Ouran High School Host Club 6

You know, I think this series has won me over, which is hard to do considering how hard I hated it four volumes in.  I’m even starting to laugh at some of the jokes.

I almost woke my roommate up laughing at one part where Haruhi admits to trying a food combination she’d heard somewhere tasted like giant tuna.  Kyoya, Tamaki, and Mori try it, and after consuming it, Tamaki snaps his fingers and Kyoya promptly calls someone to investigate and find whoever it was that started the rumor the food combination tasted like giant tuna and have them banished from the country, while Mori earnestly explains to Haruhi that the food tastes nothing like giant tuna.  Haruhi says she wants to die.

While last volume was mostly about the twins, this volume gives a lot of background on Tamaki.  Well, there’s a lot of stuff about everyone (we meet Hikaru and Kaoru’s parents along with learning about Kyoya’s situation at home), but Tamaki gets the most background.  We finally get to meet the chairman, who is just like Tamaki and loves teasing his son.  We also learn about Tamaki’s grandma and some reasons why Tamaki may not be totally accepted as a member of his family.

There’s one continuous storyline throughout the volume concerned with the Ouran School Festival.  Much of the preparation is spent on a tournament to decide which club gets the best spot in the school for the festival along with a bit of a mystery where it appears someone is trying to sabotage the Host Club’s chance at said top spot.

Tamaki finally gets shown in very favorable light.  There’s even a cute scene between he and Haruhi where he gets a chance to save a faux pas that Haruhi commits in front of all the upper crust parents.  Very nice.  Kyoya shines the brightest in this volume though, and you get to see even more of his hilariously black heart.  One of his lines also cracked me up because it was just so evil, and delivered so perfectly in a scene where everyone’s riding in a carriage and doting on fawning girls.

A lot of the weird blunders that this manga series makes I believe are made consciously.  At one point, the narration goes something like “for some reason, it’s spring time again,” the reason given in quotation marks being that the chapter ran in the May issue of Lala.   In the author’s notes in the back, there’s one panel where the characters are drawn walking in white space and yelling “hey! where are we!?” and then the author talking in depth about how she doesn’t know or care about the layout of the school or the club room.