Ouran High School Host Club Review
Dec. 5th, 2018 08:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
arias_hollow**This is an old review I am cataloging and may not reflect my Current thoughts on the matter**
(Disclaimer: This is about the anime ONLY, I have not read the manga yet)
I’m going to be honest: I went into this show expecting not to like it. I knew 99.9% of anime fandom loved it, but more often then not I am baffled by what shows become popular, and its premise didn’t help; I already have a very hard time getting into slice-of-life and romance anime, and a show about a host club just sounded stupid and unpleasant to me. But I wanted to give it a try.
At first, all I could really say for the show was that it had good animation, some funny moments, and a cool protagonist. But I wasn’t very interested, and all the guy characters seemed annoyingly class-ist and kind of just…stereotypical. And I just have a short attention span for non-plotty shows sometimes. But I kept watching, and I found the show to be less and less burdensome to watch as I went on, and I was growing increasingly fond of Tamaki (I of course continued to love Haruhi). By the end, I was having a lot of fun watching it and genuinely cared about all of the characters and their relationships and general well-being. I’m not sure specifically when my reaction started changing from “-_- + o_O” to “:D”, or what exactly caused it, but it did.
Now to get into a more detailed analysis (probably SPOILERS, you have been forewarned). First I’ll start off with what I DID like, and what I thought worked pretty well. The animation was lovely. Like, really lovely; it was so bright and shiny and smooth (plus it reminded me of Cardcaptor Sakura, which can only be a good thing). I liked the music, it was fun and fit the show really well. But what really made the show work were the characters. I wasn’t actually sure at first if I was going to be able to like anyone other than Haruhi at first, but everytime I got to an episode going over one of the main characters past/ outside-of-the-host-club issues I ended up liking them more and more, especially Tamaki, though I ended up liking Kyouya and the twins a fair amount later on. There various friendships and crushes were actually pretty adorable to watch develop, particularly once I got to know the characters better. Tamaki’s crush on Haruhi I expected to be really annoying, but it ended up being funny and cute instead, which was a big plus for me. I also really liked that they did give the twins individual personalities and issues, even if they were only apparent in the episodes focusing on them. And later on there were just so many cute episodes, like Hikaru’s date with Haruhi, the episode with Kasanoda, and kind of all the episodes focusing on Tamaki and Kyouya.
But while the show was mostly a ton of fun, it wasn’t by any means flawless. The fact that it took so long to get going is in itself a flaw, a show shouldn’t take 8-10 episodes before becoming properly entertaining. Early on the show felt more clichéd and with more one-dimensional characters then it did later. It took WAY too long to get basic information about our main characters, which made the pacing feel weird. And while I liked that the friendships were kind of slow-burn development-wise, it did feel odd that no one had really resolved their romantic feelings by the end of the series. Actually, in general the show didn’t resolve a lot of things, even if I did basically enjoy the ending. Like what about Hikaru and Kaoru’s struggle to become more accepting and independent? Did Tamaki ever catch onto the fact his feelings for Haruhi were romantic and not fatherly like he seemed convinced of? Was the show trying to say Haruhi had subtle romantic feelings for Tamaki or not? The show just felt like it needed a second season to wrap up all the loose ends but didn’t get one. Also, while most of the characters had story-archs dealing with their issues outside of their host-personas, I feel like we never really got to know Mori and Honey? Like yeah we learned Honey had a little brother that he had a strained relationship with, this didn’t reallly reveal anything new about Honey himself; he remained the “cute, child-like one” with martial art skills the entire show. And that was it. Mori had the “stoic but kind” thing going, which while fun, doesn’t tell me much about him as a person. So I wish those two had been developed as fully as the other characters were.
