Ouran High School Host Club

So... when I was explaining my history with anime and manga, I mentioned that my cousin, Alex got me into Ouran High School Host Club.  It's actually a pretty funny story.  See, I was spending and inordinate amount of time at my apartment holed up in the bedroom watching anime on my computer.  Then, I went to my grandma's for the night or weekend or something and met up with my cousin Alex and we started talking about anime because that was what was on my mind.  Then Alex pulls out a computer (her dad's or mine) and she (Alex is short for Alexandria) goes to www.youtube.com and finds the first episode of Ouran High School Host Club and tells me to watch it.

One episode and I was hooked.  The premise, the way the story was told, everything was damn funny.  It's one thing I like about manga story-telling as opposed to the way American's do it.  Terry Pratchett manages it too.  There's always these larger-than-life characters who tend to be just a little off from normal, but sympathetic all the same or at least too fun not to like.  Ouran High School Host Club is the same way.

It's about a group of people with larger-than-life personalities who get together and decide to use their charm to seduce women and make money off of it.  And when I said "seduce women" I don't mean their having sex with them or anything, they're basically letting the girls go "fangirl mode" all over and around them.

Into this group, Haruhi is introduced in the very first episode.  Haruhi is the... normal person of the group.  Not sneaky, not rich, not snobby... Haruhi just wants to get through school and become a lawyer like Mom was... and then Haruhi breaks a vase worth a lot of yen and becomes the Host Clubs "dog".  Of course through a series of crazier and crazier events, Haruhi becomes a host, being a "natural" at it.

The manga and the series are both guilty of doing something I love they take modern romance tropes prevalent in Japanese manga and anime, turn those tropes on their head, cuts them into ribbons, pastes them together, and then plays them entirely straight.  It's like if Discworld had a truly romantic miniseries without  the fantasy setting.  Don't be mistaken though, there's a lot of fantasy setting... just romantic fantasy.

That's a thing about the story, the more I read the manga or watch the episodes (especially when drunk), the more I realize just how much the author must have loved the source material.  It's the only way Ouran High School Host Club could've become nearly as good as it is.  The manga as well as the anime were always a labor of love, not a labor of "I hate this so much I must mock and lambaste it to smithereens!"  It doesn't changed the manga and anime from good to better, rather they were already excellent because someone obviously cared for the final product.

Without this anime and then manga, I never would've given Fruits Basket a real chance.