K-On!

This review is going to be broken down into the 5 parts that MAL focuses on with each section getting critiqued.

Story:
As you know by the description on the anime's page, K-on is suppose to be about Yui Hirasawa and joining of saving of her high school's light music club, with the problem being that Yui has never read music or knows how to play a guitar. Slowly a few of these problems get cleared up but the main bulk of the plot goes no where whatsoever. You can come in at any episode and still get what's going. The anime is heavy on the theme ... "light and fluffy." to which when watching it you don't have to know anything nor necessarily be there the entire episode to know what is going to happen and that's the main problem, like every other "moe" anime it's generic and predictable in the events category.

Art:
This is probably the biggest problem with the show in my opinion, the art. Seriously I can guarantee you that the studio used a step by step handbook and stencil set to create yui, mio, ristu and mugi, it's what is seriously killing the industry today in my opinion...generic characters. There is nothing that makes any one character in K-on stand out. The backgrounds themselves are nothing to praise about either as they are the standard school, bustling street/shop and from time to time inside one of the girls home scenes. To sum it up the art lacks originality and there is no direction for it.

Sound:
This is probably the only place that K-on climbs up outta the rubbish category. The times that you hear music made by the club it's actually not that bad and can be catchy at times, and with it's suppose plot revolving around music you'd think to hear it a lot but it's quite the opposite, the girls spend more time sitting around being airheads then trying to do anything music related.

Character:
What can I say,all of the characters of K-on have traits that superficial. They all are generic and no one has anything that makes them unique or stand out.

Enjoyment:
After watching 13 episodes, I can say overall the enjoyment was just another thing including original art and characters that the show was missing...I mean it was boring and painful as well as predictable to watch.

Summary:
K-on is a light and fluffy fan service anime to which it hosts no original art and set of characters. If your looking for something to which you don't need to think or understand maybe you'd enjoy k-on but even then your going to have to endure lackluster scenes of boring pointless conversations to which watching windows screen saver can provide more enjoyment.

Before I begin this review it must be noted that I am not a moe hater. Shows centralized on moe are fine so long as it succeeds at its task. What is not fine is a show that is completely false advertising.

Coming into K-ON! you would expect to see a show about girls getting into a band and watch them enjoy the experience of learning to play music. While we don't exactly expect for them to get all that dramatic or serious all the time, it's still nice to see the struggles of learning to play music, the effort it takes to get good, and ... to get the overall culture of it as well.

However what I did see was none of this at all. Much like many other poorly made animes on hobbies and sports, K-ON! did an immense disservice in portraying what it means to be in a band. The dedication, hard work, the love for music, the love for the culture of music, and even the simple know-how of instrument playing was completely nonexistent.

As a viewer, I find this very dissatisfying. Are we to sit here and really believe that characters like Yui can sit around slacking, eating cake, and hardly practicing at all with almost no knowledge can suddenly be this guitar genius on a concert stage playing these songs perfectly? Even as far as musical geniuses go, there was a lot of hard work and toil and passion put into their craft.

But fine. Clearly this anime never intended to be BECK with moe, so it's fine to adjust our perception of this anime begrudgingly so. However, even for an anime centralized around moe, or more specifically for this show "cute girls doing cute things," the show was hardly entertaining. Ignoring the fact that the characters for me were just utterly dull or annoying, the activities and antics of the girls were not really amusing.

An anime that is 1 cour does need two cliche "beach" episodes. Eating sweets the entire show was not "cute," and really the characters hardly lended themselves to being likable due to their utter lack of depth. None of them seem to be anything but 2 dimensional the entire show's run.

There is definitely a distinction between moe shows with depth and subtle complexities and shows like this, which is essentially moe blobs without soul or substance. This compounded with the fact that is false advertising created a horrible viewing experience for myself. If you were looking for a show that was in any way supposed to be about a nice group of girls truly learning the experience of a musical band, this is probably not for you. If however you are satisfied with looking at what you see is cute animated moving images of cute girls doing mundane tasks, then enjoy it as you would like.

All I can say that this show neither succeeds at being a being an anime about music nor at being a moe show, which I would call a complete derailment of what this show is both advertised and presented as.

I can write many single words to describe my feelings towards K-on, but I'll try to convey them in a small review.

Story
Story? What story. There is none. It is a slice of life show and I really mean they just take a slice out of anything they find amusing (which I probably didn't) and put it in the show. A day in the life of a high school girl who happens to be in the light music club. Some of these "slices" though tend to lead to very boring and I mean boring episodes. I think I was asleep half of the season watching this ... which is good because I had more energy then when I think about it. Then they throw in some moeness. How much of it. Constantly. Yup...I mean every episode is a freaking moe blob. I don't hate or love moe, but geezuz guys can you easy up on it for a bit. I'm not Takanashi from Working! here. So for story? A pathetic 1.

