As an ardent connoisseur of visual media, you inevitably develop a refined and intrinsic sense for genre, one which allows you to quickly identify any titular work with an abstraction of its parts. Just as an engineer might recognize a machine's function solely by the arrangement of cogs inside, a practiced aesthete will know what a picture in motion will look like long before arriving at the last frame. In my case, I could immediately tell that K-ON! ultimately exists to deceive and disenfranchise its own audience, preying on them as they try desperately to fill the hole left behind by the traumas of life and the onslaught of time. Within minutes I was dreadfully aware that this show is a one-way track to even deeper depths of sadness.

K-ON! entices the dregs of society with the promise of carefree musical fun, so potent and enchanting that you'll forget we're all on a burning rock hurling towards Armageddon. But when really analyzed – when looked at as an actual work instead of a liquid injection of "kawaii" BULLSHIT – K-ON's strain of happiness is quickly seen as a disingenuous sort, only believable in the mind of someone who has never had a real human interaction and never plans to. Without going into detail about the barely-existent plot, K-ON! can be summarized as a comatose fever-dream in which literally nothing bad or troubling ever happens - except this concept is played straight and as though existence in such an intangible bubble is relatable.

In fact, while K-ON! is technically about a group of musicians trying to hone their skills and make something of themselves, the plot is largely incidental to the real purpose of the show: Watching cute girls doing cute things in a perfectly controlled environment. K-ON! is painstakingly crafted to exude warmth and comfort down to the atomic level, positively reaming the viewer with a thunderous torrent of cutesy antics and adorable interactions. Our charming cast enjoys a delightful existence of care-free music-playing, snack-eating, and group hugs - all in the cozy alcove that is their club room, which is kept at a perfect temperature and insulated from the Mormons.

I can't understate just how utopian this show is. Their world is so perfect that we can only assume the fossil fuel industry is nominally taxed and Elon Musk has finished the Hyperloop, ushering in an era of unprecedented prosperity for all. If it sounds like I'm pitching a good time right now, then congratulations, you've fallen into the same trap as the sorry souls before you. No matter how high your spirits are when watching this show, you're still going to be dragged kicking and screaming back to the real world each time the credits roll, no happier or more fulfilled than you were before. Where other shows can leave lasting positive effects, K-ON! will leave you listless and empty every time you finish an episode and remember the Hyperloop isn't real. All that has changed is that you have another unfillable craving on top of the preexisting ones: The craving to watch K-ON! so that you may forget the coldness in your own bones for another twenty or so minutes.

The reason for this lack of a long-lasting payoff is that K-ON! is too perfect. So peaceful and content that its highest peaks are still too low. No matter how well one can suspend their disbelief, it's always evident when something is too cheery to be real. Nothing in K-ON! resembles a world that can exist. No person depicted exemplifies a state of mind that can be fulfilled. The show is utterly devoid of genuine humanity, which principally requires that our happiness is scraped from the underbelly of a world that is always working against us. Happiness is granted in K-ON! - inherent and inalienable for all its characters. In truth, the entire series is an artifice built for the sole purpose of hooking lonely and vulnerable people in order to sell merchandise and a wealth of music that is not fully listenable in the show (which is an admirable fiscal pursuit worthy of respect, but we're talking solely in artistic terms at the moment).

Indeed, I knew from the start that the most memorable part of this show would be seeing my own tired and miserable face staring back at me in the TV's reflection when an episode ends. Where in K-ON! the layman will find warmth and comfort, the dilettante will find a crushing, perennial emptiness not unlike the kind felt when Obama left office. Where the uninitiated will see cute girls drinking tea, eating sweets, and playing instruments, the critically inclined will see aliens masquerading as a malformed idea of human beings – ones who are entirely unburdened by the cruelty of reality and the consequences of living. The nauseating barrage of platitudes on friendship will ring hollow because they are spoken by surrogate characters who have never felt pain and will therefore never feel love.

However 'cute' Yui, Ritsu, Mugi, Mio, and Azusa may seem to you, they are ultimately an insidious trick. These nonliving things prattling about the club-room represent the zenith of lies fed to us by Kawaii culture and the Kremlin agents who invented it to keep us docile. As the complicated nature of the real world wears you down, you will be continually tempted to alienate yourself from reality and return to K-ON! so you can experience a synthetic and addictive brand of happiness that the real world lacks.

As the minutiae of each nearly-identical episode recedes and coalesces into a single awful memory, you will stare vacantly out the window and think back to a distant time when there was more to life than this; painfully conscious of every solitary second you've spent watching K-ON!

Ultimately, I'm still glad this property exists because it created a multitude of products to buy, thus stimulating the economy. But nevertheless, if you're even considering watching this show, then that probably means your spark has gone out. It would behoove you to try reigniting it elsewhere, because make no mistake:

K-ON! is a show meant for the dead.