Ouranistic Experience

by Bob Johnson

Captain Obvious confirms: Ouran High School Host Club is girly

Ouran High School Host Club

Haruhi and Tamaki share a moment

You’re probably already well aware that Ouran High School Host Club is the wet dream of many a socially-awkward gynoid; since having a bunch of guys rotate around a single woman is a day in the life of the average school computer club, I guess there’s a little truth to the concept of a reverse harem, but seeing it play out at any length at all has me ready to develop a virus that targets shoujo writers… now if there was one thing that put this show on my radar, it was the cross-section of its average fangirl;  you can spot them in blue blazers at any given convention, most mercifully also wearing pants, but all too many sporting schoolgirl miniskirts that are extremely flattering to their cottage cheese (blast, now I’m hungry); as for the show itself, well there’s not much to say really… there’s this girl, Haruhi, who has the benefit of not being really frickin’ annoying like other Haruhis out there; this Haruhi is sad about her mom dying when she was 5, and lately is being deliberately ambiguous about her gender; she just got a scholarship or something to this palatial private high school for the filthy rich, but despite it being so gigantic, she’s unable to find an empty room to study in, so Haruhi stumbles into the repurposed music room used by Ouran Academy’s “Host Club” – a band of bishonen who spend their time flirting with those bishoujo that pay for the privilege, and occasionally with each other; they’re also the sorts of creepy mofos who already have files on every student on campus, so it’s understandable that suddenly learning this while being confronted by an assorted-flavour-pack of fujoshi fetish fuel might inspire Haruhi to not check for the $80,000 vase behind her as she attempted to slowly back away; now indebted to the club, she is stuck with menial tasks at first, but the Hosts soon discover she’s a real hit with the ladies…  so a girl with a girl’s name who looks like a girl pretending to be a boy now has a job flirting with girls.

Slash setup, and that’s really as far as I got without fearing for my sanity.  If you’re a woman, or share Kaoru’s love of men, it may be that you can get some mileage out of this.  I might even be able to tolerate watching this with a girlfriend if she wasn’t all weird otherwise.  But if you, like so much of this show’s fanbase, are a girl that is a bit too old to still never have made love to a kakkoi boy, then don’t watch this, you’re only going to deepen your complex.

Don’t look it up:

Ouran High School Host Club
Written by Bisco Hatori, Directed by Takuya Igarashi
Produced by Bones, Licenced by Funimation

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