Ouran High School Host Club 26 END
Damn cheesy, abrupt, by the books, doesn't deliver on what I thought it was building up to. Yet despite it all, still pretty damn effective. The red alert lighting bulbs started buzzing in my head when, right up till the latter part of episode 25, there was very little that could tell you, hey this show is ending in 30 minutes. And in a lot of ways, though they managed to tie it surprisingly well with some continuous plotlines or recurring character issues (though I'm not sure how much of Tamaki's backstory fed to me here is faithful to the source material) this definitely didn't feell like a very conclusive ending.
While some of the plot choices here felt way too convenient or forced in order to deliver the protagonists where the story wanted them to arrive to, the unholy amount of cheese that is the last sequence was magnificently sold by the use of the show's ending theme. The lead in to it, was already one of my favorites, as expertly used to signal an end of a number of episodes as it was, but here, its use to underline Haruhi's new-found resolve was just sublime. 10/10. Rest of the ED proper also matched pretty well with what was happening at the screen and I'm pretty sure that part of the lyrics did too. While sometimes I feel the use of OP's or ED's track in a series feels forced, awkward and just not very warranted (khe :re khe zero), this to my mind was one of the finest examples of it.
I don't really have much to say about whole show as I always struggle to describe why a comedy does or doesn't work for it but while quite a bit of the episodic material didn't quite tickle my fance and while some of the humour did end up growing stale, Ouran High School Club remains a finely crafted piece of comedic content. Not quite up there with my all time favourites but not very far below.