Art
Hmmm. At first I thought it was decent, but when I further look at it was pretty mediocre. That fuzziness effect they try to do when moving around is, in my opinion, just lazy animation. It really takes away from what other wise could be some decent artwork. Not to mention the fact that we are constantly bombarded with chibi and moe images. After a while it just plains get you so pissed off you want to step on some ants.

Sound
There were some catchy songs in this show, which is a nice touch for a band/slice of life type of show, but it just isn't good enough to save it from utter crapness of the rest of the show. I give it a decent 7.

Character
Dreadful. None of them have character. They are so predictable and boring, no wonder no guys are in this show, none of them would like these idiots. Just think of them as Kim Kardashian clones without the hot body, that's what the characters of K-on are like. A give it a 2. At least a couple times I laughed...a couple...

Enjoyment/Overall
When I finished this show, I just kind of stood there and thought to myself. Is that it? Is this what people were raving about how "cool it was. blah blah." I think I need to bang my head against a wall a few times to see what these raving reviews see, because frankly, I don't see it. K-On to put it simply, is stupid. Hell it's even worse than the harem anime types or those old 15 fps animes that bombard you with violence...and to think I thought the 2nd season would be better. It was the same lame jokes, characters, etc. GOD almighty help us. K-On is crap. Let us pray there isn't a 3rd season.

As a guy who enjoys many varied animes from Ah My Goddess to One Piece, I'm quite willing to adapt to and enjoy many genres.

Many animes have "moe" characters in it to either please viewers or just to add a touch of cuteness. However, K-On misses the point entirely. In fact, as soon as the first episode begins, the "moe" (read: retardedness) seems almost FORCED onto you. By the time I was 10 minutes in, I was drowning in a see of concentrated lame attempts at cuteness.

Seriously, this anime will only please girls very fond of "OMG SO CUTE :3". For the rest of us ... anime lovers, the moe may be just a bit too much.

Stay far away from this.

There are anime that build a huge hype around them and turn out below average. Then, there are anime that do the same but they still manage to meet expectations of their fans. Which group does K-On! belong to? In a way, both. While it completely manages to please fans of slice-of-life and comedy manga, even some people that love K-On! admit that nothing actually happens in it. That’s where people that like their anime with plot facewall to oblivion.

Story: 1/10
Why such low rating? Because there is nothing to rate. The only signs of story were at the very beginning and even then ... it was way below average. Basically, the story is that a new girl, Yui, joins Light music club but can’t do music. Of course, that she is wholeheartly accepted into the club. Why not after all? What would be musicians doing in a music club? Another plot happens, about in the middle, when another girl, Azusa, but this time she can play guitar, joins. That’s it, say bye bye to plot. All they do is drink tea… when they actually do something.

Art: 6/10
Art, the only good thing about K-On! yet it’s probably where people divide into fans and haters. Simple reason, you either love it or hate it. Art, just like everything else, is played for laughs. Deformed characters are in every episode and design is something between a moe loli and Voldemort.

Sound: 1/10
DO NOT go into this expecting an anime based on music. Even though it wants you to believe it is, it isn’t. Practice is very rare to see here and even if it happens most of it is just pointless jamming. Concerts are even rarer (2 in the whole season) and, again, they’re played for laughs so they’re about stage fright (driven into dumb extremes), songs a 5 year old would write (no kidding), the “group” being anything but in-tune, etc.

Characters: 5/10
I hate it when people rage over a show and ignore its good points because they dislike it. Characters were the strongest point of K-On! after art. There aren’t many and while some are similar they still manage to keep their diversity both in nature and looks. However, don’t expect any character development or any characters that would serve other purpose than comic relief. The cast is full of stupid, hypocritical, useless and annoying characters that would be hated until the end of time if they were in a different kind of anime. However, they still have a charm to them and a very strong moe factor.

Enjoyment: 0/10
Even though I have sort of mainstream sense of humour (most of the mainsream anime make me laugh easily), I couldn’t even smile at any of jokes here. Humour is mostly based on a stupidity or awkwardness of a character. Like inteligent jokes? Keep away from this as far as possible. The only reaction I had to these “jokes” was staring at it with my jaw dropped wondering whether it was supposed to be funny or show the characters’ idiocy. I watched this because of boredom and I believed it would get better eventually. It didn’t.

