Hi everyone! There still isn't a whole lot to report on my end. I've been running a lot this past week to get ready for the Bolder Boulder which will be coming up in a few weeks. This hasn't left me with a lot of time to very many geeky things. I've spent most of my evenings watching Crystal play Breath of the Wild and finishing Ouron High School Host Club. I'm not ready to start talking in depth about BotW yet, so let's talk about Ouron instead. Although the rest of the series is largely a clever satire of shoujo tropes, there are some problematic parts to the series. Let's take the points one at a time.
Transphobia
First, let me lay out some assumptions, since these things are not well defined within the series itself. Ryouji Fujioka's gender identity and sexual orientation are not explicitly defined in the anime; therefore, I will be assuming the Ryouji is a straight (or possibly bi) male identifying person who enjoys cross-dressing. Having gotten through that, other characters referring to him as a "tranny" is highly offensive. Even if "tranny" is the most straightforward translation of the Japanese used in series, the adaptation staff could have spent a few minutes to explore alternatives. Perhaps, "queen" or "drag queen". Maybe the intention was to show that although the Host Club is tolerant of Haruhi cross-dressing, they are not accepting of a man cross-dressing. But without a moment in the script of someone (especially Ryouji or Haruhi) pointing out that this is a slur, this comes off as both the original creators and the English adaptation staff condoning transphobic language and attitudes.
Poor Pacing in Late Series
After a leisurely pace in the middle of the series, taking full episodes to develop most of the members of the host club more fully, the end of the series is incredibly rushed, with a bunch of new characters, completely new plot lines, and character developments that come out of left field. This leads us to the last issue:
Poorly-defined Character Motivation
Kyoya and Tamaki's fathers are introduced in the final episodes. They are initially portrayed as very hard-nosed, thinking only of the family reputation and profitability of their companies. By the end of the final episode, however, they are joking about how they were actually nice guys after all. Eclair is a similar case. She's comes out of nowhere in order to cause trouble for Tamaki and the host club, with no real defined motivations. She seems to just enjoy jerking people around, but even this is not established as a trait that has some grounding in a personal history. Nope, she's just a jerk cause she likes to be a jerk.
I think I've talked enough about that at this point. Come back next week and see what I've been up to. Game on!
