That was the moment I found the metaphorical turd in the punch bowl and realised that there was indeed a shitty taste to my refreshing harem rom com anime series. A pity, because up until then I had been enjoying the story about a scholarships tudent at a very elite highschool who is mistaken for a boy and financially blackmailed into working for the school’s host club after she broke an expensive vase –nobody in Japan has heard of insurance or the story would’ve been over before it could start. Until then I could sort of ignore the sexist subtext behind Ouran High School Host Club, but when you get rape threats (fake or not) used to “prove” to our heroine that she’s a girl and should be more aware of that, a line is crossed. Though a certain amount of sexist assumptions is a given in a shoujo manga and for the most part it’s not that noticable in Ouran High School Host club, this particular scene and episode made it hard to continue with the series.
What made me keep watching was Haruhi Fujioka, the fish out of water at the very rich and very elite Ouran High School and also the one sane woman in a bunch of amiable idiots, often the unwilling centre of their plans. She’s interesting because she isn’t the usual blushing heroine existing only to be romanced. Not bothered by which gender people see her as, she passes as male in school and the club to be able to be a host and pay off her debt. And I uses “passes” advisedly, as there is something genderqueer about her, especially at first. What’s refreshing is that she doesn’t change that much over the series even when she becomes more lovey dovey.
Is episode eight then just an isolated misstep, just a bit of awkward sexism, excused by the quality of the rest of the series? Not entirely. The idea that Haruhi should keep remembering she’s a girl and act like one crops up in other parts of the series as well and is one of those pernicious bits of gender essentialism that anime & manga, especially in the romance & harem genres, seems extremely fond of. In the context of the episode it also comes across as victim blaming, of Haruhi being responsible for being thrown off a cliff or of being threatened by rape because she trusted her friend and “wasn’t cautious enough”. That’s not something you can defend no matter how good the rest of the series is.
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