I've gone on record saying that there are only two ways to watch The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya:

1. The only proper order;
2. Whatever order you watched it.

If you read any article here regarding the series since 2008, odds are you know what I think about the first season broadcast. Some people have come up to me back in April saying that since they "fixed" the order for the rerun, I should be able to actually stop complaining now. Those same people are the ones now griping the most about the Endless Eight debacle, but that's for another post. This article has been a very long time coming, to be sure.

A year or so ago, I heard from a radio show that a lot of daily stress can be relieved by simply viewing problems and shortcomings in a way that goes against instinct. Simply choosing not to get aggravated at something that should anger you can do wonders for your blood pressure, or something to that effect. That isn't an option for me, of course, so I go for the third option: redefining the structure.

Previously I wrote that the structure of the current season (and I use that term lightly) is a horrible decision that will leave no one happy, least of all me. Many of the problems I initially saw came from the way I viewed the series as a whole. What I saw was the result of a 14-episode series after an earthquake. I tried putting it chronologically according to an episode guide, but that still wasn't enough. Rearrange it as I may, the fact remained that it was still a series that resisted rational approaches to viewing it. However, a little critical thinking led me to the conclusion that this was an issue I was being baited into taking.

I took a look at the episode guide and noticed that there are a number of arcs ranging from one to six episodes in length, one after another. The second season inserts new pieces into the old patchwork, leaving the currently established arcs contiguous. I suggested in my last post that this will only lead to future problems, but the people behind these choices don't seem to care. If the producers aren't going to play fair with the seasons, I reasoned, neither should anyone else. However, all of these claims were assuming conventional rules about episode structure and pacing, and an unconventional show like this one cannot survive under such conditions. Instead, simply viewing it in a different light will change the show from an impenetrable tangle of a series to a coherent whole. "Season 1" is not a 14-episode series. Rather, it is a well-disguised six-episode series with seven episodes of ancillary mini-stories. "Season 2" doesn't exist, unless you count it as the episode immediately following the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya arc. After watching the show with this philosophy, I believe you'll have a much easier time, if the "pacing issues" I keep reading about in reviews are any indication.

All of the problems I pointed out can be erased by mentally following the show with these rules in mind:

- There are no seasons, only one amorphous continuity.
- Watch the show in chronological order to the best of your ability. It does exist; you just have to find it.
- Ignore all claims of any kind, official or otherwise, of episodic or seasonal sequence. The show starts with a six-episode arc and continues with mini-arcs lasting one to three episodes.
- Episode 00 has no place in any continuity and should be discounted entirely when viewing it in this way.

I don't know if I'm the first person to come up with this way of looking at it, but it did take me far too long to make these observations. The problems come from official sources and conventions that dictate each episode as a block of a season, when the ordering doesn't allow itself to be pigeonholed. These conventions are trusted to lead the audience from start to finish on its own terms. The dissonance between the way the show handled itself and the way the audience reacted to it caused much undue confusion. Perhaps this attitude toward its audience caused people to cite pacing issues in first season reviews. I didn't notice any such problems in either order, so maybe I'm just reading too much (or too little) into it like I always do.

At this point, you may think that this solves all my problems, but the fact that it took me until now to discover this and that not many others have keeps me from agreeing. There is a proper order that will make watching this enigma a lot easier, but no matter how one looks at it, the tradition of television seasons ensures that these problems will always exist, to say nothing of the larger issues of the fanbase defending them.