There are many delightful shojo anime series to enjoy, but Ouran High School Host Club is a standout parody series that's quickly won over the hearts of both shojo experts and complete newcomers. Ouran High School Host Club excels with how it creates an affable energy that helps the audience connect with its many characters. The series largely features these characters in a school setting, but this host club anime is comfortable to allow both its characters and premise to experiment and think outside of the box.
Many of the anime looked at here either cultivate an energy similar to Ouran High School Host Club’s setting, its lovable characters, or its ability to function as a seamless parody of the very content that it embraces.
Updated on June 10th, 2021, by Daniel Kurland: Ouran embraces the customs of slice of life anime that are set at school, as well as more absurdist series that aren’t afraid to experiment around with form. This makes it much deeper than some simple host club anime and it allows for it to bear a resemblance to a more eclectic mix of anime series.
15 Cromartie High School Is The Craziest School Of Delinquents
Cromartie High School is well aware of the bully and delinquent school stereotype and it’s an extremely funny comedy that parodies school drama and slice of life antics with surrealist abandon. Cromartie High School’s protagonist is a bit of a blank slate that allows the eccentric supporting characters, which includes a robot and Freddie Mercury, to become the focus.
There are so many moments where Cromartie High School feels normal, only for it to take a serious left turn, which is the same approach to so much of the humor and drama within Ouran High School Host Club.
14 SK8 The Infinity Creates A Genuine Support System
There is an anime series for every sport imaginable and the recent SK8 the Infinity makes skateboarding its priority. This more competitive and action-heavy slant differs from the humorous host club anime antics in Ouran, but where they feel alike is with their characters. SK8 the Infinity is full of people that put up fronts, but are incredibly sweet underneath.
The friendships that form and how characters allow themselves to let their guards down fits with Ouran’s energy. It doesn't hurt that SK8 the Infinity comes from Studio BONES, who bring their standard level of excellence to the show's look.
13 Kakegurui!! Highlights The Absurdity Of High School Through High Stakes Gambling
It’s a popular trope in anime for proper boarding schools to double as aggressive prisons. Kakegurui!! taps into this energy in the most extreme way possible. The Hyakkaou Private Academy is governed by a rigid caste system that revolves around gambling where individuals put their entire reputation, and even their lives, on the line.
Yumeko Jabami is a new student that completely disrupts the status quo with her gleeful attitude towards putting herself in harm's way. The school setting and the social dynamics in Kakegurui!! are reminiscent of Ouran High School Host Club, even if they're remarkably different in tone.
12 Baka And Test Allows For Opposites To Attract And Magic To Run Wild At School
Baka and Test looks like any other school anime, which can also be said for Ouran High School Host Club and how it initially resembles any myriad of host club anime. Baka and Test builds up a sense of familiarity, only to then subvert these expectations.
Akiisa Yoshii is a struggling student at a new school that doesn't just divide their student body according to their test scores, but it also has a bearing on the powerful Avatars that they summon. Yoshii struggles to accept his role here, as well as his bond with fellow student, Mizuki.
11 Princess Jellyfish Is A Glorious Character Study That’s Full Of Life
Princess Jellyfish is a staple of josei anime series and it should be experienced by any fans of Ouran High School Host Club that desire a story that's a little more mature. Princess Jellyfish’s protagonist, Tsukimi Kurashita, is a highly naïve individual that feels like she'd be friends with any of the Ouran characters.
Tsukimi is frequently lost in her head over her public image and her unusual obsession with jellyfish becomes a strange motivator in her life. Tsukimi's antics to get her life together straddle reality and absurdity, but make for a perfect companion piece to Ouran.
10 Kaguya-sama: Love is War Turns Love Into A Battlefield
Top of the class, top of the list, we guarantee you that Kaguya-sama will fill every spot that Ouran left in your heart and then some – if you want, you can even imagine that the protagonists of this series are the children of the Ouran High School Host Club members if you want. Kaguya-san, the rich, precise and methodical vice-president of the student council, is in love with Miyuki-san, the clever, implacable scholarship student that managed to snatch the presidential office.
Miyuki-san is also in love with Kaguya-san, but just like her, he would rather cut his own throat than confess. See, both of them have ambitions and great expectations, and mutually devoted love would only derail those plans. Instead of Ouran’s bright colors, the animators chose to give it the severe Death Note palette treatment, which only makes the absurd rom-com script even funnier.
9 Monthly Girls Nozaki-Kun Breaks Down Gender Roles & Expectations
This series is one of the best insider looks into the exhausting world of professional mangakas— but it can also hold itself as a proud heir of Ouran High School Host Club. Nozaki-kun, the titular character, is a tall, dark and attractive high-school student that has a part-time job as a successful shojo mangaka. Sakura-chan, his classmate, had a humongous crush on him even before she this.
Just like Ouran, Nozaki-kun is dripping with sweet, sweet industry parody, lamp-shaded shojo clichés and delightfully silly romantic comedy. And just like Ouran, it plays, a lot, with gender role stereotypes jokes.
