Hirasawa Yui is no Mizunashi Akari, but her love song to Azusa is most certainly an aria.

My relationship with K-ON! has been a complicated one.

It’s been an interesting ride since my initial derision of the 4koma-inspired iyashikei series about foetal high school girls eating cake and occasionally picking up instruments, but it has ultimately been a rewarding one.

Aquamarine tears returned as the girls graduated.

There are so many gripping moments in the final episode of K-ON! that it would be impossible to list them all. But there are definitely words that will stay with me for a long time, Sawako’s “how could I possibly erase this” being foremost among them.

Is K-ON! a favorite? Yes.

Is it in the top 10? I don’t know. I did away with rankings when Aria the Origination ended.

But Yui and Nodoka exchanging their secret handshake, Azusa turning to follow her bandmates with her eyes and running into a wall, Sawako’s fretting during the ceremony, a failed game of telephone, Yui’s relaxing metaphors… who would have thought that ultimately Yui would prove the best rhetor of Houkago Tea Time?

It’s the stuff of beauty.

It’s “wonderful”—and that’s what’s so wonderful about it.

Tomorrow morning, Azusa will wake up, greet President Ton-chan, and head downstairs to lift the storefront blinds. But it isn’t time for “her” keionbu, it isn’t time for “her” Aqua. Because she, unlike Akari, is not alone.

The rest of HTT will be with her forever.

“We’ll be forever friends.”

Another mythic line to add to the collection.

P.S.

The world is wonderful in the eyes of wonderful people. – Alicia Florence

It is not, as I originally misunderstood—or rather, as it was originally conceived—Yui’s love song to her younger sister. Sure, it’s about their relationship, but it means a lot more than that to the show. Would HTT’s final concert end by focusing on Yui and Ui? Hell no. The final song of the final concert is a song about K-ON! itself, about the members of the club and how they live their lives.

It’s not just Yui who’s helpless by herself: remember, she’s the one giving energy, according to Mio.

No, “U&I” is more than all this: it is friendship, plain and simple a kind of friendship that is actually fairly complicated.

If K-ON!! isn’t slice-of-life for you, I highly advise you do something about it as soon as possible.

Go support someone and be supported back.

Go make friend to whom you can sing “U&I.”

If you’re a regular around here, and were before I “stopped being an anime blogger” (thanks, Scamp!), you’ll know I’m one of the few who talks about Aria a lot. But more likely, you’ve seen the name a few times, know the premise of the show, and little else.

I mean… in all honesty, there’s little else to Aria, save the experience of watching it. It’s slice of life at its most distilled consistency, meaning that outside the premise there’s very little to be said about its contents. They just kind of happen.

But wait—there’s probably one other thing you know about Aria. And that is that its titular character is an ugly, fat, noisy cat who does hideous semi-anthropomorphized dances and shakes his x-shaped bootyhole all over the place while shrieking noises formerly only ever heard in bad Kyoto Animation Key adaptation anime: “puinyuu,” &c..

Don’t get me wrong. I love President Aria to death.

But I didn’t use to.

And that’s actually a trend I’ve seen amongst lovers of Aria. Initially, they’ll say “it’s good, even though Aria (the cat) is horrendous.” Eventually they’ll be oohing and aahing at the sight of the lovable white blob. Did I just say blob?

Let me introduce another concept: moeblob.

You know the kind… the weaker of the two Hiiragi sisters from Lucky Star, Ayu from Kanon, Hideaki Anno, etc.

And you know them from K-on!: Yui, Mio, Azusa…

They make retarded noises, their maturity is about at the level of a sea urchin’s, they can’t perform basic problem solving, their presence alone makes you want to huggle them, and so on.

So what happened to Aria (the cat) as Aria (the show) progressed?

The blob became less of a blob and more of a, let’s say, friend. After fifty-three episodes and an OVA, he’s kinda just there, and we’re used to him, and we’re maybe even kind of interested in his struggles and tribulations. He operates much like the rest of Aria’s cast, albeit he starts out at a worse place. Would we care about the climax of the show if we hadn’t been watching Akari for fifty episodes? Would we care about Aria (the cat) if we hadn’t been watching him for fifty episodes?

