merely "manipulate data," and it doesn't seem to have a clue how she does it. Mortal beings can't even agree on whether she's God or not.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Haruhi alters reality through her imagination unknowingly.
• You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry!: Everyone is always ready to make sure that Haruhi stays satisfied. Not only does she become unbearable when angry, but her temper could also lead to the end of the entire world.

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