#so i rewatched it and boy was it an experience | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

liauditore · 2 days ago

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what’s your thoughts on ouran? you mentioned you had a love / hate relationship with it and i think that would be interesting to hear

Oh god post that usually would be reserved for my sideblog incoming. Heads up this one might get uncomfortable, heed the tags. LONG POST.

TL;DR: it's a fun show that's neck deep in the misogyny sauce

I had the true ouran experience of watching it when I was 12 and thinking it was really funny but ultimately finished the show feeling mildly disappointed as well as being Very put off by one specific episode.

As a 12 year old I didn't really have the words to explain why but over the years I thought back to ouran again and again and the more I thought about it the more. Angry isn't really the right emotion I guess. Eyebrow raised emoji-y is more accurate.

Now that I am a bit older and wiser and have read more shoujo, I think the majority of the annoyance and confusion I felt towards ouran, especially nearing the end of the show, came from the fact that it pretty much bait-and-switches its own stance on gender roles, classism and judging by appearance. Please note that I have not rewatched ouran in many years so take all this with a grain of salt and forgive me for anything I'm straight up misremembering.

Haruhi, to me, embodies a very quintessential shoujo protagonist archetype. She's not necessarily radicalized against gender roles, but doesn't place the same importance in gendered performance as her peers. She's also viciously ambitious and doesn't downplay her own intelligence, qualities that her female peers around her have been conditioned to avoid in their cartoonishly extreme upper class upbringings.

However, the other girls' education being a direct result of their education is never really examined. All the other girls at ouran are presented as vapid and "boy-crazy" over the host club. Renge, the only major female character aside from Haruhi herself, is delegated to being comedic relief (and of course, the humour surrounding her almost always has to do with her obsession with Kyoya) with some not so subtle implications that Haruhi is above her girlish antics because Haruhi is... Better, to put it bluntly, in every way including her ability to appeal to men, which can be seen through Kyoya's neutral to distasteful opinion of Renge vs his somewhat unsubtle care and attraction towards Haruhi.

This very unflattering depiction of women other than Haruhi extends to the very queer-coded* Lobelia academy girls, who the host club spends an episode "rescuing" Haruhi from and, once again despite their group leader's more masculine look, reacts in shock and horror at their feminine interests. Eugh, makeup! Disgusting!

*pressing the "nuance" button on this one because we can't expect to apply our understanding of queer signalling on a Japanese highschooler, but the Lobelia girls are. Fairly blatant enough I feel that I almost don't even want to call it coding.

The girls in the show who aren't Haruhi are either boy-crazy and therefore stupid, side characters whose episodes are often tied to getting with a male love interest (who is always depicted as "plain" compared to the desirable men of the host club), rivals in love against Haruhi (like Eclair) or silly evil lesbians.

Speaking of the silly evil lesbians, I do think it's interesting how many times the show feels the need to restate Haruhi's heterosexuality through her endless amounts of blatant disinterest in her fangirls. I briefly wrote once on how patriarchal standards have an amount of gender-nonconformity that can be accepted with women, but violently withdraws that acceptance when it can be even slightly confused with signalling queerness. Every second boomer dad wants a tomboy daughter, yet none of them seem to want trans sons. Idk, food for thought.

It's also fascinating to me that Utena is so much older than Ouran, yet almost feels like a direct response to Ouran's pitfalls at times e.g. the "not like other girls" logic of Ouran's world that pits women against eachother. The only women deserving of sympathy are those who don't act as a "threat" to Haruhi's desireability, everyone else is stupid and beneath her or an evil bitch.

The one woman who is always shown as intelligent and worthy of respect outside of Haruhi herself is Haruhi's deceased mother. Interesting that she had to be dead and more of a concept and motivator for Haruhi instead of.. a character.

If the show was just a marina and the diamonds girls simulator that would be one thing but what I find even more insidious is that not only does it not respect its female cast, Haruhi herself is almost. Instructed? In the show to uphold patriarchal rhetoric, when she entered as a neutral force. With the fact that she acts as the audience stand-in, I find this just the smallest bit troubling.

ESPECIALLY. when talking about the specific episode that really gave me the "I don't like this alot but I can't describe why" feelings when I was 12. Everything else in the show I can look past but this episode genuinely pissed me the fuck off when I was 12 and pisses me off even more now.

I'm talking of course about the "better remember your place in society or men will rape you!!"

In episode 8, the host club visits the beach but instead of the fun beach episode I thought was coming up, 12 year old me was hit was Haruhi being scolded by Tamaki for trying to defend a group of girls from ruffians, simply because she is a girl. Haruhi obviously gets mad.

