Ouran High School Host Club

3Filed under 3. The Telling takes an act of telling, and this entry is renders one.

What it is

Bisco Hatori's Ouran High School Host Club ran in Hakusensha's LaLa from 2002 to 2010 and was collected in 18 volumes. Haruhi Fujioka is a practical, unflappable scholarship student at Ouran Academy, a school for the children of the very rich. Looking for a quiet place to study, she stumbles into the Host Club, where six handsome boys entertain the school's girls, and breaks a vase worth eight million yen.

How it works

With her short hair and plain clothes, the club takes Haruhi for a boy, and she agrees to work as a host to pay off the debt. Most chapters are comic episodes: themed parties, beach trips, rivalries. The club's president, the dramatic and romantic Tamaki, the cool Kyōya, the mischievous twins Hikaru and Kaoru and the others each have their own story.

The parody

The series gently mocks shōjo conventions: the handsome-boy types, the rich-school fantasy and the dramatic gestures. Haruhi, who cares nothing for money or appearances, sees through all of it, and her indifference to whether she is seen as a boy or a girl is part of the joke and part of her appeal.

Why it matters

Its 2006 anime by Studio Bones was popular internationally, and it remains one of the best-known shōjo comedies. It showed how a series could love a genre while making fun of it.

The title by its numbers

Ouran24High32School27Host17Club11total111 → 3

総画 strokes68 → 5volumes18 → 9years serialised9debut year2002 → 4

Every letter here carries a digit; together they make 111, which folds down to 3. The weight sits in “High”, which carries 32 on its own and reduces to 5.

What the 3 brings is expression. The reference files it as an act of telling. Whatever else this entry is doing, it is doing it with the 3's instinct to turn everything into a story worth telling.

The vowels alone reduce to 4, the consonants to 8. Foundation underneath, power on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.

The letters give 3; the subject's own figures do not agree. 総画 strokes is 68, a 5, volumes is 18, a 9, years serialised is 9 and debut year is 2002, a 4. Where the two part company the reference trusts the figures, because a title is a decision somebody made about the thing, and these are the thing.

The 3 asks you to watch the technique rather than the plot it is carrying. The 3 talks past the point. Where an entry here runs long, it is usually because the technique was more fun to describe than it was important. The other entries that reduce to 3 are collected on The Telling.