Ouran High School Host Club 4

Reading this, Pastel, and Oh My Goddess together on the same day was not a good idea.  While OMG was pretty light as far as fanservice goes, Pastel and Ouran are just WAY over the top in their respective categories.

I don’t think I can ever read My Heavenly Hockey Club without remembering Ouran exists, because that seems to be the only time I remember its on my shelf.  MHHC borrows heavily from Ouran for its premise, but it takes the basic plot (girl at school who doesn’t belong is taken in by club full of hot boys, and the boys are identical between the two series) and does much better things with it.  It pains me to say that MHHC borrows, but the fact is the characters are too similar, and Ouran came out first.

The first volume was kind of a parody in that it took every shoujo harem stereotype and crammed it into the series with a bunch of jokes that made fun of the way the characters had to act.  Of course there was vague twincest, of course there was a cute little boy, a seme-type (if that’s what Mori is), a boy with glasses, and a really hot, over-the-top royalty type for the main character.  These boys ran a lucrative club, after all, dedicated to giving the girls what they want.  This by itself was acceptable for the first couple volumes, but since then, nothing new has happened.  It hasn’t come up with any new ways to make fun of these stereotypes, and really, the jokes about pleasing the club customers have disappeared.  When you just have the group of boys acting the way girls would like them to act, you have the stereotypical shoujo harem series.

I about lost it when there was a chapter where, from out of the blue, the characters acted out Alice in Wonderland.  This chapter existed because apparently a number of people requested it, along with crossdressing many of the boys (among other things), so it kind of skips around as many of the characters play Alice and other roles.  There’s even… twin catboys.  Many people may still call this a parody of shoujo harem series, but… while the characters did make reference to how popular some of them were and what readers requested, I believe the entire chapter was done without parody in mind.  I think it was just honest-to-goodness fanservice.

I just finished Cheeky Angel, and like I said before, I’m just not into episodic comedies at all.  This series doesn’t have much in the way of plot or actual development of the relationship between characters other than (possibly) between the two main characters, so I just am not going to be able to get into it.