Haruhi Suzumiya / Tropes T to Z

Tropes A to E | Tropes F to I | Tropes J to N | Tropes O to S | Tropes T to Z |

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Haruhi Suzumiya provides examples of the following tropes:

• Taking the Bullet: Subverted. Yuki doesn't sustain lasting damage shielding Kyon with her own flesh.
• Talking Is a Free Action: Somehow, Kyon in the anime, when thinking or narrating (you can hardly tell the difference between the two). Especially obvious during "Someday in the Rain".
• Team Mom: Haruhi is actually turning into this, starting around Disappearance, but especially obvious in the preview chapter of novel 10.
• Technobabble: Every time Yuki, Mikuru and Itsuki explain something to Kyon, who normally lampshades it.
• Technology Porn: The futuristic videogame "world," with tons of ships and views of torpedoes being loaded everywhere.
• Temporal Paradox: Future Mikuru would not have showed her star-shaped breast mole to Kyon as a Trust Password if Kyon didn't tell Present Mikuru that she had one after Future Mikuru told him, because she didn't even know until Kyon told her.

• Tempting Fate:
  • Or rather, Tempted Fate. In the infamous "Endless Eight" arc, Itsuki said that Haruhi is so happy and could not possibly do anything horrible. Guess what happens.
  • "Stop yelling 'contest' over and over. If those words reach Haruhi's sharp ears..." [HARUHI KICK!]
  • In Kyon's opening narration in the very first episode, he says he just wants a quiet life, passing through high school uneventfully. Then he meets Haruhi...
  • Real-life example: When the first Endless Eight episode was aired and it didn't end the plot conclusively like the original novel did several fans jokingly said that there'd be Endless Eight repeating for the whole season. Others jokingly responded that KyoAni would never do such a thing. Guess what happens.
  • Mikuru almost catches Kyon looking at his folder full of pictures of her, but he quickly closes the window, thinking smugly that he doesn't make mistakes. Immediately...
    Mikuru: Huh? What is this? This MIKURU folder.
    Kyon: Gah! I slipped up.

• Time Loop Fatigue: In "Endless Eight", the SOS Brigade is trapped in a time loop covering the last two weeks of summer. They go through the loop over 15,000 times before breaking it. Fortunately for their sanity, most of them don't retain memories of the past loops, apart from deja vu. The exception is the alien Emotionless Girl Nagato, who recalls everything with superhuman clarity. The toll this takes on her comes up in Disappearance, when her fatigue with her duties causes her to alter reality so that the Brigade never met.
• Time Travel: The novels get really complex about this later.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: One of the reasons Kyon hates Time Travel.