This in of itself is fine, Tamaki's been shown to be an idiot and very deep in the misogyny/classism sauce, and the way this show mocks that is why I really like him.

But Tamaki is supposed to be IN THE RIGHT this episode, as later Kyoya pretends that he's going to rape Haruhi to teach her a lesson about why women shouldn't confront men I guess. Which, of course, implies quite a lot of very strange things in a show made for young girls, including that if you just abide by gender expectations that are Good and Keep You Safe you... won't be raped? Haruhi even thanks Kyoya for PRETENDING HE WAS GOING TO RAPE HER ?

It's this. Very strange and hypocritical moment for this show and really, really soured Kyoya's character for me -- which is a shame cus I do think he's one of the most interesting club members. I'll never not fume about this episode man I literally got into fights with friends over this episode being garbage as a kid and it was one of the smartest opinions I had at that age.

It's also gross to me that this whole thing revolved around, in the first place, Haruhi trying to defend other girls. In a show that keeps isolating Haruhi from them. So to recap 1. DO NOT seek out relationships with other women, they are vapid and won't understand you, certainly not more than the men in your life and 2. If you defend other women (from men), you're being stupid. Get a man to handle it instead, because it's men's duty to defend women, not yours. and if you violate this natural order you deserve to get raped. Hashtag some gender roles are good, actually.

I also have more thoughts on the way it's presented as if being raped as a woman is the worst thing imagineable but Renge's stalker tendencies towards Kyoya are played up for laughs. Shrugs.

The episode even ends with Haruhi saying she wasn't afraid because she knew Kyoya wasn't going to do it, but then ending up in a curled up helpless ball anyway because of. some thunder. really awesome. While I don't have any problem with exploring Haruhi's vulnerability, we never see any of the boys in such a state, reinforcing that this isn't about dropping the facade of unemotional masculinity but Haruhi being... a girl. Barf.

Even completely disregarding that episode, the messaging is. Strange to say the least. I do think this one might be the thing that gets me shot because Tamaki Does come around to appreciating Haruhi as a person and not simply a "woman", but the fact remains that she still acts as a "love interest" from beginning to end. And the whole dynamic of. Haruhi going from completely disinterested to fond of Tamaki over time, and Tamaki learning to abandon his playboy ways and see Haruhi as a person is totally fine and okay. BUT it is a little bit. Oh so NOW you want to talk about seeing women as people.

I feel that I've been. very focused on the hate part of the love hate and I'll be real nowadays that is very much the dominant half. I still like the show just for nostalgia value, the humour, as well as the host club members themselves. Morii and Honey specifically have a really awesome dynamic and I wish we got to see Honey go berserker more but it is what it is. Kyoya, rapey moment aside, is also really fun and maybe one of those characters that made me realise what kind of tropes I like. I will not stand a word of Hikaru and Kaoru slander, those boys are awesome and their incestuous club personas are a great parody of how performative the club really is, and through that how performative society as a whole is when dealing with attraction as a concept. And I actually really like the side characters too, the emo catboy and Renge in particular.

But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't perhaps one of the most anti-feminist bait and switches I'd ever seen in my life.

Haruhi's not even gender-nonconforming!! She's just a normie with a normal amount of care put into gendered presentation but because she's in the psychopath rich people school she SEEMS gender-nonconforming!! Which is fine as I've said before I think a lot of shoujo protagonists are like Haruhi in that their gender is more "I just work here" at best and something used to oppress them at worst, but Haruhi goes out of her way to present more feminine the moment she leaves the school gates.

Big words for this show to come out swinging saying gender roles and expectations attached to them are dumb when its so terrified of actually tackling them. I don't require everything I watch to be queer queer gay gay homosexual transgender beam attack but like?? Why have Haruhi say she dgaf and then have her present feminine anyway? Especially when it's been highlighted to us that her family is dirt poor, yet she still has the money for hair extensions? You're telling me she decided to cut ALL OF HER HAIR OFF FOR A TINY PIECE OF GUM. for no reason at all when she could've easily just cut it into a bob??

FTR I do still like Haruhi which is what makes this all the more frustrating, especially since she's one of the few female anime characters who we're told is supposed to be masc-presenting and actually could pass as that. Mf questioned the system of gender and then proceeded to do fuckall with it. Gets forced into crossdressing but underlines it with "but im not a lesbian" the whole way through. What cowardice. What theory and no practice. What bark but no bite. What a non-theme. Haruhi is the opposite of punk. Centrist ass take of an anime.

Ahem. Biases aside. I just feel like it fails as a romance, fails saying anything substantial about gender or class and ultimately ends up being meaningless fluff at best and pro-rapist and anti-woman at worst.

#asks #delete later #<-- i won't this is just my talking tag now #cw rape

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