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Comment by trothamel | Hacker News Reader

Oddly, the image that Scientific American chose to illustrate their article isn't from any of the Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya projects, but from Aokana - Four Rhythms Across the Blue, a much more obscure title.

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You seem well versed in anime - can I give you a few math proofs to work out?

They also close with an example for Harui's show and earlier try to explain its premise too... Completely ignoring the fact that fans don't care to watch the whole show in any order, but only the "Endless 8", the 8 episodes actually stuck in a time loop.

And even making an example out of 8 episodes would be stupid, as the 8th episode in the Endless is meant to be the very final piece of the loop. It's arguable for the very first, you could in theory watch it out of order too, but it has the most setup of the bunch.

So they only cared for the superpermutation of 6.

Critically abysmal research on the article's part.

True to an extent; there's the broadcast order versus the actual chronological order versus the source material order that all differ a good bit[0]. Broadcast order being the main outlier. It's an episodic series, with some that span more than one episode, along with Endless Eight. If anything, I'd say the permutations should be separated out by the first season and the endless eight it encompasses, as there's no sense in watching an endless eight episode in the midst of the rest.

[0] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JWY_VFaF_NAxlmPkYsOA...

The entire Haruhi series is famously randomly scrambled, so neither it's airing order nor their episode number follow the chronological order of events.

It's been a while since I saw it, but from what I remember the original airing was fairly intelligently scrambled. You have a spine of episodes that consist of the original light novel, which occur in the same order they did in that book. This introduces the characters and the main plot, and ends in a climax that has to be at the end.

You then have a series of one-shot stories from the books (and one original episode contributed by the creator of Full Metal Panic!) that get scattered throughout, as there wasn't enough content for a full season, and it would be weird to have the climax occur mid-season.

If you actually check out the original 4chan post you can clearly see that it's about the first season. I'm not sure where you got the idea that it should be about the Endless 8, since you even admit yourself that it would make no sense.

Not to mention they occupy totally different mediums (anime vs visual novel). Kind of like using a random movie cover when you're talking about a music album.

Both have anime adaptations, neither are anime original.

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