8 La Corda D’Oro Uses Music As Its Love Language
There are lots of Ouran fans that loved Tamaki because of his musical talent and his ability to exorcise all kinds of feelings from secondary characters through his piano. La Corda d’Oro beautifully taps into this dynamic and it's an anime that's based on a manga that was in turn adapted from a harem otome game.
The story follows Kahoko Hino, a kind and musically gifted violinist that finds herself surrounded by equally gifted musicians. The music in this series is to die for, and although you won’t cry as much as with Your Lie in April, it is still a trustworthy emotional rollercoaster.
7 Kids On The Slope
Kids on the Slope is a wonderful show by Shinichiro Watanabe, of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo fame. It takes place during the summer of 1966, and it follows outsider students Kaoru, Sentaro, and Ritsuko as they explore their love of freestyle jazz in a world that, really, is only ready for the next Beatles.
They team up to create an underground jazz band, and the music they create spreads through the school as they grow up. The animation is perfect, natural and particularly realistic whenever the characters are playing musical instruments. The only possible critique is that, in an Ouran scale, it sometimes gets a tad too melodramatic.
6 Fruits Basket Mixes Slice Of Life Honesty With Supernatural Hijinks
Ouran High School Host Club owes 50% of its DNA to Fruits Basket and that is a fact, not an opinion. Fruits Basket follows Tohru Honda, a plucky high-schooler whose parents drop her like a hot potato, and who after camping in a random field gets taken in by some members of the (mostly male) Soma family.
Twelve of the Somas are cursed with being the avatars of the animals that make up the Chinese Zodiac, and they turn into these creatures every time that a member of the opposite sex hugs them. What does it share with Ouran? Well, a sizable reverse harem and a heartwrenching coming-of-age story about assembling your family and carving your place in a world determined to trap you in a gilded (or, in Fruit's Basket case, magical) cage.
5 My Love Story Allows Its Romance The Proper Time To Blossom
My Love Story is the perfect anime series for those people whose favorite Ouran character is either Kasanoda or Mori. My Love Story follows Takeo Goda, a tall, muscular, and incredibly kind high school student who always ends up in the friend zone corner. Takeo's lucky changes when he saves Rinko Yamato, his classmate, from a groper in a train.
Although Rinko falls for him almost immediately, it takes Takeo a little bit to catch on. My Love Story is a very cute love story with a highly unconventional protagonist, which gives the genre quite a refreshing change of pace.
4 The Wallflower Looks At Tender Relationships With A Dark Edge
The perfect anime for fans of Nekozawa! Sunako Nakahara is an introverted gothic high school student who is really into indoor activities and horror movies. Worried about her increasingly probable future as a reclusive shut-in, Sumako’s aunt makes a deal with four gorgeous young men: in exchange for living for free in her and Sunako’s mansion, they will bring her niece back to the light.
However, despite Sunako’s apparent change in appearance, her dark-side tastes remain unchanged, and maybe it will be up to the boys to accept her very particular inner beauty.
3 Paradise Kiss Examines The Beauty In Life's Little Differences
Ai Yazawa's Paradise Kiss is a must-watch anime series for those intrigued over Hitachiin twins' fashion empire in Ouran High School Host Club. Yukari Hayasaka, the protagonist, is rich, beautiful and smart— but she feels a deep discontent with everything around her.
This starts to change when she’s recruited int ParaKiss, the fashion line developed by her school’s design students. Paradise Kiss is a remarkably diverse anime, and one that dvelops main characters that are asexual, transgender, and bisexual. It is also gorgeous, and the storylines are very mature; think of it as a mean Ouran 2.0.
2 Kiss Him, Not Me Subverts Standard Rom-Com Conventions
This anime will be right up the alley for all of Ouran's Renge fans. Kae Serinuma is cute and sociable, but she is also a fujoshi, a girl who loves reading yaoi manga. Kae loves to proejct her favorite character’s relationships unto boys that she knows. When her favorite anime character dies, she becomes so upset that she loses a lot of weight.
When she emerges, everyone falls in love with her new figure (and yes, this problematic plot point is lamp-shaded and mocked in-universe). Too bad for them that Kae is more interested in seeing them date than in falling in love herself.
1 Yona Of The Dawn Explores Gripping Character Development In A Dangerous World
This anime (and manga series) is absolutely epic, and although it is technically a shojo with a reverse-harem structure, the story, the world, the visuals and the heart-stopping action scenes add so much meat to it that it would be a crime not to include it in this list. Yona is a red-haired, naïve and happy-go-lucky princess.
She loses everything, including her mane, when her loving cousin assassinates her father and she is forced to run away with her best friend. Yona's best chance to reclaim her kingdom is to find the legendary dragon warriors and to convince them to fight for her. Expect Sansa and Arya Stark levels of character development, as well as complex grey relationships between every character.