Light novel adaptations

Light novels are bad, Haruhi is a masterpiece though

Depends on the author.

I'm just curious about how terrible your experiences with anime must've been for you to believe Haruhi is anywhere near the top of the medium.

Chances are i've seen everything you consider to be at the top. Haruhi is just much better than you think.

I prefer them over manga adaptations. The art in the anime is almost always a downgrade

I don't mind them

There wasn't really shift, just more anime in general, also i like that they stopped do so many vn adaptations, where they replaced h-scenes with blue bolling.

What element sets it apart in your opinion? As far as I could tell it doesn't do anything to deviate from the 'cookie-cutter light novel aimed at teenagers' story structure; average boy banters with a strange girl with a massive amount of introspective dialogue, some fantastical scenario occurs the boy revolves, then the arc ends with a vaguely romantic scene between the two. Then this is repeated every volume or couple of episodes.
Is it just better executed or have I missed something?

It's just deeper than the rest of anime. It takes on very heavy themes like the duality between fantasy and reality, and how science fiction connects the two, stuff like the nature of living beings, theology, etc. Heck, it's literally the only anime that actually understands time travel, for example. The characters are also well written and really feel like real people who can make mistakes and aren't perfectly reliable at the roles they're supposed to have. Add to that a LOT of meta, show don't tell and unconventional storytelling, and a perfect execution of all of this, honestly Haruhi is a massive outlier among anime, and even fiction in general.

>Then this is repeated every volume
Not really though. But what matters is that Haruhi handles its themes really well. It touches quite a few things, like individualism, projecting, empathy, how we handle fiction, and overall it's a coming of age story of both Haruhi and Kyon, as two opposites that are both foil and fuel to each other (in the end, Haruhi is actually the more rational one, but that becomes clear only at the end)

To be fair you could also simplify it to what you've described but that'd be missing a bunch of subtext. There's also the execution that sets it far apart a lot of other anime but that's something else.

We've had light novel adaptations for over twenty years. I think the main shift has been the intention behind those adaptations. More and more modern adaptations come across as low-effort advertisements of the source material; the ultimate intention isn't to create a good anime, but instead solely to create an anime that incentivises people to buy the LN.

>t takes on very heavy themes like the duality between fantasy and reality, and how science fiction connects the two, stuff like the nature of living beings, theology,
"I'm twelve and this is deep"

I see. I wouldn't say such themes are deep, or heavy, nor would I claim Haruhi does them well, perhaps even not at all regarding theology, but this does answer my question. Not sure why you think its the only anime that understands time travel though.
By the way, I specifically remember one episode beginning with Kyon's narration claiming it's so cold that the Earth could shatter or something along those lines. Then we're shown clear visual signs that it is indeed cold. Is this kind of thing not the opposite of "show don't tell"?

>"show don't tell"
The Japanese literary tradition definitely does not adhere to that.

you're correct. this other guy has some serious moe-tism.

For instance, if you watch the anime and takes things at face value, you'd think Haruhi just has a hard on for muh aliens. But if you take into account her reactions and the way she finds solace in other things more and more as time passes, you can guess that's not it: what she enjoys is the act of searching alongside her friends. Same goes for, say, Kyon being in the brigade: if you take his narration at face value, he hates it, but then you watch the movie and realize how full of bullshit he was, so whipped by society and his idea of normal that he refuses to admit even to the viewer that he enjoys these sillly things. And there are clear signs of it, but you can ignore them if you wish so.
That's more about character development here but there's a lot more to say about execution and the way Kyoani added so many mundane scenes happening in the background on purpose. Because in the end, that's what Haruhi is mostly about: the mundane and how one would deal with it. Disappearance is full of that kind of stuff.

"show don't tell" is really only practiced by English speakers
and probably just means "well written"

t. feefeelsfag

>I wouldn't say such themes are deep, or heavy, nor would I claim Haruhi does them well, perhaps even not at all regarding theology
It's not negotiable, these things are in the series, you can't just pretend they're not.
>Not sure why you think its the only anime that understands time travel
Because it's the only one that doesn't mix up time travel with travel between universes. Deterministic time travel is rare in fiction as a whole and in anime i legitimately haven't seen it outside of Haruhi.
>I specifically remember one episode beginning with Kyon's narration claiming it's so cold that the Earth could shatter or something along those lines. Then we're shown clear visual signs that it is indeed cold
Kyon was commenting on the fact that it's cold, his statement wasn't supposed to be that important whatsoever, you can't use that as evidence that the whole show is tell don't show. Hell, you yourself didn't realize it took on some of the themes it takes on because of how show don't tell it is.

What? There's a bunch of anime with a show don't tell policy.

That's not true. Zig Forums is just too autistic to notice subtly most of the time, unless "show don't tell" means something completely different from what I'm envisioning.
Take this well known manga page for example.
The character is expressing his grief despite not explicitly telling the viewer so, even though it's not subtle at all. This is clearly show don't tell, is it not?

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>By the way, I specifically remember one episode beginning with Kyon's narration claiming it's so cold that the Earth could shatter or something along those lines. Then we're shown clear visual signs that it is indeed cold. Is this kind of thing not the opposite of "show don't tell"?
Actually that's both show and tell. Usually, the issue would be "tell and don't show", like telling it's cold but not showing it onscreen, therefore making it seem artificial and this element not having any visual consequence. Sometimes it can be good to just drop a random detail here and there, but you don't want that detail to get forgotten, as if it only existed within the dialogue line that stated it, as it'd feel inconsistent. In Haruhi's case, the narration works a bit like a one-man show, Kyon talking to the watcher like he knows them and reacting to everything, even if it's trying to remember where Honduras is located despite it not being of any importance.

There's also a bunch of "show don't tell" in Haruhi, though. Someday in the Rain, for instance, has almost no line of dialogue but clearly conveys the themes of Disappearance: neglect and loneliness for Yuki and her parallel with Kyon. Disappearance, despite its extensive use of monologues, carries a lot of visual information that says a lot about Yuki.

"Show dont tell" is the worst shit to ever come put of creative writing 101 that makes every freshman pseud think they're a literary critic for

I'm just saying that the idea of "show don't tell" is not consciously practiced by Japanese writers (I'm not talking about manga which is partly a visual medium anyway), not that it never occurs. It is not a rule that they do their best to adhere to like it is in modern English-language literature. In a way I'd say that their literary style has generally developed counter to the concept.

A smart writer will naturally tend to be show don't tell even without being familiar with the concept

Assuming you're talking about anime writers, which you probably should be since this thread is about anime adaptations, this isn't true at all.

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