• 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.
• Theme Naming:
  • Twice called out over Yuki Nagato's name in the books, once in Wavering and again in Indignation.
    • In fact, her name is written with the kanji for "has hope"^note as Kyon points out in one of the novels, but can also mean "snow" (which forms the basis for several Bilingual Bonus puns in the light novels, the manga, and in the spin-off manga/anime Disappearance of Nagato Yuki-chan).
  • Mikuru's name can be read to mean "Sees it coming."
  • Kimidori can be read to mean "green" — something lampshaded in Haruhi-chan.
  • Itsuki means "tree." Mori means "forest."
  • There is a large hotel chain in Japan named "Tsuruya" (similar to Hilton or Marriott in the United States).
  • Haruhi itself means "spring day" (as in the kind of day that makes one energetic) and can also mean various things depending on what kanji are used.
• This Is a Work of Fiction: In Sigh, Kyon actually uses this to save the world from talking cats, Mikuru Beams and autumnal cherry blossoms.
  Haruhi: This story is a work of fiction. All character names, organizations, incidents and any other names, phenomena and such, are fictional as well. It's all made up. Even if it resembles someone, it's probably just a coincidence. Oh, except for the commercials! Shop at Omori Electronics and Yamatsuchi Model Shop for great deals. Stop by and buy! Huh? I gotta say it again? This story is a work of fiction. All character names, organizations, incidents and any other names... Hey Kyon! Why do I have to say all this stuff anyway? I mean, it's totally obvious.
• This Is Unforgivable!: Movie!Asakura's way to vaguely threaten Kyon should he happen to start dating Yuki and not take it seriously. The official English translation in the novel is a bit less threatening ("...if you intend to go out with Nagato, you'd better be serious about it. Or else I won't allow it.")
• Those Two Guys: Taniguchi and Kunikida — though we see a lot more of Taniguchi.
• Tin Man: Subverted with Yuki, who legitimately appears to lack normal human emotions... at least, at first glance.
• Title Drop: The anime, in episode 8:
  Kyon: After that, Haruhi was strangely quiet, and dare I say, a bit melancholy.
• Tomboy and Girly Girl: Several, including:
  • 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. Everyone else falls in between these two spectrums.
  • 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 and Yuki
  • Yuki and Mikuru
  • Haruhi (suburbanite) and Tsuruya
  • Tsuruya and Mikuru
  • Haruhi and Ryoko
  • Tsuruya and Ryoko
  • Yuki and Ryoko subvert this trope. At first Ryoko may seem like an outgoing girly girl but she is actually a proactive alien who plays loose cannon to the Data Overmind and Yuki is usually a stickler to the Data Overmind's regulations.
• Touched by Vorlons:
  • Espers, but if you apply it strictly, then every super-natural being only exists because Haruhi created a world like that 3 years ago..
  • If you believe what Itsuki has to say. Mikuru's camp seems to have the opposite perspective on the matter.
• Trapped in Another World: Kyon in Disappearance. Subverted in that the timeline of the original world has been altered instead of going to another world directly.
• Troperrific: Five trope pages and an impressive character sheet. The Genre-Busting nature of the series helps.
• True Companions:
  • Subverted in the first few novels, at least for a while; neither Itsuki nor Mikuru trust the other fully, if at all, and Yuki warns Kyon not to trust anything any member of the SOS Brigade tells him. Kyon in particular is annoyed by most of the members, particularly Itsuki and Haruhi, and explicitly only cares about Mikuru, and regards Yuki as no more than a part of the furniture. The fact that the entire group has been brought together against their will is often a point of contention, and though Haruhi treats the group as True Companions, no-one else sees it as such until Disappearance. After that, however, the characters begin to treat each other in a manner that befits the trope, with Itsuki in particular saying he would gladly betray the Organization for the SOS Brigade.
  • The 11th book REALLY showcases this trope, with Itsuki once again being the main one to show it, saying that the SOS Brigade has become a part of him now.
• True Love's Kiss: Kyon kisses Haruhi to convince her to turn the world back to normal — or at least give her an interesting romantic subplot with Kyon, keeping her from getting TOO bored.
• Trust Password:
  • A crowning moment of awesome for Kyon in Disappearance — "I am John Smith."
  • There's also "Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody" — first, Kyon proves himself to three-years-ago!Yuki with a note from present!Yuki. She then proves herself to Kyon — after synchronizing with herself from three years from then, Yuki pulls off her glasses as if to say "Yes, Kyon, you don't have a glasses fetish."
  • Adult Mikuru attempts to use her mole as a Trust Password with Kyon. It doesn't quite work. Similarly, in the movie, Kyon tries to use this with younger Mikuru, but it doesn't work out either.
  • In "The Melancholy of Mikuru Asahina," Kyon says that his option of telling Mikuru his knowledge of her future self is a trump card comparable to telling Haruhi that he is John Smith.
  • Kyon might also be the key to unsealing Yuki's full power. Yuki says she has willingly sealed off her ability to synchronize, and that she cannot unseal it herself. She says the password to unsealing is in someone else's hands, but doesn't actually say who.
• Twice Shy: Kyon and Haruhi eventually have their BST turn into this. Itsuki lampshades it in the 10th novel.
• Umbrella of Togetherness: The anime-only episode "Someday in the Rain".
• Uncanny Valley Girl: Ryoko Asakura.

