Ouran High School Host Club 16

Bisco Hatori – Viz – 2011 – 18 volumes

I enjoy this series quite a bit, and I adore Tamaki to the very core of my shoujo-loving being, but now that we’re closing in on the end of the series, we’re getting into dramatic finish territory, and it’s getting tough to read. I had to put this volume down for awhile because I couldn’t do the whole sad story in one sitting.

I don’t want to spoil too much, but it’s obvious that the Ouran storyline is beginning to wrap up here. Haruhi and Tamaki are dancing around their feelings, and all that it’s going to take is a real conversation between them to cement their relationship. Unfortunately, this coincides with Tamaki’s grandmother finally getting around to letting Tamaki into the fold. He’s got his hands full with learning all about the Suoh family business, and doesn’t have… free time anymore.

There’s all kinds of sinister in this volume. Both from Tamaki’s grandmother, who has been a villain all along, and Tamaki’s father, who fails to support or even stand up for his son. The Suoh lawyer is also sticking her nose in Haruhi’s affairs, and by the end of the volume, even Tamaki says things he’s going to regret later. In some cases, immediately, when he collapses in the hallway in a comedic puddle of tears.

I think the worst part of all this is that it’s so talky. This series is always so funny and happy, it’s extremely difficult for me to sit through a depressing volume where characters simply sit around and discuss what they can and can’t do for 200 pages.

Oh, I have full faith in a happy ending. There’s going to be some unpleasantness to get there, though.

So that the whole thing doesn’t end on a sour note, there’s a short story in the back of the volume about how Haruhi’s parents got together. It’s all kinds of awesome, with Ryoji still more or less himself even back then, and Haruhi’s mother… well, is more or less exactly like Haruhi, save for the fact she has a secret Takarazuka soft spot.

Following this, there’s another really funny story about Hikaru and Kaoru’s grandmother. She’s just the sort of eccentric old lady you’d expect to be head of the Hitachiin family.

Hatori’s strength as a writer really is in coming up with these strong, hilarious characters that play well together, and it’s good that both of these fall in this volume with a difficult part of the main story. They more than make up for the lack of silly Tamaki in this volume. I do hope he’ll get an opportunity to appear again next volume, though.

Ouran High School Host Club 15

Bisco Hatori – Viz – 2010 – 17 volumes

Oh man. Every time I read a volume of this series, I have to remember how much I love Tamaki. He’s a great shoujo manga character. So silly, and he brings out the funniest in everyone. I thought last volume was a lot of giving the reader what they’ve wanted all this time, but this volume kicks it up a notch.

I had forgotten about the surprise the club had been preparing (?) for Tamaki, and a lot of the beginning of this volume is an “Orienteering Tournament” where Tamaki pairs up with Kanoya and goes around to various challenges and checkpoints prepared by the Host Club members (most catered specifically towards Tamaki winning, though they hide it by claiming it’s an event for their patrons and Host Club-centric, rather than Tamaki-centric). The Orienteering tournament is… okay. It serves as a catalyst for Kanoya (we finally find out what’s bugging her) and also as a device for Haruhi to let Tamaki know that he should share his problems with the club rather than bottling them in. It’s important, but honestly, I’m ready to be finished with this series, and I can feel the ending coming… I’d just as soon have the volume spent sorting out the rest of the character problems, rather than going through more plot. Not that the tournament is boring or bad in any way, I’m just impatient to see the resolutions, is all.

In the aftermath, Tamaki admits to everyone that he has a crush on Haruhi, and we get to see the silliness of how he deals with Haruhi now that he’s realized this, and how his superior attitude makes poor Hikaru feel. It’s Tamaki turned way up, and there are just so many cute scenes of him freaking out or going off on tangents, or everyone trying to calm him down. He really is great, the series is 100% worth reading because he’s such a great character, and every volume spent with Tamaki in a good mood is an absolute pleasure to read.

There are two volumes left! I’m very much looking forward to finishing this series up. I’m hoping we’ll see both within the year. I am happy that it hasn’t worn out its welcome yet, and I’m also curious to see how things will wrap up with Tamaki.

Ouran High School Host Club 14

Bisco Hatori – Viz – 2010 – 16+ volumes

Did you ever notice how sometimes… the Achilles’ heel of an artist is immediately apparent? I took one look at the title page and smiled a little, because as well as Tamaki and horses go together, it was immediately apparent they hadn’t appeared because she couldn’t draw them. There was a horse chapter, but I loved the essay in the back where she mentions how bad she is at drawing animals (there’s a wonky-looking tiger in the same picture), and had to have a lot of help from her assistants for the horses.

Also, I love how Hikaru has to scream “in the ‘shoujo manga plot development’ sense!” at Haruhi at one point to make sure she understands what he’s saying. That cracked me up.

