Oh, K-On. This anime is both famous and infamous for a lot of things. I watched it when it was first coming out, and at first I thought it was okay...but then watching it more and more began to frustrate me with every episode, though I did finish it and the second season, which will be its own separate review. K-On is said to be the anime that popularized the moe anime genre, particularly the "cute girls doing cute things" type of it, which some may say was to the anime industry's detriment. After seeing both seasons, I think I can see why. In all honesty, K-On as a show really frustrates me, because it does have potential to be a good show, but rather than utilize that potential, it just wastes all of its time waffling around and focusing on cutesy moe antics rather than the more important stuff. After I finished K-On, I didn't go near it again until this year when it randomly came out on Netflix, so I thought maybe I'd rewatch it again and see if maybe I have a better opinion on it.

The result? No, my initial feelings on it haven't changed. It's still as frustrating as it was back when I first watched it.

So the base premise is that four--later five--high school girls start a light music club after it gets disbanded. Yui Hirasawa, the guitarist, is a cheerful, spacey girl who has never played a guitar in her life and just wants to spend her days having fun and being a ditz. Ritsu Tainaka, the guitarist, and her friend Mio Akiyama, the bassist, are the ones who initially reform the light music club, with rich girl Tsumugi Kotobuki, who plays synth, and level-headed freshman Azusa Nakano, also a guitarist, joining soon after. Though everyone tries to learn more about music and playing their instruments, most of the members prefer wasting their time eating sweets, drinking tea, goofing off, and getting all mushy-gushy with one another, to the frequent irritation of the members who are more dedicated to music.

No, really. I'm not kidding you with that last sentence. That's really all the show is: Just a bunch of girls waffling around and doing everything except playing music and getting their act together. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with slice-of-life anime. I don't want to give the impression that I outright hate slice-of-life anime. Many of my favorites happen to be in that genre. However, if you make a slice-of-life anime where nothing happens, your audience isn't going to care. Characters in a story, even in a slice-of-life story, need to face challenges in a way that'll make the audience care about them, if done well. And that's one of my biggest beefs with K-On: Any challenges the girls face always wind up having some sort of convenient solution that neatly wraps everything up in a neat bow and doesn't present any actual conflict. Yui doesn't have enough money to buy a guitar? Let's have the rich girl's father own the music store she gets it from and have her buy it at a discount! Mio accidentally flashes her underwear at a crowd? Let's soften the blow by having some people form a fan club around it, which is totally not utterly degrading and humiliating whatsoever! One of the club members calls everyone out on their lack of drive? Let's have her warm up to them by having the girls cuddle her and have her stick cat ears on her head! No one ever faces any consequences for their actions, or lack of action, with Ritsu being the biggest offender on this one, as she continually bullies Mio and acts like a brat towards her, but any repercussions she gets are always played for laughs, and she never faces serious karma.

Speaking of the characters, everyone's a moe blob. Yui's the clumsy, clueless ditz, Mio's the exasperated level-headed one, Ritsu's the obnoxious tomboy, Mugi's the rich girl, and Azusa is basically a younger Mio. Other than Mio, Azusa, and Ui, I really didn't like any of the characters, namely because the show is trying so hard to make them seem as cutesy and super pwecious as possible rather than making them feel like people. Yui in particular annoys me with the fact that she acts less like a high schooler and more like a 5-year-old shoved in a Barney skit, and the show infantilizes her like crazy. Who the hell legitimately DOESN'T know that you have to pay to get your guitar strings replaced?! Most people would know before high school age that if something is broken, you either buy a new one or pay somebody to fix something for you, like changing a light bulb or having a vet prescribe medicine for your sick pet! The teacher is just there to complain about her lost youth and shove the girls in stupid outfits, and Nodoka, as good as she is, is woefully underutilized. I can totally understand why people wouldn't like a show like K-On based on how the characters act in this alone. I mean, you don't necessarily watch certain anime for realistic acting or three-dimensional characterization, which is fine. But when you lean too heavily on trying to make your characters as diabetes-inducingly saccharine as possible, without putting in the effort to develop them, flesh them out, or make the audience care about them, you screwed up hard. Also, Mio and Azusa deserve better. They really do.

Seeing as this is a music anime, one would think the soundtrack would be good, right? Uhh...no. I mean, the background music in and of itself is fine, if rather sappy at certain points. But the actual songs the girls write and sing are, like them, ridiculously childish. Granted, nobody expects teenagers to automatically be as good as Celine Dion in a nanosecond, which is fine. But again, the show is favoring cuteness over substance, and the girls' songs, along with their lyrics, are nauseating and painful to listen to a lot of the time. One song is about friggin ballpoint pens, for Pete's sake! Who the hell writes a song about pens?! All their songs are little more than generic bubblegum pop that's all just so grating on the ears. In all honesty, the only good thing the anime has going for it is the animation. KyoAni prides itself on fluid animation that really brings the characters to life rather than having them be just static images with moving mouths and blinking eyes, and this continued even after K-On's runaway success. But good animation isn't enough to hide K-On's blatant flaws.

That being said, do I think K-On is a bad show? Not necessarily, I've seen plenty of stuff that's even worse (coughcoughLapisReLightscoughcough), but it's completely held back by cliches and the desire to be as moe as possible. I do plan on seeing the second season and reviewing it, but I doubt I'll like it any more than this one, especially since the second season is longer than this one. But hey, if you like K-On, cool! More power to you! It may not be for me, but sometimes people like their cotton candy anime, and that's okay.