JLee22

Ah, I love that song which they used for the anime opening.

Anyway, I had been meaning to read through my personal collection of this manga series as it is hands down my fave. I like many others and have read many more, been a part of the fandoms and all that jazz, but Host Club is the only series that I read, reread, and read again. I wanted to go through it all in order this time and order the missing books from my collection as I went. I'm missing 5 out of the published 18 volumes and the first 9 in the set I have in continuous order.

For some reason, maybe the cover on the first book, people always think it's a boys love comic, but it's not! Haha, oh man, it's not, but they joke about in-series all the time. Pretty much every romance and shoujo joke and trope that can be made is, indeed, made. What I love about it is the sheer irreverence towards established genres and even other fandoms, plus each panel is so packed with little drawings and asides that it takes two to three times as long to read as a normal manga.

Things that really pissed me off in the past 48 hours re: this series -

1.) The information for the majority of these volumes is incorrect, and I can't edit the book pages because it keeps asking for the ASIN number WHICH IS ALREADY THERE. Whiskey tango foxtrot, guys.

2.) Also, they're manga. The series order number is literally printed on the front cover. Why do they all keep saying #1 in the series order on the book pages?

3.) Some of them don't even list the author! Again, the manga-ka's name is LITERALLY PRINTED ON THE COVER IMAGE. Who puts these things in initially? Is it computer generated? Amazon is doing a better job, sheesh. What the crap.

4.) Somewhere between 10:30AM and 3:40PM in my timezone today, Booklikes "closed" my 2015 book challenge on me so that none of my updates in the latter half of the day showed up. I actually was two books short of my 50 book count and just needed to finish reading them before midnight, but it didn't even recognize the books I updated as finished from this afternoon. Result? Motivation gone. Screw it. Clearly setting my timezone preferences means jack on this website. Probably the first thing I have found that I genuinely hate here on Booklikes. So even though I finished this half of the series in 2015, Booklikes is going to pretend that I didn't. Thanks BL.

Adorable things about this series:

1.) Hunny! Also, Beary + Bun-bun + Bereznof trio, just too cute.

2.) The minor characters are just amazing, every time. A lot of them that showed up in earlier episodes are brought back in later ones. My favorites are Ranka (Haruhi's dad), Nekozawa (I cry every time on the episode with his sister!), and Shima (I imagine it would have been 10x funnier if she had been animated exactly as she is in the manga and voiced by Eartha Kitt).

3.) Haruhi is one of my favorite heroines because she isn't the typical Japanese anime/manga girl bubblegum hyper or crazy red (or blue!) Oni type personality. She's blunt and pretty easy going and thinks about food a lot. Haha, reminds me of me!

4.) The background stories of each member of the Host Club actually adds to their characters rather than serving as filler episodes. The art is not as fanciful or decorative as many other manga can be, but the amount of content that gets squeezed in is amazing.

5.) And yes, the majority of the story is silly. Even the most serious topics will be undercut with a heavy dose of irony and/or subtext; nothing is sacred. Nothing. (That being said, this being a Japanese comic, they even joke about [ritual] suicide about one point!)

6.) Tropes, tropes galore. Another good choice to play trope bingo. See TVTropes.