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The context I found the usage in (which hopefully should suffice here):

この人ってやっぱり本当に危ない系な人？

自分を世界そのものだとか言って……それってアニメの影響か？　涼宮なんとかがどうだとか言う……。

I'm not entirely sure what どう is doing in this structure. Reading a similarly answered question didn't clarify it for me unfortunately. Should it just be treated as a set expression like in the previous question, and if so, what does it mean here? Or am I just misunderstanding どう in this usage (which I think of as meaning "what" or "how")?

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「～～がどうだとか言う」

is a common and informal expression describing how a person habitually brings up the topics that are quite unimportant and/or irrelevant in the eye of others.

The 「どう」 part can often be replaced by 「どうした」、「どうなった」、「なん」, etc.

Thus, if I had to translate:

「涼宮なんとかがどうだとか言う……。」

I might go with something like:

"S/he is always talking about things like what's (up) with the Suzumiya girl."

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  • Does it only carry the nuance of a habitual action? Since it doesn't feel like that here. Seeing another similar usage どうだとか～どうだとか（いう）, it seems like it's listing things, or just bringing them them up as topics. I'm understanding the sentence as "Likening herself to the world itself... is this something from an anime? Haruhi or whatever you call it..."
    – user26484
    Commented Aug 4, 2018 at 19:36
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    I'm reading "Declaring herself to be the world itself... Has she been watching some anime? (Like that one where) Suzumiya What's-her-name does/is something or whatever?" or something along these lines. They are most likely referencing the Haruhi Suzimiya series, where the eponymous heroine is an unwitting creator of some kind of alternative world or something like that.
    – goldbrick
    Commented Aug 5, 2018 at 0:45
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    Here どうだ is acting as a placeholder for the predicative expression they didn't bother or was unable to fill in, much like what「なんとか」 does for the given name of the character. It's like 「それって涼宮なんとかがどうだとか言うアニメの影響か？」, only the middle part coming afterward.
    – goldbrick
    Commented Aug 5, 2018 at 0:45

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