Ouran High School Host Club

For our week focusing on romance manga I decided to read the first chapter of Ouran High School Host Club. I chose this manga to read because it was one of the first anime I watched, and boy some of these characters have not aged well. Hikaru and Kaoru's weird incest thing was always kind of off-putting to me, but I had totally forgotten about Honey. Like I straight up forgot he existed. Honey is basically a "shota", despite actually being 18, and the manga translation that I read essentially calls him "the pedophile type". This isn't really wrong considering it was probably translated from either shota or shotacon, which is basically a genre of manga about attraction to children, specifically boys, and is the counterpart to lolicon (the same thing but with girls). It's all pretty gross.

Ignoring all the weird and gross characters, I was actually kind of shocked to see just how different the manga differs from the anime stylistically. The manga is a lot more "pretty" and what you'd expect from shojo (which is what it is), while the anime is just well, anime, although style unique and recognizable in its own right.

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