There’s a saying: “I used to hate mushrooms; then they grew on me.”

Gross, but fitting.

Aria (the cat) is a mushroom.

The moeblobs of K-on! are mushrooms.

I’ll admit it was hard for me to get past the first few episodes of stupidity and retardation, but I forced myself to sit through it. Every episode it became more bearable. This isn’t just a case of the senses being dulled: I became more invested in the characters’, well, characters; in their daily lives and encounters and attempts and failures. And by the time I got to the episode in which they’re all failing at their various Sundays in “A Winter Day,” I cared.

They’d grown on me.

Is it a fault of K-on! that its cast is a bunch of foetuses with head problems?

Probably.

Is it a fault of the viewer to dismiss the show at first brush due to said fault?

I wouldn’t say so, necessarily, though a scathing commenter such as Owen might unabashedly bash on the dismissive viewer.

But I would say it’s fairly rewarding to see a slice-of-life show through and really get in bed with the characters (I mean this in a nonsexual manner). I’m a few episodes into K-on!!, and I don’t know if it’s just better than the first season or if the phenomenon I’ve outlined in this post is simply working its wonders.

I’m having fun with those kagayake-ing girls and their growth.

[[ I felt the need to write this in defense of K-on! after declaiming against it quite vehemently to my friends less than a month ago. I felt that showing a similarity with Aria—my favorite show—would show my sincerity. I hope you all understand that I am not trolling. Cheers! ]]

How the mighty have fallen.

I’m going to show my spite for the whores over at Kyoto Animation and vote against everyone today. Well. That was another easy decision!

Next, people have been accusing me of not being an anime blogger. I can’t accept that. So here goes. Time to blog some animu!

Ookamikakushi vs. Kanokon: an objective analysis

Point 1: male lead is a total pansy
O: yes.
K: yes.
Result: tie.

Point 2: male lead smells hella good
O: yes.
K: yes.
Result: tie.

Point 3: male lead is voiced by a girl
O: probably.
K: yes.
Result: K+1.

Point 4: male lead is wanted by many girls
O: yes.
K: yes.
Result: tie.

Point 5: male lead is wanted by many guys
O: yes.
K: probably.
Result: O+1.

Point 6: male lead smells so fucking good
O: yes.
K: yes.
Result: tie.

Point 7: wolves!
O: yes.
K: yes.
Result: tie.

Point 8: male lead smells so good everyone wants to shag him
O: yes.
K: yes.
Result: tie.

Point 9: how does the series attract its viewers?
O: ‘suspense,’ murder, etc.
K: boobs.
Result: K+1.

Final Score
O: 1, K: 2

Kanokon wins by virtue of its fanservice. Hurrah!

Positively taken with the masterful art-style present from episode one of endearing slice-of-life/comedy K-on!, I hung myself upside down from a tree for three weeks in order to contemplate the meaning of my relatively bland existence. I died and was reborn, and when I examined my robes I found them gray no longer. (They were blood-soaked, possibly the result of the runes.) I took a long, soapy bath and, when the laundry finished drying, I looked at my figure in the mirror.

My Days, Jim, has kindly recorded the words I uttered as I examined my new self:

“I have become moe, destroyer of brains.”

(Thanks, Jim.)

As I stood there, transfixed by my own fixation, I realized that I was missing but one thing: a musical instrument. I was going to revive pop music. I quantum divided my hand into a drill, focused on the tones I most dearly wished to reproduce, pierced time and space and the twelfth wall, and—you guessed it—produced my instrument: a shiny new well-greased flute.

Transformation complete, I stand before you on my wobbly spearlegs.

Now, who will be my three accomplices? I know that I’m the most bad-ass thing to ever set foot on the stage of the world, but a band is four (or five?!?!!?!?), not one.

UPDATE: Please post your interest in joining the band in the comments below, along with your cell-phone numbers. You will receive anonymous texts instructing you where to go for your… *ahem*… auditions.