• Undressing the Unconscious: When the SOS Brigade makes a film for the school festival, one of the scenes has Mikuru's character throw into a lake and then nursed back to health by Itsuki's character, who puts her in bed now wearing a nightshirt, with the scene implying he changed her clothes while she was unconscious.
• Unequal Pairing:
  • The Kyon x Haruhi pairing hinted by the series comes with a really big double bind: Haruhi can't be Kyon's equal as long as he actively continues to deceive her about her true nature, but Kyon can't be Haruhi's equal if she becomes aware of her true nature.
  • The fans who want Kyon with Yuki (also hinted by the series) notice the all-powerful data entity probably doesn't want to see Yuki actually liking someone. And Mikuru can't have any relations with anyone not from her future.
• Unfazed Everyman: Kyon, quite obviously. He's quite Genre Savvy about it, too, although having a world-changing demiurge as a friend/boss kinda forces him to be.
• Unlimited Wardrobe: Mikuru Asahina and by extension everyone except Yuki.
• Unreliable Narrator: Kyon is odd. There are contradictions and quirks in what he says as a narrator and as a person that are just out of place.
• Unreliable Voiceover: Sometimes Kyon's narration is contradicted by what's on the screen, with no reason to doubt that the visuals are anything other than the truth. The best example is in the first chronological episode, when he says he's not interested in Haruhi, despite having just spent several scenes very obviously checking her out.
• Unseen Audience: Whoever the heck Kyon is talking to
• Unwanted Harem: It seems like the rest of the SOS Brigade is this to Kyon. Including Itsuki.
• Villainous Breakdown: In the 11th novel, when Fujiwara meets Future!Mikuru (whom he believes to be his older sister) he completely loses it.
• Villainous Rescue: Asakura, of all people, saving Kyon from Kuyo Suo. Suffice to say, she doesn't exactly do it out of kindness. It doesn't help that most of the time she holds a knife at his throat!
• Vitriolic Best Buds:
  • As Taniguchi said about him and Kunikida, "So I threw him out the window, and that's how we became friends." * Tsuruya laughs*
  • Haruhi and Kyon also have this sort of relationship.
  • Itsuki and Kyon as well, particularly because they're the only males in the SOS brigade and Itsuki is the most open and talkative compared to Mikuru and Yuki.
• Viewer-Friendly Interface: Averted to extreme detail. The Literature Clubroom computer in Disappearance is a genuine PC-9821 running NEC Windows 95, complete with original start-up chime.
• Virtual-Reality Warper: In the anime, the crux of the episode "The Day of Sagittarius" is a computer game battle. The opposing team wrote the game and uses this to cheat their way to victory, so Yuki, herself essentially a computer, reprograms the game while playing to level the playing field.
• Wager Slave: "You're late! Penalty!"
• Waking Up Elsewhere: The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya combines this with Timey-Wimey Ball. Kyon wakes up after experiencing being stabbed by Asakura, but by the time he wakes up, the past has been rewritten so that he fell down a set of stairs and hit his head.
• Weirdness Censor:
  • It largely seems like nobody who hasn't had the Masquerade broken for them can connect the dots and notice the weird events that happen around Haruhi for what they are. Events or situations where this is evident:
  • Haruhi's herself, of course. Most incredibly in the "Snow Mountain Syndrome" story.
  • Many of the supernatural events in Sigh happen in the presence of Haruhi, Tsuruya, Taniguchi, Kunikida, and in one case the whole city, who either don't notice them or come up with mundane explanations for them (for example, "the fence must be really old" when it breaks in perfect, neat lines due to Mikuru's cutter beam).
  • Nagato's performance in "The Day of Sagitarius."
  • Nagato's "ventriloquism" in the student movie.
  • The SOS Brigade's baseball game — though the Kamigahara Pirates become superstitious about Kyon's bat.
  • Possible exception: Tsuruya, as seen in Novel 7. She knows that the SOS Brigade isn't normal, but we don't know whether she's figured it out on her own, or whether she's been told.
• Wham Episode: Oh, there's been a couple so far.
  • To start with, Melancholy, part 5. Now that is how you peel back a masquerade!
  • The biggest Wham so far, though? Disappearance, entirely, in both book and movie form. It's basically three hours of having your face hit with a sledgehammer over and over — and you'll love every second of it. By the end of it all, everything you knew about the universe of the show has been turned on its ear and all previous suppositions are called into question.
  • Book 10 pulls this off rather nicely too. It's even called "The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya". Fujiwara is trying to give Sasaki Haruhi's power so he can control Sasaki and resurrect his sister—who is an alternate timeline version of Mikuru. Except it completely fails, because Haruhi saw this coming, split the timeline a week ago, and created an avatar that could consciously wield her powers to save everyone.
• Wham Line:
  • While certain parts of Episode 00 do drop hints at Haruhi's abilities, Shamisen speaking and Kyon and Nagato's attempts to cover it up clearly indicate that the show will have supernatural themes.
  • In chronological order, it's not entirely clear if anything supernatural is going on for quite a while, or if Haruhi just attracts weirdos (because none of them offer any proof of their abilities). Then Ryoko Asakura calls Kyon to an empty classroom and, after a slightly odd speech, says cheerfully "That's why I'm going to kill you and see how Miss Suzumiya reacts!"
• What Happened to the Mouse?: Shamisen, the talking cat, appears in episode zero (eleven chronologically) of the 2006 version of the anime, in the opening and ending animations, and nowhere else in that season. It's implied that Kyon takes the cat home with him after the filming incident, but he's never seen at their house in the later episodes (most of which take place earlier in the year). This can be confusing to first-time viewers, who might think of this as clumsy continuity until they figure out the gimmick of the first season. The 2009 version of the series, however, inserts the episode that introduces Shamisen into the proper place in the chronology. Amusingly, the short story that expands on Shamisen is called "What Happened to the Cat?"
• When It All Began: Three years ago...
• When the Clock Strikes Twelve: The anime's "Endless Eight".
• White-and-Grey Morality: There are pretty much no villains, aside from maybe, possibly Asakura Ryouko, and even then she's just a really, really, really far extremist. All forces are genuinely trying to create the world they think is ideal, and only very few seem too extremist for rationality. The Data Entity wants to just "observe"; the Organization wants to maintain the world as it is; the Time Travelers want to keep a Stable Time Loop. Haruhi herself isn't evil, just a Jerkass who wants a little more excitement, and Kyon just wants his peace. Even the Anti-SOS Brigade has somewhat stinted yet good intentions: Fujiwara wants to keep his race from being "slaves to time travel", Kuyou Suou just wants to communicate in the first place, Tachibana Kyouko just thinks the world is more ideal under Sasaki's influence, and Sasaki wants to figure out the truth behind everything. Not to mention the fact that it might even be better for Sasaki to become God.

• Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him?: Despite having "total data jurisdiction over [the classroom]," Ryoko insists on using her military knife to do the deed when she obviously could've crushed Kyon with flying desks (or done anything else, really).
• The "Why Wait?" Combatant: When the computer club president challenges the SOS Brigade to a duel, no sooner does the "d" word leave his lips than Haruhi, without waiting for an explanation, does a flying kick to his head. She justifies it by saying that a duel is a duel from the moment the word is mentioned.
• Wife Husbandry: Time traveling high school boy encourages junior high school girl towards the topics of his interest.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: After going through nearly 15 and a half thousand of the same 2 weeks, Yuki gains emotions and becomes this. Except that she doesn't destroy the world. She steals Haruhi's powers and retcons reality for 1 year, according to the novels, and 3 years and 5 months, according to The Movie. And she succeeds. And she's stopped by the protagonists. And, for a point in time, there's 4 Kyons and 3 Mikurus.
• World of Technicolor Hair: Most characters have realistic hair colors, aside from the Humanoid Interfaces; Yuki has greyish purple hair, Ryoko has blue hair, and Kimidori has green hair. Oddly, Tsuruya also has green hair despite not being a Humanoid Interface herself. No one seems to regard any of these hair colors as unusual even if most characters who have them aren't human.
• The Worf Effect: Happens to Nagato with the Heavenly Canopy Domain, both in Snowy Mountain Syndrome and Surprise
• Written Sound Effect: The opening of the new episodes.
• Wrong Bathroom Incident: Two classes take P.E. together. The girls have to change in another classroom but the title character doesn't bother with going there and change between the boys. Changing her mind is impossible so they end up switching the rooms for changing between the boys and girls. Thus the other girls will change with Suzumiya, instead of her with them.
• You Didn't Ask : Endless Eight would have been a lot shorter if someone just asked Yuki. Justified in that her role is to observe. Subverted when a Genre Savvy Kyon uses this to help solve the Remote Island mystery. Itsuki asks Yuki for a body's temperature to estimate the time of death. Kyon later realizes that she would have just told them the time of death if asked directly (remember her fortune telling?) ...which would have revealed that the person was not actually dead.
• Younger Than They Look: Yuki is technically only 3 years old, until "Endless Eight" anyway.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: Haruhi can alter reality unknowingly.

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