“After School Tea Time will always be… After School!”
— Yui

(Note: This is about both the seasons, K-ON! and K-ON!!)

Moé Slice of Life-animes revolving around a bunch of cute girls doing cute things have started to become quite a trend lately. Some are really good, like Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star. But they tend to drown in a sea of mediocracy, much like what has happened to the Seinen genre. But K-ON actually stands out more than most others. Instead of being flat-out comedies, K-ON actually manages to make me happy just by… being there. It’s not as hilarious and hysterical as most other SoL Comedies are, instead being very cute and slow. While it essentially is about a bunch of cute girls doing cute things, it takes a different approach.

The entire story revolves around the K-ON, short for “Light Music Club” in Japanese, which is “revived” by Ritsu Tainaka, who also has her best friend Mio Akiyama join. After a short while they also manages to make Tsumugi Kotobuki join too, after she went to the wrong room, but they still need another member to officially restart the club. Problem is that almost all the other freshmen has already joined other clubs. This is where Yui Hirasawa, the so-called main character, comes in. She has never been in a club before, but decides that Light Music sounds fun, and decides to join. While this solves the problem with the lack of members, it presents another problem: Yui can’t play any instrument, so now she has to learn Guitar from scratch, and manage in time for the school festival.

This sounds like something serious about a band playing music doesn’t it? Well it’s not. It’s about a bunch of cute girls using the Light Music Club and their band “Hokago Tea Time” (Hokago = After School) as an excuse to hang around in the music room and having tea, quite frequently also joined by their Teacher/Advisor Sawa-chan. They actually do play some music sometimes, but most of the time they just fool around. When “Azunyan” is introduced a bit into the first season they briefly stop to have some actual practice, but a few episodes she is pulled into the other members’ pace and they all start fooling around again.

K-ON has only two major faults. The first one is that it’s not always chronological at all and tend to jump a bit, so one episode can be high summer, the next winter just to go back to summer again for the next one, though it handles this a lot better than Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu for example. The second one – that actually is mostly in the first season and fixed for most part in the second – is it’s predictability, I sometimes see jokes coming a while before they do. This is not necessarily something everyone will get annoyed at, but fans of the Slice of Life genre will most likely have seen most of the jokes performed better somewhere else. This doesn’t stop the jokes from being seriously funny though, but they lose the surprise.

The soundtrack is arguably the best part of the show, and I really wonder how this is supposed to work as a Manga. Aside from the standard-issue comedy soundtracks, there are a lot of well-made BGM themes, along with the songs performed by the girls’ band After School Tea Time. Complete with ridiculous lyrics. Their signature song is called “Fluffy Time”, and they also have songs with the titles “Curry”, “Rice is a Dish” (a pun on the Japanese word “Gohan” which means both “Food” and “Rice), and a – for obvious reasons – never performed song called “Raccoon’s Love Shower”. The first Opening Theme, “Cagayake! GIRLS”, is in my opinion the best one, with the second season’s two OPs, “GO! GO! MANIAC” and “Utauyo!! MIRACLE”, being a bit worse, but still great – upbeat Pop for the win. A strange thing about the first season’s OP and ED is that after Azunyan’s introduction a few episodes in, she seems to be hastily pushed into the OP, and forgotten entirely in the ED.

The voice actors are perfect for their characters, especially Yui’s, Azunyan’s and Mugi’s, and they really help bringing out the already good characters. All of them are also newbies, but after the huge success of the first season they quickly got other roles. None of them are individually on Kana Hanazawa (Kanade from Angel Beats!)’s or Hirano Aya (Konata from Lucky Star)’s level, but all of them together make up a cast far better than most. Not to mention they can actually sing; unlike a certain other Yui, the Yui in K-ON (or anyone else here for that matter) doesn’t have separate voice actor for singing.

Aside from the voices, the characters are fairly unoriginal, with a few exceptions. Note that they being unoriginal doesn’t mean that they are bad characters; they’re all some of the better variations of their character type.

The self-proclaimed main character, Yui Hirasawa, is a childish, clumsy girl who never really succeeds at anything, but somehow ends up as a guitarist genius. She’s mostly a blob of moé without much personality, but being a moéblob has never been a bad thing, has it? She also has really strange daydreams, like dreaming that Mugi’s eyebrows are pickled raddishes, and she treats her guitar (which she names “Geetah”) as a person.

Ritsu Tainaka, the club president of the Light Music Club and also their drummer, and is the reincarnation of Haruhi Suzumiya, with a sightly different hair color. Just like the original Haruhi, she’s loud, obnoxious and with a ridiculously short attention span. Unlike the original Haruhi though, she’s forgetful, has somewhat bad grades and never turns in paperwork for the club in time.

Mio Akiyama, Ritsu’s best friend and also the band’s bassist, is also a moéblob, but not to the same extent as Yui. She’s left-handed, has a secret fanclub, gets scared by essentially anything, plays the bass only because the bassist can stand around in a corner without anyone noticing, and joined the K-ON just because Ritsu did. Most of the time she is also seen hitting Ritsu when she does something especially stupid, when she’s not covering in fear of something equally stupid in a corner.

Tsumugi “Mugi-chan” Kotobuki is the airheaded ojou-sama of some wealthy family, who despite her obvious advantages she tries to live a normal life. I say “try” because she doesn’t really succeed. She also has really strange dreams, like wanting to be hit by Mio because she feels left out when she hits Ritsu all the time. Her main role is to bring tea and cakes, and is both the least interesting character of the cast and the one with the least screentime. This doesn’t mean she’s a bad character, it’s just that the others are better.

Asuza “Azu-nyan” Nanako joins the K-ON a bit into the first season, and is one year younger than the rest of the members. She looks a lot like a twintailed version of Mio, and plays guitar just like Yui, except Azunyan is actually good at it. She is also the only member of the cast who seriously wants to practice, though she tends to get distracted by something and forget about it.

When it comes to Art, K-ON! shines there too. The unique art style really suits the theme of the show, and the animation by Kyoto Animation (well-known makers of Moéblob shows with Clannad and Lucky Star among others on their merit list in case you didn’t know) makes it shine even more. Every part of the animation shines, from the motions to the camera angles. The latter actually deserves some extra mention. Instead of, like many other music-centered shows, focusing unnecessarily much on characters’ faces during concert scenes, K-ON! tend to focus evenly much on the instruments and the faces of all the characters, and also switch angles a lot. This makes it a lot more fun to watch than the concert scenes in for example Angel Beats, and makes them feel much more living. K-ON! is also one of the shows that can nicely handle ridiculous movements and facial expressions without accidentally performing more physically impossible movements than necessary.

K-ON is not everyone’s cup of tea. Or everyone’s piece of cake. Or pickled radishes. If you hate rocky pop songs, Slice of Life or Moé, stay away. If you’re looking for a serious music-centered show or a Slice of Life one, you’ll be annoyed at all the comedy, and if you’re looking for a flat-out comedy you’ll be disappointed at the (somewhat) serious parts. The thing with K-ON is that it mixes all of the genres, without really lacking anywhere, and not going to extreme degrees in any one of them. Instead it’s sitting in a cozy spot in the middle, being cute and relaxing rather than hysterical or serious. The entire thing is very unique, and anyone should at least watch an episode of it – you’ll either hate it or love it, and the only way to find out is to try. Which you can either do in your browser here (second season here) or put it on your iPhone/iPod/PSP with the files here (second season here). A quick search on a downloading site of your choice (like Nyaatorrents) should also give you higher quality downloads if you feel like watching it in HD.