Ouran High School Host Club 12

I get into these childish mindsets where I don’t really want anything else from a series except my favorite parts.  Quite often, this is because the series is great, and pretty much all of it is awesome, but the fact remains I fly through the books looking for whatever it is that I want.

Now, this volume had  few really great story segments in it.  At the beginning of the volume, Hikaru and Kaoru get into a vicious fight.  Kaoru retaliates by monopolizing Haruhi and basically shutting Hikaru out until he (Kaoru) confesses his feelings to Haruhi.  He’s got a couple ulterior motives, too.  This actually got a bit… deeper than I would expect from this series, and there were some pretty strange issues both Hikaru and Kaoru addressed, but it was quite good, and their confrontation had been building up for quite some time.

Elsewhere, Kyoya is taking his class trip to France and looking for Tamaki’s mother so that he can report back.  This takes a long time, and wasn’t all that interesting or rewarding (it may pay off in the future) but he invokes Troyon, so I forgave this particular story segment.  He is searching fo her in Barbizon, which gets one to thinking of Fontainbleau forest, which then makes me think of CHOMO, and then…

Wait, what?  The topic?

My earlier point about only wanting to read about things I want applies here, because Tamaki isn’t actually in this volume until the very end, and he’s the very best thing about this series as far as I’m concerned.  There are a few brief scenes where Tamaki is with his father, but the longer, better section is where Haruhi figures out that Tamaki has not gone on his trip.  There’s even a cute, fanservice-y scene between the two at Haruhi’s house, and we get to learn Tamaki’s real French name.  It sort of made up for the fact he wasn’t in most of the volume.

The two moments that made me laugh out loud were also Tamaki’s doing.  At one point, he sends Kyoya a really horrible text message (horrible in the fact that it was full of misspellings and colloquialisms and little pictures and stuff).  The part that made me laugh hardest was when Tamaki’s father described a scene from Tamaki’s childhood that kept building up embarassingly until he mentioned that Tamaki would get so excited he would pee himself.  I’m not sure why that struck me as so funny, but it was awesome.

I’m DYING to see some buildup between Haruhi and Tamaki.  Things look to be moving in that direction for the next volume, so I’m really looking forward to it.  A lot.  Tamaki is one of my favorite shoujo manga characters at this point.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.