By any stretch of the imagination, K-On! is the most well-known ‘Cute Girls Doing Cute Things’ anime. It’s the first anime most people who know anime think of when they think of ‘moe’ or ‘slice of life’. I was originally going to call it the GOAT CGDCT anime, but the GOAT status is so subjective that it would be unfair to other great CGDCT anime. However, K-On! is the face of the moe/CGDGT/etc. anime, and is by most measures the most favored and well-known of all of anime of the like. Of course, K-On! isn’t the best anime out there, and does have haters, although most of that stems from the hatred of the genre it's the face of (thankfully, that hate, and those type of anime watchers, seem to be a dying breed and antiquated now). What separates K-On! from other anime of its type, and makes it memorable to this day, is how much effort Kyoto Animation put into it. From the well-developed characters, to the lively animation, and the great BGM/insert songs, K-On! is a one of a kind anime, and is the product of something that was made from love and hard work, not from the sole pursuit of the almighty yen (although KyoAni did make a lot of money due to how much of a smash hit K-On! was.)
While she isn’t the sole focal point of the series, K-On! focuses on Yui Hirasawa’s goofs and gaffs, which she tends to have a lot of. One of them being that she thought that the ‘Keionbu’ (‘Light Music Club’) played easy instruments like the castanets. The Light Music Club, having zero members at the start of the anime, is re-established by Ritsu Tainaka and Mio Akiyama, who play drums and bass guitar, respectively. Sawako Yamanaka, a music teacher at their school, tells them that they need to find two more members in order to save the club from being disbanded. They find Tsumugi Kotobuki (‘Mugi’ for short) by chance after she walks into the music room looking for the Chorus Club. After some begging by Ritsu and arguing between her and Mio, Mugi decides that the Light Music Club sounds like fun and that she wants to join. Mugi is able to play the keyboards—all they need to find now is a fourth member, who is hopefully a guitarist. Despite the drawing of a guitar and the “Looking for a guitarist” caption on the recruitment poster (drawn by Mugi), Yui still mistakes the Light Music Club for the ‘Easy Music Club’. After Yui’s childhood friend, Nodoka Manabe, explains to her what the Light Music Club actually is, Yui becomes intimidated by the idea of joining. She doesn’t know anything about playing guitar, and she’s afraid that the members will kill her for attempting to get out of joining. Thankfully for Yui, the three members of the club don’t attempt to kill her—instead, they convince her to join after performing for her. On the promise to learn the instrument, Yui becomes the fourth member, and the lead guitarist, for the Light Music Club, securing the club’s existence for the next three years.
Azusa Nanako, introduced in episode eight, is the other character that is focused on in this season. She is the junior of everyone else in the Light Music Club, and also plays guitar. While she says that she’s a ‘novice’, she’s miles ahead of Yui when it comes to playing guitar. She plays the rhythm guitar due to Yui’s insistence that she be the lead guitarist. Azusa is a great foil to Yui, from how serious she takes the club to how they spend their time while in the clubroom. While Yui is fine with spending every day in the clubroom sipping tea and eating sweets, Azusa wants to spend the time after school practicing. This issue in particular causes a great divide within the club, with Azusa and Mio being on the ‘Let’s Practice’ side, while Ritsu and Yui are ‘Team Let’s Eat Cake’, and Mugi being there just to have fun. While Yui does practice, the times she does tend to be inconvenient (during the middle of the night or when she should be studying instead). Azusa’s knowledge of guitars is unparalleled compared to Yui. Azusa has to teach Yui what a ‘mute’ and ‘vibrato’ is, show her what a tuner is and what it does (Yui is somehow able to tune her guitar by feel), and has to explain to her that she should perform maintenance on her guitar often and take care of it. It’s only expected that Azusa knows more since she’s been playing since the fourth grade, while Yui only started playing last year, but it is still surprising how little Yui seems to know about guitars. While the laid-back nature of the club can sometimes piss off Azusa, she sticks around because the Light Music Club offers something that most bands that she could join can’t offer—genuine friendship.
To not leave them out, I’ll tell you a little bit about the three other girls as well. Mio, the bassist (due to not wanting to be the center of attention), is reserved, intelligent, and is the songwriter for the songs the Light Music Club performs. She is the most popular member of the club, popular to the point where she has to her own fan club. She’s easily frightened, a trait about her that Ritsu, her childhood friend, loves to exploit. Ritsu is the most ‘genki’ member of the group. While she tends to be on the lazy side, she is good at playing drums, although she tends to play a little fast. Her pranks on Mio often leave her getting hit by her—leaving Ritsu with a temporary bump on her head almost every episode. Mugi is the most mysterious girl in the group. She is from an extortionately wealthy family, which allows her to be able to provide the other girls with sweets and tea every day and be able to provide vacation homes for summer camps. While she is considered the most gentle girl, she sometimes likes to be ‘rebellious’, possibly due to her wanting to defy the roles that wealthy young women often have to fill. She also tends to get enthralled by things the others consider mundane, and is heavily hinted to be a little gay in the manga.
What separates K-On! from almost every other anime of its kind is the fact that it was made by people that actually wanted to make it—made from love in other words. While anime is a highly commercialized (and cynical) industry, K-On! is special since it has the feeling that it was made by people who weren’t worried if it would be a success or not. Of course, K-On! was a huge commercial success—it still has merchandise being released, almost ten years after its last release.
