Visionary Nexus Network

If you’ve been reading my Weeklies, you’ll probably notice that my stance towards K-ON! has gradually soured, and now, I think it’s at the point where I feel compelled to air my disgruntled thoughts about it. I’m hardly the first person to bring up the fact that K-ON! is an utterly crappy anime series. Zenk has already treated us to his vitriol regarding the first episode and elsewhere, Baka-Raptor gave us an entertaining, yet insightful post as to why the show is terrible. The tide in favor of that show continues to be strong and given its popularity, I suppose there can never be enough people out there railing against K-ON!’s insipid, uninspired nature.

The show’s premise is nothing new; four girls in a school environment decide to hang out together through some contrived means and once they do, the show gives us a look into their day to day affairs as they try to gel into a cohesive group of friends. This concept is nothing new and it shouldn’t be a hard concept to pull off well. Ichigo Mashimaro managed to work up some light and fluffy entertainment, Hidamari Sketch endeared us to its characters through the way the interactions are handled to form that cohesive unit, and Lucky Star’s characters had traits that allowed their personalities to bounce off one another to humorous effect. If we are to declare that all of these shows are comparable to K-ON! (and I would say they are), then we can go ahead and use those shows as a metric with which to measure how well K-ON! is able to deliver upon the life and fluffy entertainment. As you might guess from this post’s title, I don’t think the show measures up too well. But that’s putting it too lightly. Disappointing is probably the most accurate way of phrasing it.

K-ON! starts off with a decent set of ingredients needed for executing its premise, but the manner in which the ingredients are mixed together results in a complete mess with flaws that are just too glaringly obvious. The characters turn out to be nothing more than one-dimensional archetypes (with Mio being the only exception, but only because she’s a plot device, see Baka-Raptor’s explanation), the plot elements are subject to a healthy dose of recycling, and even the soundtrack is pretty dull.

Just based on these criticisms, the series would appear to be headed for disaster, but up until “Fuwa Fuwa Time’s” performance, the series manages to maintain a level of decency that is tolerable because the gags that they used still retained some degree of originality. It isn’t until episode eight where the show takes the plunge into complete ineptitude. As I described in the post, the girls’ attempts at advertising their club were clumsily done because anyone of sound mind would see that they were merely sabotaging themselves and I failed to see the humor behind it.

And then there’s Azusa. Good old Azusa. Right away, her addition to the cast left no doubt in the my mind that she would be little more than a Mio clone, subject to the whimsies and abuses that the other members would heap on her and I was annoyed at the fact that my guess turned out to be correct. A arrival of a new character creates possibilities for the show to expand its horizons except we get none of that. Gags are recycled with a new victim in mind and the same goes for the plot. Upon watching the preview for episode 10, I couldn’t help but shake my head in disbelief when I realized that they were going to effectively reuse the earlier beach house episode with too few variations to make it interesting. Furthermore, the dialogue during that episode worked as a textbook demonstration of tell, not show and it was clear that the producers took the lazy way out of showing the audience how much fun Azusa had. And finally, there was that clumsy attempt at drama which does very little for the series at this stage of the game other than to make one character completely unsympathetic.

We’re on the brink of the final episode (technically speaking) and there’s virtually no chance that the show can redeem itself. The last “real” episode came off as being unconvincing in terms of illustrating how far the girls have come along as a club and as a group of friends (they do say it straight out though, which is again, irritating). The characters are flat and show very little development during the course of the show, and above all, the show felt like it was juiced up on a sort of moe Red Bull drink. That pretty much ensures the show’s astounding lack of quality and leaves only the songs as this show’s saving grace, which, to be honest, does not make it worth your while to sit through if you’re only in it for the fluffy music. While we have been disappointed by shows like Munto, K-ON! has managed to be Kyoto Animation’s lowest point yet. Let us hope, then, that this is but a desperate ploy to increase their cash flow to fund better shows rather than a symptom of their inability to produce polished, enjoyable series.

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