She also appears in related media in the franchise including the manga adaptation, two original net animation series, and video games.

Haruhi is depicted as an eccentric and headstrong schoolgirl, who has a great disdain for anything that she views as normal or mundane, and is only interested in supernatural beings or mysterious occurrences.

[1] Her displeasure with the school's "normal" after-school clubs leads Haruhi to gather up several students (Kyon, Yuki Nagato, Mikuru Asahina, and Itsuki Koizumi) and found her own: the SOS Brigade, making them participate in activities whether they like it or not.

Haruhi also, unknown to her, possesses unconscious god-like abilities to change, destroy, and reshape reality to her desires, mostly thanks to Kyon who originally had these powers, as he once believed in Aliens, Time Travelers and Espers back in the day before, before he chose to lock his mind and unknowingly transfer them to Haruhi when the 2 first met.

She sometimes swaps out the arm band for one proclaiming short-term but similarly elevated titles, like "Ultra Director" while she was making a movie with the SOS Brigade.

For example, although Haruhi attempts to contact aliens during the Tanabata holiday three years before the events of the series,[8] she dismisses Kyon when he posits that the other members of the SOS Brigade (Yuki, Mikuru, and Itsuki) are supernatural creatures, stating that it is "too convenient" to be true.

[9] Despite her selfish and callous attitude at the start of the series, she later becomes more sympathetic to others and displays a strong sense of responsibility towards the SOS Brigade members, such as when she gets up early on school days to care for Yuki when she is sick in The Surprise of Haruhi Suzumiya.

Though Haruhi shows little interest in romance throughout the series, she has prior to the story's events been in short relationships with multiple boys, all of whom she dumped as uninteresting.

When he catches her putting her cardigan on him to keep him warm in "Someday in the Rain", she is mortified, and in The Intrigues of Haruhi Suzumiya, after preparing for him an elaborate treasure hunt with Valentine's chocolates made by the three SOS Brigade girls, she warns him not to tell anyone about it since it would "start rumors".

[2] Before the event, Haruhi tended to think of herself and her life as being special and interesting, but the sheer number of people packed into the stadium (and her later calculations that this only represented a small fraction of the population of Japan) caused her to come to the conclusion that the events of her life likely fit into the normal, everyday occurrences and habits of Japanese citizens and humans in general.

[2] Haruhi attracted the most attention by drawing a huge graffiti mural on the field at school of the night of Tanabata, which was reported in the newspaper.

Using the alias "John Smith", Kyon implied that there were strange things out there and that there might be interesting people at North High, which inspired Haruhi to attend the school.

Haruhi's entrance into high school is marked by her meeting her fellow student and series protagonist, Kyon, the first person to seriously engage her in conversation related to her interests.

However, after Kyon informed her about an incident involving painting hieroglyphs on the school grounds and revealed himself to be "John Smith", the alternate reality version of Haruhi helped him restore the former world.