Ouran High School Host Club Was Born From A Simple One-Sentence Pitch

At the Anime Expo in 2019, Hatori chatted with Viz Media about  “Ouran High School Host Club.” During the course of the discussion, the mangaka explained how the idea for the manga came to be, and it all came down to a sentence:

“Ouran High School Host Club came about around the time I was working on Millennium Snow. And my editor at that time, we were just throwing around ideas. And he brought up – he just threw out themes of handsome boys at a rich high school. And at that time, there were relationship video games that were pretty popular, and also host clubs were popular as well. And during that meeting, nothing really hit me. I wasn’t particularly drawn to a specific genre, because it was just a brainstorm meeting. But then, someone put the words together of, “Well, what if there’s a host club at a high school?” And that’s when the lightbulb went off. And I thought that it could be a ridiculously funny manga.”

The manga itself is pretty hilarious, with the various situations that main character, Haruhi Fujioka, gets herself into being one of the main sources of the humor. The manga’s embrace of parodying otaku culture is one that is sure to get laughs out of anyone familiar enough with that subculture, especially directed at fujoshi and fudanshi (male fans) types when confronted with the reverse harem style in “Ouran High School Host Club.”

The anime is available on Netflix now.