Mostly though, we get the serious volume I’ve been craving. Tamaki is still maddeningly obtuse, but he wouldn’t be Tamaki if he wasn’t, and even he’s getting more and more serious about his feelings. We get a real confession out of Hikaru, what seems to be a realization from Haruhi, and a coming-around from Tamaki. Things are much more shoujo-y now, but of course there’s still the mess of Tamaki’s family and sad backstory to deal with before we get the happily ever after.

But even sad backstory is welcome for Tamaki. Even melancholy, he’s still so silly and likable that he more than carries the series through any slow spots. I got a big kick out of Hikaru and Kaoru accusing him of wetting his pants, then him admitting to being prone to “happy squirts” as a boy. It’s so embarrassing, but just so him, too.

But yes. We finally, finally, finally got a fanservice-y volume. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for all this time, even though nothing is yet official. I have a feeling that the next volume won’t have much to do with this one, and will likely be extremely depressing, but all the same, I need my happy end for this series, and I can almost taste it. There can’t be more than a few volumes left. I don’t like everything about it (too many characters, too many gags), but I like Tamaki enough that I’ve been eating new volumes up with a spoon for years and will continue to do so until the end.

This was a review copy provided by Viz.

Ouran High School Host Club 13

Bisco Hatori – Viz – 2009 – 15+ volumes

Sigh.  I just want the story to get to the point.  I can tell it’ll get there eventually, but it’s going at an agonizingly slow pace.  There are a few major things that happen in this volume.  Big things for both Haruhi at the beginning and Hikaru at the end of the volume, and we also learn something important about Tamaki in between.  The chapters that go along with Haruhi’s revelations are adorable and play the plot point up just enough.  They are incredibly enjoyable, and are funny, sweet, romantic, and completely in-character for all involved.  There’s also an adorable scene between she and Tamaki that was worth the price of admission for the volume by itself.

I guess I can’t complain too much about those aspects of the story, but still… there are a lot of side stories that go along with these things, and new plot points are emerging that make it seem like the plot still has a ways to go before I’ll get to see what I want.  And in the end, it’s kind of silly to criticize a shoujo manga for not getting the main couple together.  I mean… that’s what they do.  They get the main couple together, and then end.  That’s why I read them.

Even so, ski trips aren’t always on the agenda, but that’s what happens here.  Granted, the ski trip is where the important plot point concerning Hikaru happens, but even so… though lots of character development happens, it’s still part of Haruhi’s new agenda to “experience more.”  If all that stuff has to happen, I guess it’s okay that it’s at a ski trip, and it’s really not filler at all… but it kind of feels like it anyway.  But only because it is a ski trip.

There’s also a bit of an explanation as to why Tamaki is such a late bloomer, but it’s a silly one, and I was disappointed that it was the reason even though it makes sense in the context of the story.  To make up for it, we get a chapter about young Tamaki’s move to Japan.  It was hilarious and made me love Tamaki even more, if that’s even possible.  The other thing about this volume is that we are right on the edge of Tamaki character development, and to see him looking serious, or sad, is uncharacteristic and quite striking.  He’s a good happy character, so to see him sad is doubly effective story-wise, I think.

But… yeah, I’m still ridiculously addicted to this series.  It’s funny and romantic and I’ve even grown attached to the huge cast of characters, something I generally hate.  And it looks like there’ll only be plot and character development from here on out, and… I’m sure the slow and thorough development this series takes will be good for me in the end, and put it way above the average shoujo series.  When Tamaki and Haruhi get together, it should be very sweet indeed.

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.

Ouran High School Host Club 11

Wow, it’s been forever since I’ve read this series.  I think we’re pretty much caught up with Japan, and this series seems to come out slowly there, too.  It’s kind of a bummer, because like I said I’m pretty well into it and would like for more than one volume a year to come out.

I was worried with the huge gap between releases, it would be hard to maintain my enthusiasm for the characters, especially since the plot this time around was a bit of a nonsequitor about an all-school sporting event.  I wound up really getting into it, though, and the eventual result was absolutely to die for.  Kyoya gets kind of a bum rap in the story… or maybe not so much a bum rap as he is looked upon unkindly.  This story humanizes him, and of course Tamaki is at the head of the whole thing.  I love that guy.

Tamaki still really makes the series for me.  I’m not sure how I can like one fictional character so much, but he seems to do absolutely everything right.  Plus he’s got a tragic backstory, which starts to come into play again towards the end of the volume.  Despite the fact he’s portrayed as this sort of big dope that doesn’t know his own feelings, he seems to know exactly what it is that everyone else needs to feel good about themselves.  For this reason, I find it hard to believe he’s totally oblivious about Hikaru and Kaoru… or Haruhi, for that matter.  But what fun would it be if he wasn’t?  I like him just the way he is.

