Reviews FanficRecs / The Unraveling of Suzumiya Haruhi

Abandoned, but complete enough

Or maybe, too complete, depending on your point of view.

A respectful deconstruction takes apart the story and does something novel with the pieces.

This story stops before it gets to that 'novel with the pieces' part. It's just a deconstruction, and abandoned in a disappointing place; this author doesn't do that 'reconstruction' part, because depressing is easier to write.

Evidently, a lot of people enjoyed it; for me, it almost immediately catapults across the line from Drama to Wangst with the author cheerfully telling you in the narrative that the story is just depressing deconstruction. There's no point, there's no positive take-away, and you can't even really view it as anything other than tangentially related to canon because of how much the character's back-stories are twisted to fit this new, bleak vision.

Sadly, it doesn't even hold true to its own title; Haruhi shows up in the prologue and nowhere else. We're told only that things get worse from there (and thus, there is nothing to be gained by returning to her Po V for anything else in the story). Oh, well.

This is a feel-bad story in the purest form, and it worked on me; I felt bad that I read it and wished that I hadn't. The suffering is not there to serve a story or make the characters grow. It's just the author showing off that he can be depressing ... which should be evident enough given the bulk of everything else he's written.