Okay, I promise that this is going to be the last Endless Eight comic I’ll be doing – I fully realise that, at this point, I’ve flogged this dead horse arguably more than the show itself. I’d written myself into a Haruhi-related hole, though, and this was the easiest shovel to wield.

Still, Endless Eight did somewhat cause a reduction in the value of Haruhi merchandise, in so much as the show met with the usual over-reaction in Japan – by which I mean it resulted in mass book-shredding and figure dismemberment by some of the shows more previously rabid fanbase.

In any case, Endless Eight is over now, and we can all happily move on with our lives, basking in the joy of new Haruhi content with interest value beyond wondering if they’ll do anything interesting with the direction this time, and precisely how small Haruhis swimsuit will be.

There was an interesting thought regarding Endless Eight in this weeks Anime 3000 podcast, where they suggested that fandom may well forgive, or at least somewhat forget, about all this Endless Eight frustration assuming the rest of the series is good. It’s probably going to end up true in the long run – fandom at large has proven itself to have fairly atrocious long term memory, where the final episode of a show often somehow determines the worth of an entire series, and one seasons Best Thing Ever is quickly forgotten.

If the persistent theories that the absence of a new KyoAni production next season indicates their intention to continue into doing the Disappearance adaptation they’ve been promising for a couple of years prove to be true, then I certainly do think that Endless Eight will be relegated to the status of Minor Annoyance rather than the matter of earth shattering importance it is now. Otherwise, I’m not sure that Sighs will really be enough to wash the bad taste some have in their mouths.

On a more random note, I’ve been out and grabbed my copies of the Haikasoru books since my previous post. Curiously, the guy who rung my purchases up mentioned to me that he’s got a preview copy of ZOO already, and proceeded to badmouth it’s translation. It’s hard to know how much credence I should be putting into that – aside from the fact that he’d mangled the pronunciation Haikasoru, when I quizzed him about it, he mentioned he hadn’t read any of the other Otsu-Ichi books published in English (though he was aware of Goth). He didn’t strike me as someone who read a lot of these Japanese novel translations, though I suppose I shouldn’t be using that as a stick to gauge the validity of his comments. He did specifically mention that he thought the English adaptation was giving things away ahead of time that he thought it probably shouldn’t, and as a result was spoiling what were otherwise interesting stories. Disappointing if true, but I’ll be buying ZOO anyway.