What made K-On! such a success? Other than the reason I stated above, it was also made by one of the best anime studios in Kyoto Animation. K-On! is such a success because it treats its characters with respect. The problem with most anime adaptations that are similar to K-On! is that they treat their characters like products to be sold. They might be forced to do this due to the economics of being an anime studio since the studio relies on Blu-Rays being sold for the production to be a success. This ends up with anime being paint-by-colors with the same trite fanservice scenes, among other things. Unfortunately, that’s the path of least resistance if a studio wants to make a profit on an anime. While K-On! isn’t the first anime to not use fanservice as a way to guarantee sales, it’s the prime example of how not reducing your characters to objects can also be successful. The most ‘fanservicey’ scene in the anime is when Mio trips and accidentally shows her panties—with the panties not actually being shown. Ritsu often brings that memory back up to tease the easily-embarrassed Mio, but does it in a way that is fully comedic and not objectifying Mio. There’s also a beach scene where Ritsu gets upset that Mio has bigger breasts than her and headshots Mio with a beach ball, but again, it’s brought up for the purpose of making you laugh (although breast jokes are dime-a-dozen and are generally not funny). As I stated earlier, it’s not like there isn’t any merchandise for K-On!—in fact, it’s probably one of the most commercialized anime out there. It has a ton of merch for a reason though. So many people, including myself, like the series enough to buy it to this day. For example, I own three Mio figures, one Mugi figure, a Nendoroid of Mio and Mugi, multiple singles, a large Mio tapestry, the entire manga, and all of the anime series on Blu-Ray. The reason why I own so much merch is because the series resonates with me on a deeper level than probably 97% of other anime. The K-On! girls are so popular because their story resonates so much with people. They weren’t created to be marketed as products. While I wasn’t an anime watcher when it first aired in 2009, K-On!’s influence on the western anime community was tremendous. KyoAni wasn’t inventing the moe wheel when it made K-On!, it made the best version of it, something that anime studios have been trying to reproduce for more than a decade now without success.
Another reason why K-On! was such a success was because of the depth that KyoAni had to add to it. While K-On! is originally a manga, the anime is what it is known for. Once you take the time to read the manga, you’ll understand why. While it isn’t bad per se, the manga is at average at best. The first problem with it is that it’s very spotty. The first volume covers the first year, and the second volume covers the second year, which leaves out a lot of potential plot. This is one of the reasons why this anime advances so fast (this season at least). Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but K-On! deserves way more than seven episodes per school year (counting the OVA released along with the first season). The second season makes up more than enough, with the third year being set over twenty-seven episodes and a full-length movie. The point is that the anime took the plot of the manga and made it 110% better. The manga felt like it was a storyboard for the anime, instead of it being what the anime was adapted from. There are many other factors contributing to this, like the fact that the musical aspect of K-On! wasn’t fully utilized until the anime was produced. It’s way harder to make and produce songs for something met for a magazine than it is for something met to be watched on television. There’s also the issue that 4-komas aren’t relatively deep in the first place (not that K-On! needs to be deep), or that the manga is way lewder than the anime. The manga is a short read (it took me less than two hours to read the adapted parts of this season), but you’re not missing out on much if you decide to skip out on it.
K-On! is not without its faults, however. I’ve already talked about how this season is paced too fast. It’s not fair to criticize KyoAni for that, since the manga kind of forced them into that position. The parts about the anime production that I didn’t like were the points of tension around the end of the season. I know that the anime can’t be all ‘fuwa-fuwa’, but the way that the conflicts are brought up and resolved seems a bit hamfisted to me. The good thing about the conflicts being resolved quickly however is that it doesn’t waste too much screen time. I’m not the biggest fan of Sawako-sensei either. I find her character annoying, and her bits generally not that funny. I don’t think her character adds that much to the series, but I understand why she has to be there.
At the end of the day, what makes K-On! resonate so much with fans can’t be explained with one reason. Its plot is simple, yet moving. The animation quality is some of the best, as expected from the talented folks at KyoAni. The music in the anime is some of the best from any anime that I’ve seen. The benefit of K-On! being about girls in a Light Music Club is that the music doesn’t have to be the bog-standard formulaic J-pop that tends to infect almost every anime. Seriously, the only genre of music that’s more formulaic than music made for anime is any country song that’s bad enough to get on the radio. While some of the songs can trend towards the formula, K-On! does have some bangers—most of which are now on Spotify. While K-On! isn’t conflict-free, the calm and grounded nature of the anime is comforting to most viewers. The girls do have a shared dream of one day playing at the Budokan, that dream is more tongue-in-cheek than an actual goal. It’s like when your friends ask you when ‘you’re joining FaZe’ after you make a good play in an FPS game, or a band with young people in America joking about playing at the Hollywood Bowl or at Madison Square Garden after they finish a session. The Light Music Club is as much about hanging out with your best friends as it is about playing music. This doesn’t mean that the girls slack off all the time in club—it means that they want to enjoy their time in high school while they can. The Light Music Club is more of a hangout than a club. The groundedness of K-On! gives it an appeal that similar anime don’t have. It’s not about being the best, it’s about enjoying yourself and having a good time with your friends, a message that resonates with more people than one that would come from an anime where the girls actually became famous enough to play at the Budokan.
The funny thing about K-On! is that its insistence on being a light-hearted and easygoing show is the main reason why it became so popular in the first place. That, combined with the geniuses at KyoAni that had the secret formula when producing this, made K-On! be the first anime that most anime watchers think of when they hear ‘moe’, ‘cute girls doing cute things’, and ‘slice of life’. Is it the best one of those anime out there? The metric for rating a ‘moe’ show is light-years more subjective than metrics for any other type of anime. With that being said, K-On! is one of my favorite ‘moe’ anime, and would be the first one I would recommend to someone who wanted to watch one. It’s still popular a decade after airing for a reason.
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