1052: Kiss, Kiss, Fall in Love

During November, as you know, I was writing non-stop fiction in my own NaNoWriMo spinoff. This doesn’t mean I wasn’t doing anything worth talking about in my spare time, however. You may recall that a relatively short while back I well and truly “got into” anime and had some enthusiastic words to say about a number of different series. I thought I’d share my thoughts on one more that I finished at some point in the middle of last month: Ouran High School Host Club.

This was a recommendation from my anime-enthusiast friend Lynette, who has been the source of many good recommendations to date. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from it, though armed with my relatively limited knowledge of “host club” culture that I’d picked up from playthroughs of Yakuza 1, 2 and 3 (I’m still yet to tackle 4, but I’ll get there) I had a general idea.

(For those unfamiliar with this particular quirk of Japanese culture, host/hostess bars are establishments in which patrons can come in and settle down for a pleasant evening’s chat with a host/hostess of their choice. Their chosen companion will ply them with drinks and food and attempt to get them to spend as much money as possible, though if Yakuza is to be believed there’s every possibility that the host/hostess and their client will strike up a genuine friendship “and maybe more” in the process — good for the people and good for the business, too. It is, it should be said, rather different from prostitution.)

Anyway. Ouran High School Host Club revolves around a group of bored, rich male students at a very exclusive high school (the titular Ouran Academy) who formed their own host club in an attempt to entertain the equally bored, rich female students. The club covers a diverse array of “tastes”, ranging from pretty boy Tamaki to the borderline-incestuous twins Hikaru and Kaoru via the… whatever the male equivalent of “loli” is embodied by the childish, cake-loving “Honey”.

Enter Haruhi, who is a girl. Haruhi stumbles upon the Host Club’s premises — the disused music room — and inadvertently breaks an incredibly valuable vase in the process. She is saddled with a debt that she couldn’t possibly repay, so the club agrees that if she joins as a host and entertains the girls of Ouran Academy, they will let her “work off” her debt.

Thing is, certain members of the club initially don’t realise that she is a girl, since she first appears dressed in a boy’s uniform and sporting a rather boyish short, shaggy haircut. Hilarity, as you might expect, ensues, and the series progresses as Haruhi and the gang get into a series of increasingly silly scrapes, all the while learning new things about each other and their backgrounds. The rich kids of the Host Club learn about Haruhi’s poor background, her deceased mother and her cross-dressing father — one of the more memorable characters in anime I’ve seen recently — while Haruhi learns to come out of her shell a bit, and solidifies her own idea that gender doesn’t define her personality.

At heart, Ouran High School Host Club is a very silly show. The characters are heavily exaggerated, and the visual aesthetic is very stylized — everyone has noses that you could cut glass with, for example, and the show isn’t afraid to pop up captions to explain various things or even to put big flashing arrows over the top of something that will become important in a few minutes’ time. Similarly, the show is a textbook example of anime not being afraid to have characters that defy the laws of physics for comic effect — there’s lots of exaggerated facial expressions, black clouds looming around the depressed and angry people suddenly becoming inexplicably huge. The whole thing is presented with an almost childish degree of enthusiasm, and the energy is relentless. It’s perhaps for this reason that I actually found it difficult to watch more than one episode at a time, whereas conversely I can and will watch a whole bunch of slower-paced stuff in a single sitting. (I devoured the entire series of AnoHana in one go, for example, but that’s a story for another post altogether.)

As well as being silly, though, there’s a tender heart beating within. The characters have very real affection for one another and their relationships deepen and blossom as the show progresses. It manages to pull this off without dropping into the realms of cliché, either, except where it is deliberately lampshading romantic clichés — usually through the identical twins duo of Hikaru and Kaoru.

The show is gloriously, gloriously camp, managing to pretty much out-gay both Bayonetta and Space Channel 5 (both of which are games, I know, but they’re the yardsticks by which I measure relative campness) but it also knows when to show restraint. There’s a time and a place for shenanigans and prancing around, it seems to say, and a time for people to be serious. The good pacing that the show enjoys means that it builds to a very satisfying payoff come the end of the series — and not necessarily in the way you might expect, either. I shan’t spoil it for those who are planning to watch it, but suffice to say it’s worth sticking it out for the whole run, even if the seemingly-relentless chaos of some episodes feels like it might be a bit much sometimes.

In short, I enjoyed it a lot. It doubtless won’t be to everyone’s taste — what is? — but I found it a lot of fun. Give it a chance if you’re looking for something a little bit different from the norm.