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.

Ouran High School Host Club 5

Ah, this volume was much better.  After one one-shot episode, the entire volume takes place at a getaway in the woods where Haruhi is trying to help one of her dad’s friends.  Everyone else shows up too, because that’s just how it works, but I actually kind of got a kick out of things this time around.

Major points were awarded for the “refreshing” contest, which was held among all the boys to see who would get the one extra room and get to stay with Haruhi in the cabin.  The owner decided who was the most “refreshing” among the boys.  They all sort of do what you’d expect of them, but a couple parts were very funny (Mori is apparently good at being refreshing, and chopping wood for no reason).

A lot of the volume is also dedicated to developing the twins a bit.  One of them, Kaoru (not that it matters to me, I don’t really try to tell them apart), gets hurt while trying to protect Haruhi, and it seems to shake up the other one quite a bit.  Later, they both sort of talk about how they only grew up with only each other so they’re not really familiar with considering other people’s feelings.  Much later, Kaoru sets Hikaru up on a date to try and teach him a lesson about dealing with other people socially.

I wish Tamaki got more breaks, or got to do something other than being totally silly (he does get one heroic moment in this volume), but other than that I think I could get used to more volumes like this.   I also kind of wish there were less characters, especially since Hunny, Mori, and the Vice President don’t usually do anything, but I guess that’s just how things work.

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.

Ouran High School Host Club 3

I like this series.  I like it a lot.  I think it’s very funny.  I just wish it were something else, because I want plot development SO BAD with these characters.

I’ve gotten used to the somewhat manic style of storytelling that Hattori uses here, and the most manic chapters this time around were my favorites (Halloween and the visit to the main character’s house at the end), but now I’ve got a problem with how much I like the characters and how little they change.  To show you what a girly girl I am, I want a real romance between the two main characters right now.  We constantly get tossed hints and kinda cute scenes that end too soon, but neither one of these two has really developed… at all.  The plot is not moving forward even a little bit (except for maybe a hint we got tossed that one of the other characters may have a thing for the main female), and that’s really all it would take to make this series one of my favorites.  I can’t help the fact I just like episodic series less, and this happens to be one.

I also don’t like the way she kind of insists on having all the characters present in every chapter, then only making use of four of them.  While she does work to make small roles for the three minor characters, it feels so cluttered when everyone shows up at once, especially in the last chapter when they visit the main female character.  The main male character and the two twins would be more than enough to carry things… but I suppose we need minor characters too.  Mind you, I absolutely adore all seven members of the host club, and I think she has a real knack for making interesting side characters (like the three “lesbians” that randomly show up at the beginning of this volume, or the scary classmate that appears periodically), I just wish we saw less of a lot of them since they’re just not used all that well all the time.

I’ll keep reading it, because I like it enough for that, but I hope with all my heart that eventually it starts getting a bit of plot.

Ouran High School Host Club 2

The best of the stories in this volume was the one where the twins fought.  I thought it was pretty good all the way thorugh, but by the time it got to the end, I was absolutely dying with laughter.  Well-constructed drama along with well-constructed humor.  Excellent.

More shoujo manga-y stories fill out the volume.  One where everyone has to help the main character keep her gender a secret during medical exams, one where  they help a young boy confess his love, one where they have a silly adventure in a lavish underground swimming pool, and an unrelated short story at the end concerning getting people together.

I like the characters a lot still, and I’m really getting into almost all of them.  The overall style of the manga of nonstop-absolutely-everything is still a bit too much for me, but since it’s coming out fairly slowly now, I think I could really enjoy it every once in awhile.

Ouran High School Host Club 1

I bought this series in the last Viz sale at the Right Stuf, but it took forever for volume 2 to arrive.  I was actually prompted to begin reading this when I read a review comparing it to another series I read recently.

Oh, it’s so SPASTIC.  I don’t know if I love it or hate it.  It’s definitely got some funny moments, but it tries to cram in, like, three jokes per page, and everything’s so busy, it’s hard for me to handle the amount of manga I get per volume.  It definitely slipped down a few pegs for being way too over the top.

But it’s definitely not without its charm.  The main male character alone is worth the price of admission.  There is no question about what he thinks of himself, and it’s fun to see him play off not only his huge ego, but the main female character, who seems to care less about him.  He’s got kind of a weird crush on her, and gets insanely jealous when the two twin characters have some really twisted fun with her every once in awhile.

It strikes me as quite a bit like Hana-Kimi, mostly because they keep the main female character’s gender a secret to help out the host club… but it seems like a not-very-good reason for doing so.  I didn’t think too hard about it, though.

The manga doesn’t pretend to have an actual plot, and it makes sure to tell you that the two senior students aren’t going to graduate anytime soon.  The actual one-shot stories are very shoujo manga-y.  There’s one about a jealous girl.  There’s one about getting a couple together.  There’s one about a prearranged fiancee.  But I will admit the last one in the volume, where everyone acts out of character to go along with the script for a romantic sim video game, was probably my favorite.