Ouran High School Host Club was probably the 4th or 5th anime series I ever watched and is vastly different from the rest. The first episode I tried to watch the English dubbed version and it just didn’t sound right to me, I could tell a lot of the lines just didn’t exactly match up so I switched to English subtitles. The story line is kind of hard to explain, the plot summary on IMDB says “At the ultra prestigious Ouran High School, Haruhi Fujioka looks for a quiet place to read and walks into an unused music room, and accidentally stumbles across the notorious Ouran High School Host Club, a group of boys who entertain the girls of the school for profit. When Haruhi accidentally breaks an expensive vase belonging to the wacky Host Club, she is made to serve under them until her debt is paid off. Haruhi is soon made a Host, but in order to pay off what she owes, she must continue to allow the Host Club’s customers to believe she is a boy.”
I definitely started watching it because it was fun, silly, colourful and a little bit ridiculous. But I continued watching because of the intelligent use of satire as well as Haruhi who is such a strong female lead character who is constantly rolling her eyes at these boys who are just so ridiculous and foreign to her. It’s so refreshing to see the teenage boys being viewed as the crazy ridiculous characters, that being said there are plenty of strange and silly girls in the show too.
After watching the first few episodes I had to do some research to find out what Host Clubs were and if they actually existed, so that I could understand the show better considering Host Clubs are a foreign concept to me. They do in fact exist but from the personal experiences I read online they aren’t nearly as fun and glamorous as Ouran High School Host Club might lead you to believe.
For my digital artefact I have chosen to do character profiles to highlight the different characteristics of anime that are used and parodied in the show. These character profiles will be formatted in to a tumblr because tumblr is a platform used by lots of fans for sharing photos, gifs, thoughts, fanfictions. I think because it’s such a widely used platform for fans it’s the most appropriate place to profile characters.
The tumblr is obviously not finished yet but when it is it can be found here… The Faces of Ouran High School Host Club.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0816397/plotsummary?ref_=tt_ov_pl