The last part of the volume starts going into the school trip to France Kyoya and Tamaki’s class is taking, and then follows up with Hikaru and Kaoru having some very serious conversations about Haruhi.  The volume ends on kind of a bad note… and again, I’m dying for more.  It’s good that even with the huge gaps, the series can be so addictive.  This is still hanging around at the top of my shoujo list… while it’s not the absolute best, it comes pretty close.

Ouran High School Host Club 10

I have a serious girly addiction to this series. I was grinning like an idiot at the laundry mat the entire time I was reading this volume. There are still a lot of funny moments, but most of this volume was packed full of cute little romantic scenes, and I kind of liked that.

Most important in this volume is that a new character is introduced. She’s right there on the cover. Her name is Mei, and she’s Misuzu (the drag queen who owns the “refreshing” hotel) daughter. She’s also a ganguro girl of some sort, and the funniest part of this volume was when Haruhi and her dad had an identical reaction to the Host Club when first seeing Mei, which was left untranslated as “keba!”, or too much makeup.

Much of the romance in this volume hinges on the fact Mei develops a crush on Tamaki. Through her, there are lot of moments for both Tamaki and Haruhi to talk to her about the other. Tamaki gets the best ones, of course, but maybe Haruhi will have her time later.

Tamaki gets a lot of cute romantic moments in this volume. At one point, the characters go to karaoke and Mei wonders why Tamaki, a foreigner, is singing a bunch of really old Japanese songs and staring directly at Haruhi, as if he wants her to approve. There’s also a cute moment where Tamaki asks Haruhi if they can get together sometime over summer break, and again when he admits his “fatherly” feelings to Mei later.

Really, Tamaki is just the cutest.

Others get cute romantic moments, too. Hunny has a love story at the beginning with a girl in the Occult Club who keeps trying to curse him. I promise this winds up being a lot cuter and less stupid than it sounds. The twins get a lot of time to sort out their feelings for each other and Haruhi, which is also always, ALWAYS cute. Even though most of their time their brotherly love is silly, when it’s genuine it’s the absolute best.

The last chapter is about Tamaki organizing a sports festival for Ouran. Kyoya breaks Tamaki’s heart when he refuses. This plot will carry over into the next volume, but I gotta say, I’m not really looking forward to it. After all, how many opportunities are there to be romantic in a sports festival?

Ouran High School Host Club 9

So yes. I am totally addicted to this series now. I don’t know that I can totally gloss over the fact that I didn’t start liking it until volume 5, but I know that I need the rest of it, like, right now. Your mileage may vary.

After getting so worked up over Tamaki at the end of the last volume, I was bummed by the story at the beginning of this one. A Princess from a European country comes to visit Japan and attend Ouran for awhile. She acts extremely spoiled and generally spends all her time making everyone as mad as possible. Tamaki seems to be the only one who is willing to cater to her every whim. There are weepy reasons for all this, but the girl’s general horrible attitude wasn’t easy to forgive.

As payment for putting up with her, we get a real, honest-to-God Tamaki/Haruhi moment. Neither one appreciates it, of course, but there’s a panel of Tamaki blushing that I feel should go into the “Perfect Shoujo Moment” hall of fame.

There’s a chapter about Tamaki being sick and conflicted that follows it. I enjoyed it thoroughly. My enjoyment was knocked up several notches when Mori followed up an offhand comment at the beginning of the chapter at the very end by admitting he does sometimes think about kissing Hunny. There was something totally awesome about that.

I was bummed that there were only a few chapters of the main story, but we get a short side chapter, an Egoistic Club chapter (which I didn’t really like), and one chapter which is related to the main storyline about how Tamaki convinced Kaoru and Hikaru to join the Host Club. I was a little less clear on what their reason was for joining, especially since they were unforgivable assholes before they met Tamaki, but… maybe it will become clearer later? It’s not like Tamaki could have cured them totally when they were that terrible.

I think volume 10 is coming in the mail this week, but… it’s still running in Japan!  We are caught up!  What am I going to do after that?!  I just won’t be able to wait for more.

Ouran High School Host Club 8

Apparently sometime over the weekend (I can’t tell for a variety of reasons, cancelled posts, drafts, the fact it counts stuff like the “about” pages, etc) I passed 1,000 posts.  Holy crap, that’s a lot of manga.  I think I’ll buy more.

Now, let’s get back to reporting the funny parts in Ouran High School Host Club.  The best joke so far came at the end of the volume on one of the author talk pages.  She tells a story about how one of her assistants pulled her cellphone out of her bag and realized she’d grabbed her remote instead that morning.  Then they all imagine Kyoya doing the same thing.  The next page is a regular page of manga, where Tamaki asks Kyoya to make a phone call and everyone silently observes that he pulls out a remote and wonders what the etiquette in that situation is.  I laughed so hard I did wake my roommate up this time.

