Honestly, literally who hasn't heard of Ouran. This review isn't trying to convince anyone to watch it, if you were in the anime community in the early 2010's and into shojo you've seen it. I just wanted to express my genuine appreciation for how well done this adaptation is. The comedic timing in this series is SO stellar, and the life and movement they gave to the visual gags is so fucking impressive and genuinely hilarious. I really wish we could get an official release of this series that has proper subtitling of the on screen labels that appear sometimes, the funimation one is really flawed because they only allow for one line of text so if there's too much dialogue they just don't subtitle the labels. Official anime distributors seem to be consistently dropping the ball on this even over 15 years later with series such as Komi Can't Communicate - you'd think they'd have figured this out by now.
I think the second half of the series is overall a lot stronger than the first - I think a lot of people would agree that the early episodes about random one off characters don't really hold much impact, but it feels like they even figured out how to do this better as well in the second half, the two parter with Kasanoda is probably my favorite pair of episodes in the whole show. It's so fucking funny, and involves large character moments for the main cast as well! The only other point I'd ding is that some of the politics in this show don't hold up great - lots of light homophobia/transphobia/not always stellar depictions of lgbt folk. On the one hand, seeing gender-noncomforming characters like Haruhi and her dad was really big for me as a little gay baby with no other exposure to that kind of stuff. On the other, I can still recognize that there's a lot of less than great stereotypes that get played for laughs. The good news is things can be more than one thing! I love Ouran. I really, really do.