Long story short, Ouran High School Host Club WAS a very fun, cute show that I actually ended up enjoying quite a lot. It had lovable characters, good humor, and great voice acting and animation. But it took too long to get going, didn’t resolve a lot of issues that were brought up, and some of the main characters failed to have any meaningful development. Final Rating: 8/10
(Disclaimer: This is about the anime ONLY, I have not read the manga yet)
I’m going to be honest: I went into this show expecting not to like it. I knew 99.9% of anime fandom loved it, but more often then not I am baffled by what shows become popular, and its premise didn’t help; I already have a very hard time getting into slice-of-life and romance anime, and a show about a host club just sounded stupid and unpleasant to me. But I wanted to give it a try.
At first, all I could really say for the show was that it had good animation, some funny moments, and a cool protagonist. But I wasn’t very interested, and all the guy characters seemed annoyingly class-ist and kind of just…stereotypical. And I just have a short attention span for non-plotty shows sometimes. But I kept watching, and I found the show to be less and less burdensome to watch as I went on, and I was growing increasingly fond of Tamaki (I of course continued to love Haruhi). By the end, I was having a lot of fun watching it and genuinely cared about all of the characters and their relationships and general well-being. I’m not sure specifically when my reaction started changing from “-_- + o_O” to “:D”, or what exactly caused it, but it did.
Now to get into a more detailed analysis (probably SPOILERS, you have been forewarned). First I’ll start off with what I DID like, and what I thought worked pretty well. The animation was lovely. Like, really lovely; it was so bright and shiny and smooth (plus it reminded me of Cardcaptor Sakura, which can only be a good thing). I liked the music, it was fun and fit the show really well. But what really made the show work were the characters. I wasn’t actually sure at first if I was going to be able to like anyone other than Haruhi at first, but everytime I got to an episode going over one of the main characters past/ outside-of-the-host-club issues I ended up liking them more and more, especially Tamaki, though I ended up liking Kyouya and the twins a fair amount later on. There various friendships and crushes were actually pretty adorable to watch develop, particularly once I got to know the characters better. Tamaki’s crush on Haruhi I expected to be really annoying, but it ended up being funny and cute instead, which was a big plus for me. I also really liked that they did give the twins individual personalities and issues, even if they were only apparent in the episodes focusing on them. And later on there were just so many cute episodes, like Hikaru’s date with Haruhi, the episode with Kasanoda, and kind of all the episodes focusing on Tamaki and Kyouya.
But while the show was mostly a ton of fun, it wasn’t by any means flawless. The fact that it took so long to get going is in itself a flaw, a show shouldn’t take 8-10 episodes before becoming properly entertaining. Early on the show felt more clichéd and with more one-dimensional characters then it did later. It took WAY too long to get basic information about our main characters, which made the pacing feel weird. And while I liked that the friendships were kind of slow-burn development-wise, it did feel odd that no one had really resolved their romantic feelings by the end of the series. Actually, in general the show didn’t resolve a lot of things, even if I did basically enjoy the ending. Like what about Hikaru and Kaoru’s struggle to become more accepting and independent? Did Tamaki ever catch onto the fact his feelings for Haruhi were romantic and not fatherly like he seemed convinced of? Was the show trying to say Haruhi had subtle romantic feelings for Tamaki or not? The show just felt like it needed a second season to wrap up all the loose ends but didn’t get one. Also, while most of the characters had story-archs dealing with their issues outside of their host-personas, I feel like we never really got to know Mori and Honey? Like yeah we learned Honey had a little brother that he had a strained relationship with, this didn’t reallly reveal anything new about Honey himself; he remained the “cute, child-like one” with martial art skills the entire show. And that was it. Mori had the “stoic but kind” thing going, which while fun, doesn’t tell me much about him as a person. So I wish those two had been developed as fully as the other characters were.
Long story short, Ouran High School Host Club WAS a very fun, cute show that I actually ended up enjoying quite a lot. It had lovable characters, good humor, and great voice acting and animation. But it took too long to get going, didn’t resolve a lot of issues that were brought up, and some of the main characters failed to have any meaningful development. Final Rating: 8/10
