#im insane i am crazy. what i wouldn't give to latch obsessively onto any characters other than HIKARU AND KAORU HITACHIIN

[blueskittlesart]

I got into anime because of ohshc, go insane

you have no idea the floodgate you've just opened. i am crazy <3 <3 <3

ouran is fascinating to me. genuinely. because for a lot of western fans (including myself) it was a starter anime. something we watched when we had very little knowledge of the industry or the genres which populated it. and like. with almost any other show that would be fine, but ouran is fundamentally a satire of shoujo romance, a specific anime genre which notably has very little presence in the western market currently, and had almost NO PRESENCE WHATSOEVER when ouran was in its peak popularity. I believe its popularity as a starter anime is mostly due to the fact that it simply happened to be one of the more easily accessible shows for western fans back in the day (it was part of the first wave of anime to be added to netflix iirc and was also almost immediately ripped and uploaded to youtube.) But like, looking back on it, the fact that many people watched ouran with little to no knowledge of anime in general AND the fact that the market was largely oversaturated with shounen while shoujo was relatively inaccessible at the time made it so that many western watchers were essentially missing 90% of the context with which it was meant to be viewed, and i think that DEFINITELY contributed to the way it has sort of fallen out of favor in recent years.

there was a shift around maybe. 2015-16ish or so. when those of us whose introduction to anime was that first wave of netflix translations got old enough to find our old interests cringe. and we started looking for ways to critique them so we could hate them for real reasons instead of just because we hated our middle school selves. and this did lead to a lot of valid and well-deserved critique of the anime that was popular at the time, which i don't necessarily want to diminish, but i think it led to criticism of ouran specifically which stemmed from lack of context and ignored critical portions of the show, which ultimately shifted the widespread perception of it among western fans from "funny comedy romance anime" to "homophobic twincest anime." (yes i am talking about the twincest. sorry but i am going to make you think about this because i never stop thinking about it)

before anyone goes insane i am in no way saying that twincest is not Bad. but what i AM saying is that OURAN WAS ALSO NOT SAYING THAT. this is where the lack of cultural context comes into play I think, because, as mentioned, ouran is satire of a specific genre of romance manga that is very well-known among japanese readers but took much longer to make its way west than shounen did, so a lot of the tropes and jokes that ouran is making fun of read to the untrained western eye as just sort of weird and off-beat. hikaru and kaoru's relationship is one of those things. there is a very real trend among female shoujo fans of fetishizing "forbidden" relationships, whether that be mlm or familial or whatever. because of this, you'd get series that were written about those kinds of relationships catering specifically to people who fetishized them. it's fucking weird. the point that ouran is trying to make with hikaru and kaoru is that IT IS FUCKING WEIRD. hikaru and kaoru are written deliberately as a critique of this trend of fetishization. They canonically play into their peers' fantasies because they enjoy the attention, while underneath it all they have almost no sense of self due to their peers' inability to view them as anything but two parts of a whole. the hitachiins as characters are a deliberate commentary on the way in which fetishization and shipping culture dehumanizes and strips these characters of their identities, reducing them down to entertainment for the girls they cater to. (as a note, i think it's interesting that a lot of the western 'yaoi fangirls' of the first-wave netflix anime era were obsessed with these two. like. girl maybe look at your source material a little bit longer LMAO.) I think suggesting that ouran's handling of hikaru and kaoru is an endorsement of twincest is an insane misunderstanding of the Entire Point Of The Show and it's really unfortunate because i KNOW it puts a lot of people off from watching it in the first place. People fr make it sound like the twincest is fucking pervasive when it literally is not and the whole point is that it sucks and they shouldn't be doing it.

to a lesser extent this weird inability to distinguish satire and endorsement is present in western fans' reactions to other aspects of the show as well. the most notable example i can think of off the top of my head is the way lobelia academy was handled. I vividly remember 2020 tiktok discourse about tamaki's "adam and eve" line as if that wasn't soooo obviously a JOKE AT HIS EXPENSE. lobelia is, again, satire of a specific shojou trope: the evil lesbian. again, a relatively common shojou trope in which a vindictive, man-hating girl tries to get in the way of the main m/f couple because she is in love with the female lead, often by physically harming or incapacitating the male lead. in the context of ohshc, ouran is the high school for the male and female leads and lobelia is the high school for the evil lesbians. there are definitely still some valid critiques of the way that the lobelia girls are written, but the amount of people who are just like. absolutely convinced that bisco hatori must be a huge lesbophobe for writing a blatantly obvious satirical critique of a lesbophobic trope is insane to me. also tamaki's adam and eve line was funny as fuck sorry i <3 homophobes