Better than the humor this time though was the fact that, very slowly, romantic elements are creeping into the story.  A longer plot at the end of the book introduces a new character who openly crushes on Haruhi in the most unintentional scary way possible.  Obviously the Host Club members disapprove, but Tamaki disapproves most of all.  Said new character (who we’ll call Bossa Nova, same as the Host Club) finally, after 8 volumes, points out to Tamaki that he is not Haruhi’s father.  Tamaki doesn’t understand, because he thought he was.  Tamaki doesn’t know.  TAMAKI DOESN’T KNOW.  It works so well.

Second best, aside from the romantic development, was Bossa Nova.  Bossa Nova has a real name that sounds like Bossa Nova, and Haruhi calls him Casanova, but everyone else defaults to Bossa Nova.  He’s the son of a big yakuza boss, has been thoroughly instructed in the ways of the thug, and has the scariest face on the planet.  His servants at home shy away from his glance, because every look is like a death threat.  The thing about Bossa Nova, though, is that he’s really a big pushover, loves kittens and cute things, and wants to play kick the can all night with his servants.  He also doesn’t have any friends because everyone thinks he’s going to kill them.  He can’t help it he’s so scary, so he tries to get Mori to teach him how to be friendlier.  Mori and the rest of the club try a variety of hilarious solutions, and Bossa Nova sticks with them through thick and thin because he knows they’re honestly trying to help him.

Bossa Nova really is a perfect character.  He takes every thug stereotype you can think of and tries to run in a cute direction with it.  He doesn’t act cute, he just wants to act cute, which is an important part of the jokes.  He gives himself Yanki tattoos with magic marker.  He wants to play kick the can.  He starts hauling around a little boy as a “cute item” like Hunny, which make his servants question other things about him.

He’s perfect.  Thank you, Bossa Nova.

There’s also a great chapter about how Tamaki and Kyoya got to be friends.  Once again, after acting foolish for awhile, Tamaki shows some surprisingly strong insight into Kyoya’s character, which seems to be his talent.  They are also shown at the end briefly discussing the formation of the Host Club, which brings to mind some comments Kyoya made about the Club being beneficial to all the members.  Hmm.

One more thing I got to mention: Tamaki’s depths of despair are illustrated perfectly over three panels, all with a spaced-out upset Tamaki in the foreground: one had dinosaurs in the background, one had volcanoes and planets blowing up in the background, and one had him falling through space in a full-panel illustration.  It was perfect.

Ouran High School Host Club 7

I was a little less enthusiastic about this volume, though I did crack up at several points.  The very first chapter has a Haruhi/Kyoya focus, and Kyoya reveals more of his black heart, but there’s some slight bonding between the two as well.  Really though, the best moments were at the beginning when he woke up in the middle of a shopping mall and flashed back to remember how the other members of the club drug him out of bed and propped him up there to sleep while they ran off elsewhere, and at the end when a “lost child” message came over the PA system using Kyoya’s name, description, and saying his guardian Mr. Suoh was very worried about him.  I died laughing.

Two other parts had me laughing hard, too.  One was a story about Hunny’s brother, he reveals that he thinks that Hunny is an alien, and the reaction panel for the Club with everyone giving blank stares in the foreground and the twins giving each other a high five in the background was hilarious.  On the next page, Hunny’s brother told a story about how he got up in the middle of the night and found Hunny eating a gigantic cake, saying that Bun-Bun wanted some, and the brother was totally repulsed.

The other funny part was when the boys show up at Haruhi’s house and her dad answers the door unshaved.  They try to escape, but he grabs them and tells them not to give him their “I’ve seen the tranny in his natural state” look.  There was just something funny about that.

Mostly the funny stuff comes from spot-on delivery.  I think the comic timing is getting better and better with each volume, and I laugh at it even though I’m trying hard not to.  Establishing the characters helps too, and now that they’ve got a little bit of depth (not much, but a little), some stuff is even funnier.  Hunny’s brother being repulsed by his cake eating habits when everyone else thinks its cute is a good example, because it really IS horrible.

Hm.  The stories in the volume were all across the board, but we learn a little bit about Hunny and Mori’s brothers, and there’s a nice story about how Tamaki helped convince Hunny that being himself instead of meeting everyone else’s expectations can be a brave thing to do.  There’s a rivalry between Hunny and his brother, but it turns out not to be as severe as it first seems.  What else… there’s a side story about Hikaru and Kaoru and their favorite nanny that also sort of reveals a bit more about their twisted personalities.  The story about the meeting between Tamaki and Hunny sort of helped Tamaki’s image too, since, like I said, he’s normally depicted as a wuss.

There was another Egoistic Club story in the back of the volume.  I don’t usually like them, but it was a continuation of the last story about the weird relationship between the twisted student and teacher, so I was okay with it.