Anime Pilgrimage RTT

Ouran High School Host Club – episode 4

May 10, 2006 on 10:54 pm | In Ouran High School Host Club | Comments Off

“The invasion of the female manager”

I am a master of silent laughter. When you watch anime on trains or in the library, you don’t want to draw attention to your mirth. This episode of Ouran High School Host Club had me in danger of exposing my jollity to the world at large. At the last second I held it down, but this was a near riotous episode, packed as it was with inappropriate material.

Renge’s father returns from France with a picture of the Host Club. Kyouya happens to look like a character from the dating sim “Ukidoki Memorial”, and so she literally takes a plane out of the window to return to Japan. Once there she tries to make the club members more interesting by transforming them into stock characters and making a movie.

Considering that this episode was about a girl who believes she can shape the world to her will, I can’t really fault JP Meyer for calling this show “The Melancholy of Fujioka Haruhi”.

Normally I’m opposed to cruelty in anime for comedy purposes, but when the characters deserve it I have no problems. Love Hina (at least in anime form) was an exercise in pure sadism, which is one of the many reasons I hated it; Yakitate!! Japan has been heading down a slippery slope thanks to mistreatment of Kawachi. On the other hand, almost every time Ryo got beat up in City Hunter, he deserved it.
The boy to hit here is Tamaki, and the reason that it’s so funny every time is because he sets himself up for falls. If no one knocked the wind out of him, then he would be an insufferable egotistic blimp. I absolutely love the way that Haruhi has learned to handle him.

What I can’t believe about this episode is that in the script, Renge made Kaoru the seme! Shocking that she would choose him of the twins! My disbelief actually stems from the fact that they used the term … and the fact that I understood what Renge was talking about. Haruhi didn’t, which is probably for the best.
I suppose that Renge is an otaku – the characters actually used that word to describe her – so she uses the terminology and shorthand. I think this is the first time that I’ve seen a female character addicted to love sims and obsessed with that world in anime; sure, Space Ship Agga Ruter (AKA “Hentai Muyo!”) featured the Star Wars date sim, but that was nothing compared to this mania.

The film was a true victory for hilarity, and the only real issue I had with this episode was that the director and Renge were talking in English that was mixed under the other characters’ Japanese, so I couldn’t make it out. It would have only made the episode more hilarious, just as ostensibly American characters speaking English then accidentally throwing in particles is.