Ouran High School Host Club

Episodes 23-24

He's the center of Ouran High School Host Club both as an institution and as a television show, but there's a lot at this point we still don't really know about Suou Tamaki. The show's been doing its standard drip-feeding of details throughout, so we've gotten tidbits like his sickly mother or, more recently, the revelation that he's actually the illegitimate son of the school chairman that's taken him in, and that as such, he's only half-Japanese. Why just in one of this week's episodes we make the shocking discovery that he's a colossal weeb! These are background bits that have contributed to making him feel like more of a whole person than the Mamoru Miyano comic-relief caricature he mostly functions as, but they haven't factored into his actual characterization too much. So how can Ouran plumb Tamaki's depths in a way that resonates with the comedy it does best? By exploring the possibility that he may be even more of a dumbass than we thought.

To be thorough, the 23rd episode, despite featuring his name in its title, isn't really all about Tamaki. In a rare two-part excursion for Ouran, this one continues the story of best-guest-star Kasanoda, and let me tell you I cannot believe I was ever worried about where this plotline with him discovering Haruhi's ‘secret’ would go. I of course figured things would segue into Casanova-kun realizing he had those kinds of feelings for Haruhi, but I guess I was more concerned they'd made a bigger deal out of the gender confusion or the possessiveness amongst the club than they did. There is a little bit of both those things, but they pass quickly and it's very hard for me to be annoyed by them anyway when the humor around the situation is so whip-smart.

An advantage of just continuing on from another episode like this is that Ouran's style of humor can really commit to the running gags and piling-up comedic bits. That offhand robot-noise “Ma!” joke from the last episode comes back at least two times in episode 23, and they use it for increased effectiveness each time. Meanwhile, Kasanoda's concerns over what gender he thought Haruhi was as he fell in love with her get to intersect delightfully with his realizations from the previous entry, with the ever-adorable Tatsuya being entirely supportive of him being in love with a ‘guy’. It means there's no possibility of Kasanoda betraying the true kindness that defined him previously, and he gets to be just genuinely sweet and decent to Haruhi as he fumbles with following through on his crush on her. I was almost rooting for him there for a minute, even as another offhandedly brutal rejection by a blissfully-unaware Haruhi provided the comic highlight in an episode full of them.

A lot of that humor works as Ouran continues utilizing it to facilitate character work. Having seemingly given up on developing Mori entirely even as this story started with him (he and Honey are reduced to a Greek chorus explaining the show's relationship chart at the end of this episode), the series instead pivots to Tamaki. There's actually a theme across both this and episode 24, with the potential of Tamaki's character being teased using other viewpoints to show how hard it is to actually get a read on this guy. In Kasanoda's case, it's that his inexperience with Tamaki, his lack of acclimation to having patience with him, lets him fully call out the President's most alienating aspect in his seeming courtship of Haruhi: His insistence on positioning himself as her ‘Daddy’.

The result is a spectacular internal takedown for Tamaki that gifts us with the bonkers revelation that he might be as unaware of his own actual romantic designs on Haruhi as she is. The comic chops of the show let it follow through on this in ways others might not get away with, as every seeming called-out motivational inconsistency is excused simply with “Tamaki really was that stupid”. Even Kaoru's overt pumpkin metaphor gets momentarily brought back to confirm that no, it really isn't that deep. Even as they're frustratingly predicated on his possessiveness of Haruhi, Tamaki's various reactions of shock throughout this episode are hilarious in their escalation, and the end result of what we realize about his mental processes almost makes up for the discomfort factor. Almost. Ignorance is still no excuse, and in this case there's frustration in the knowledge that if he could connect the dots on his feelings for Haruhi, he might be able to curb those uncouth associations. But there's that point again about Ouran prioritizing gag material over more effortful character growth.

So is that what the following episode 24 is about? Not really, as even with another near-full flashback supposedly focusing on how Tamaki and Kyoya first founded the Host Club, it's less about showing how far Tamaki's come just to get where he is now, and more about indicating that those he surrounds himself with haven't known what to make of him since he first arrived on these shores. It doesn't mean the episode's devoid of back-ported character work, of course, since its primary focus is actually Kyoya, and seeing how he started out really makes clear how their relationship works as the foundation the club is built on today.

Kyoya's terrifying practicality has been his most prominent character trait from the beginning, and we even knew the familial motivations behind that make it work. But seeing it in action is another story entirely, as every connection he makes and interacts with in the early scenes of this episode is clearly calculated. It's the value-pursuing mindset we already know in him, but without even a hint of self-satisfaction or pointedly enigmatic playfulness – this Kyoya is all-business. There was already the question of what Kyoya actually got out of Tamaki's Host Club conception that would fit his goal-oriented nature, so this is another of Ouran's narrative tricks in getting us interested in the details behind a foregone conclusion.

While this is technically a more ‘serious’ episode of Ouran, it's actually fairly inherently humorous just in its framing. Kyoya's befriending of Tamaki is initially just another business-minded venture at the behest of his father's interests, but he quickly finds himself frustrated in the attention he's leveling towards keeping the facade up. The jocularity comes from the fact that Kyoya seriously can't grasp his interest in the situation, while his sister (who first shows up in this episode and seems quite delightful) along with us immediately understand what's going on: He's found a challenge, assigned or not, that he has to try really passionately at, instead of coasting on his natural charms and abilities.

Seeing Tamaki's past efforts parallel to Kyoya's raises more questions about the Host Club President, for his part, but they're illuminating nonetheless. There's the previously-established point that he's possessed Haruhi-adjacent abilities to empathetically read people, which he demonstrates here by repeatedly calling Kyoya's entire ass out. His immediate grasp of Kyoya's cold family life and resigned lack of ambition may drive the stuffier kid up the wall, but they also clash with what we know about Tamaki in the past and present. Is his vapidness just some sort of savant tendency that allows him to understand others surprisingly well but have no awareness of himself? There might actually be more going on there, as hinted in a moment at the end of this episode where his silliness slips and he frankly addresses his assessment of Kyoya. It provides a mystery of characterization to follow into the rest of the story (with only a couple episodes left, presumably some sort of insight or resolution awaits us at the end) but also the clearest picture of the dynamic that powered these two into the present.

Apart from its apparent initial agenda, episode 24 is less about the founding of the Host Club itself and more about presenting to us why two people as disparate as Tamaki and Kyoya would go in together on such a venture. It's mostly a revelation in Kyoya's case: the idea that his continued efforts to ‘win’ his friendship with Tamaki drove him to play along with his whims, but there are also signs that Tamaki understood he needed Kyoya as the other half of his equation. Their archetypes are very clearly staked out as ‘Hero’ and ‘Villain’ by this episode's end, which compels their dynamic in a much more unique, tangible way than I'd felt through the rest of the series until now. It's dramatic, and retroactively makes sense with what we've seen of them all the way through the rest of the series. Like the uptick in the quality of humor and characterization throughout the rest of this second half of Ouran, it's something I wish had been around longer, but can at least be grateful for its presentation now that it's here.

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Ouran High School Host Club is currently streaming on Netflix, Funimation, and Hulu.