Time to ease myself back into blagging. So recently, if you’re following me on Twitter you’ll have noticed that I have not been shutting up about Special A. Special A is a shoujo manga that I decided to pick up while waiting in between chapters of Ouran. The setting is a lot like Ouran: everything takes place at a high school for the rich and elite, except the rich factor isn’t done as over-the-top as Ouran.

Because of this though, we see a lot of similar situations. We have the students trying to please their parents and grandparents, doing things like maintaining a certain rank, doing work to prepare for when they take over the company, getting into arranged marriages and so on or screwing around at one of their many private villas. We also have the typical Japanese high school scenarios: athletic festival, cultural festival, or the Golden Week holiday.

What makes S.A. different from Ouran is the focus on the characters. Understandably, Ouran focuses on Haruhi and her relationships with the rest of the Host Club and especially the romantic development between her, Kaoru (well, not really anymore), Hikaru, and Tamaki. As of the last manga chapter, this still hasn’t been resolved. But the other characters have been receiving very little development as they are reduced to simply being helpers to the main players.

Special A has a more even gender ratio among its cast of characters. What ended up happening is that pretty much every major character is now in a romantic relationship and we get chapters that focus on the development of each one. It’s still clear that the main relationship is the one with Hikari and Kei, but it’s nice to see some focus on the other characters. And with all of this development of the side characters, they’ve changed from slightly boring to fairly interesting and fleshed out. There are some characters in Ouran that I really don’t care about. This has not happened in Special A.

Finally, a word about the anime adaptation. It is pretty terrible. I was halfway through the published chapters when I decided to take a look, so I had a pretty good feel for the characters and the story. The first thing I noticed was the awful OP. Ouran’s OP made me think twice before watching because of all the flowers. This OP was just bad. The second thing that I noticed was that the voices for Kei and Hikari did not fit at all. Kei is far more laid back than Lelouch NIPPON Lamperouge and Hikari should sound much more aggressive than Mi-mi-miracle Mikurun-run. The third thing was the terrible insert song, in the same vein as the OP. And finally, even in the first episode, the anime was already cutting and pasting the manga storyline all over the place. And from what I hear, the ending of the anime is not going to be very satisfying at all.

So recently, I decided to dig deeper into the animus again. The last anime I’d been following was Mobile Suit Gundam 00, which ended at the end of March. By that time, I’d dropped both Naruto and Bleach since their animated counterparts were visually bad and going through a sea of filler while their manga brethren were far more interesting and didn’t have the annoying baggage that the anime is known for.

Of the bunch of series I acquired, Ouran High School Host Club is the one that’s left the biggest impression on me thus far, so I’ll be writing about it first. A large part of it has to do with what happens beyond the anime, in the manga where the plot continues. Of course, this is because of the interesting cast of characters, the hilarious comedic moments, and the awesome writing. What’s interesting about Ouran is that it’s a shoujo manga, which isn’t a genre that I’m into.

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised, even though it was weird not being in the target audience. This was made very clear to me as I scoured the Internet for the latest Ouran chapter, forcing me to step into various Ouran forums. But, since I enjoy thinking about and taking apart characters and plot, and Ouran is excellent in both, I’m going to be going into a lot of it here.

One thing that I am fairly unhappy about is the fact that it’s almost inevitable that the whole thing will end in Haruhi ending up with Tamaki. I guess one of the reasons I don’t like this is because it’s fairly obvious and set in stone. But otherwise, I think he’s too ideal and unrealistic — there really isn’t anything wrong with him, other than the fact that he’s kind of slow and his biggest fault is in his trying to keep the dynamics of the Host Club unchanged. Essentially, everything in the manga has been stacked in his favour for him and the only thing preventing anything from happening is his idiocy and refusal to face the truth. I much prefer the Tamaki that just tries to keep the club together.

And this is why I feel like Hikaru and Kaoru got screwed over. Both of them love Haruhi and both of them are aware of it, but most importantly, both of them went through ridiculous amounts of character development because of it. With the realization that they’re both competing for the same girl, they had to struggle against each other. Eventually, this ended in Kaoru deciding to step aside for Hikaru and both of them having their worldview changed from the focus on themselves.

Haruhi is definitely the catalyst for the entirety of their development, since she’s the first person to tell both of them apart. She certainly hasn’t invoked any similarly huge character changes from any other member of the Host Club. And it makes sense for the twins to be attracted to her because of the fact that she knows them so well that she can distinguish them when they’ve been actively stopping people from being able to do so.

I also enjoy the interaction between the twins and Haruhi far more than those of Tamaki and Haruhi. With Tamaki, we get a lot of “olol Tamaki is stupid” or Tamaki acting in his father-daughter mindset, whereas the twins are more like her. It just seems unfortunate that all of this work spent on the twins and all of their internal conflict is going to be flushed down the drain as Tamaki just does nothing and gets a happy ending. In this case, it would seem like not only Hikaru lost, but Kaoru as well, since he stopped pursuing Haruhi to help his brother win her.

As I mentioned before, I’m not the target audience of the manga; that is, I’m a guy. It was very clear that the majority of folks on whatever Ouran boards were for Tamaki and Haruhi and I was in the minority that liked the idea of Hikaru and Haruhi together. It made sense to me when I realized it; girls (the target audience) like Tamaki because that’s his character and that’s the way he was written. Of course, that gives me no reason to like him, and I don’t; I don’t relate to him at all, and I find the twins far more interesting as characters.

Next time, I’ll be going on about Soul Eater or Dennou Coil and even later, possibly Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.