Experiment: Fandom Cross-posting

[genderneutralmilkhotel]

Since I am new to Dreamwidth, I am going to experiment and see if this is a good platform for formatting fandom meta posts should Tumblr collapse tomorrow. Particularly I want to keep my meta on the movie Thor:Ragnarok and the rest of the Asgard-centric part of the MCU (mostly through that movie) and the Haruhi Suzumiya franchise since it is SO hard to find a fandom for the later and hard to find a niche for the former I like.

thegirlwithmanynames if you're still up for talking Haruhi, headcanons, and interpretations, I'm always all ears. Also if there's anyone else in this fandom on Dreamwidth or Pillowfort then we should totally start a small group.

This post is in response to a piece of (really good) meta about Itsuki Koizumi by echo-from-the-void on Tumblr that I have not posted because I'd never repost someone else's work. Their post can be found (w/my response in the thread) here.

The role of a mysterious transfer student

echo-from-the-void:

It’s no secret Koizumi is my favorite character. I think he is the one character who Tanigawa seems to care for the least and yet almost accidentally turns into the most well-written in the final volume. I have several theories on that…and of course my own headcanons since it looks the serious is on permanent hiatus.

(Post that turned into an essay under cut holy shit that got long)
One interesting element of the Disappearance verse – I’m talking about the movie and fourth novel, not the stupid Yuki-chan spin-off thing – is that the Koizumi of that universe has most of the same personality characteristics of the Koizumi of the main universe. Mild-mannered, polite, loyal to Haruhi, passive aggressive, a Stepford Smiler, Just Wants To Be Special, capacity for jealousy but wants Haruhi to be happy, arrogant, a bit condescending, a total geek for time travel talk, and a bit dry and sarcastic. However, these qualities manifest themselves to different extents in different contexts across the two universes. It’s been maybe four or five years since I saw the Disappearance movie, but I remember that moment where one of the boys offers Haruhi a jacket (I think it’s Kyon) and when she turns it down Koizumi’s like “well, can I have it then?” He’s still a polite guy but he’s not a complete pushover.

I had a strong theory at the time I last saw the movie that Kyon warms up to Koizumi post-Disappearance because, prior to Disappearance, it is impossible (for Kyon) to tell what Koizumi is *actually* like. He could be freaking Light Yagami for all Kyon knows! The audience can pick up on things Kyon doesn’t, especially in the animation adaptation where his facial expressions, the framing, and the voice performances by Daisuke Ono and Johnny Yong Bosch get across nuances the first four books do not (one of the reasons I actually think elements of this story, like Kyon’s Unreliable Narration, works best in a visual medium and why the anime works because it set up characterizations in later novels – it was always a segment of a larger universe). This is the only anime I actually prefer the English dub, partially because Johnny Yong Bosch is really good at the Characters Who Are Somewhat Skilled At Lying But Not As Skilled As They Think They Are voice (played to perfection as Lelouch in Code Geass but he does this as Koizumi too), even though Koizumi’s HYPER politeness does not translate from Japanese. So even if the audience has enough clues that Koizumi isn’t that great of an actor, Kyon doesn’t and also Kyon doesn’t care enough to learn. My original theory was that Kyon warms up Koizumi a bit post-Disappearance after realizing that Koizumi is simultaneously acting much more than Kyon thought, but also not acting as much as he could.

After re-reading the novels, I amend that theory somewhat. I think part of it is that Kyon thought Koizumi was being melodramatic when he warned about THE UNIVERSE GETTING RE-WRITTEN. Now Kyon no longer thinks it’s a silly concern. However, I did notice that by Surprise, Kyon has gone from claiming he “can’t tell what Koizumi is thinking because he’s a guy” (wtf) to “I hated myself for being able to read Koizumi’s body language so well” to just being able to communicate with him silently, no problem. A bit more on their dynamic in the last few books here (with link updated), but the fact is Kyon has come to read Koizumi pretty well by that point, even catching him off guard on a few instances (like asking if Mori is Koizumi’s superior in the Organization). It’s also worth pointing out that while Kyon can’t say for certain whether or not Koizumi is lying about being the head of the Organization (he doesn’t buy it immediately but doesn’t cross it out), this doesn’t cause him to doubt Koizumi’s loyalty to the Brigade. Essentially I think Kyon’s decided that he trusts that Koizumi’s heart is in the right place…even if Kyon can’t believe everything that comes out of his mouth.

I wrote in my reblog of @echo-from-the-void‘s excellent essay on Haruhi as much as I loathe Yuki-chan as a concept on so many levels, namely, it takes what was so unique about the Haruhi universe – that the characters were absolutely not shallow anime archetypes but well-developed people who only vaguely echoed archetypes – and destroys that by making them “actually” shallow anime archetypes which doesn’t even make sense since the whole theme of Haruhi Suzumiya had to do with the influence and power of individual people to take control of your own destiny in an absurd universe which is why the characters not fitting into shallow archetypes that were All the Rage in 00s anime on a meta level complimented the theme of Becoming Who You Are Born To Be within the story wtf,

….*ahem.*

…..one of the things I do like is the idea that Koizumi had no friends in the Yuki-chan verse until Haruhi came along, he latched on to her with a fierce loyalty, he continues to hang out with her even after she grows bored with him as he seems to have no other friends, and he comes off as a compulsive people-pleaser even when he does not have a “reason” to suck up to Haruhi. Literally everythingelse about his characterization is wrong: his homoerotic subtext with Kyon seems to come out of nowhere “just because it was in the original” when canon Koizumi actually eased into that, the way he lets Tsuruya kick him in the face without any retaliation even though he has no external reason to stay on her good side, or the fact that he seems to be reduced to The Nice Guy even though his original Disappearance-characterization emphasized that he is not always that nice even though he’s basically good. But the compulsive people pleaser, fiercely loyal to a fault, maybe lacking in self-esteem characterization sounds like Koizumi.

All of this, to me, seems to imply that there are layers to Koizumi: there is the slick, fake, overly nice layer. Then underneath that layer there is a fairly sarcastic, arrogant, maybe a bit condescending person. Then there is the insecure layer. And then the dangerous one where he will literally burn you alive if you threaten his friends. And then under that he’s actually genuinely a pretty nice guy who just wants to be loved. The boy contains multitudes. It’s why he went from being the character I cared about least in this series to my favorite after reading the books…and why I’d say that his character development seems to be the most natural out of all the characters despite the fact he never got his own arc though I wonder if Tanigawa was leading up to it?">