Overall: 1/10
To me, enjoyment, plot and characters make most of the rating, in that order, so art could be perfect and it still would get low rating. (I found the art stupid so it wouldn’t help much anyway) I didn’t enjoy the series but you might. The only thing you should ask yourself if you have a lot of time on your hands and if you enjoy watching moe characters drinking tea. If so, by all means watch this. If not, maybe you should try something else.

Yes, I believe this show is not worth watching. Is everything bad about it? No. I am absolutely impressed by the art in the opener. Never did I think an animator would accurately draw what it would actually look like for someone to play those instruments at that exact point in the music (check out the covers people do for the op).

Anyway putting that aside, three main problems occurred for me when watching this show.
1. Concept. It is a show about a music group getting together to play music, but a good portion, and I mean every scene except for a few, have very ... little to do with playing music.
2.Origin of Entertainment. From what I could get, enjoyment came from either looking at cute girls doing cute things, slice of life comedy, or both.
3. Characters. Look at the characters at the beginning of the show. Now look at them in the end, have they changed? No.

My biggest concern was the concept behind the show. Answer these statements with only agree or disagree. These girls are making a band. They get together to play music. The best "concert" scene of the show is the opening. Now stop. Let's think for a moment. This show is about a group of girls forming a band and playing music, but the only time they are actually performing seems to be the opening of the show. I think my point is fairly clear, though I may be mistaking it and it is really just a slice of life anime centered around music. I guess it would make sense as it would avoid making it another Lucky Star (I also did not enjoy this either since it reminded me too heavily of the fact that I could be doing the same exact things the characters were doing rather than watching it). But even as a slice of life, the entertainment, comedy, was too heavily focused on the moe factor, which brings me to my next point.

Why do I want to watch cutesy anime girls talk about starting a band but never actually play music? The kind of entertainment you can get from this show is what I can get from looking up moe pictures online. It is probably different for everyone else, but that is what I assumed was the entertainment. There were some points where the slice of life did come into play, but I felt the slice of life was never truly entertaining nor funny. Sorry, I don't like watching the same gags slice of life tends to offer.

Finally, the characters. Most storytelling in any shape or form always has some kind of character development which changes the character's personality, ESPECIALLY in slice of life. The reason is that CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT IS A KEY ELEMENT OF MOST ENTERTAINMENT MEDIUMS USING STORYTELLING. Even if the characters supposedly got better at playing together as a band and learned their instruments, it was completely irrelevant to personalities of the characters as they never really changed. This alone would not be a problem of there was something to be had from the interactions between the characters, but I came to realize that the interactions were a little too realistic for me, as in, I was constantly asking myself, "Hey, you could be doing this too, right? Why are you watching this then? Why are their interactions completely on the level of being plausible in reality minus a few things?"

These interactions may have been to convey a sense of realism, but to me, they conveyed reality, which, if you use anime as a form of entertainment to take your mind off of reality for a little, makes no sense. There were some moments that are clearly near impossible to find in your daily life, but the overall feel of the show, the entertainment, and the goal chasing are so easy to replicate with friends in real life that you might as well do it yourself.

Thus, as much as I would like to rave about the animation, the meat of the show is just too little for me to actually enjoy.

To break it down:
Pros:
+amazing opener animation
+a good representation of putting plan to action(minus some spots)
+enjoyable music

Cons:
-music was very limited
-little to no character development
-no need to watch the show for the same entertainment
-depended on moe for entertainment

I know there are some people with opposing opinions, so if wish to refute me, feel free. I might give this show another chance if there is enough opposition, but for now, this is an accurate representation of my thoughts for the K-On

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.

The way I look at things, getting children into music is never a bad thing, it gives them something to focus on, enhances the brain and can be a future for some, be it as a musician or any of the jobs with a musical need. Well at least thats before starting K-On, some ways should't be used to get kids into music, especially when it dumbs it down to the lowest level.

Story - 2/10

Even though the show sells itself as a music/band show, a majority of the time it's a slice of life/school show, with just a bit of musical talk in-between.

It's not a ... complicated story. Girls enter their freshman year of high school, start a music club and become a band, yeah kinda sums up the whole first season. The reason you can sum up the whole season in few words is the lack of detail or story put into it. In twelve episodes two full years pass, most series don't get a full year done in a full twenty four episode run. Because of this they never dwell on much besides the same repeated gags, heck they apparently had so little content they pretty much repeated two episodes and had a semi-recap episode at the end. The only time I felt they cared about the story was the winter break bonus episode.

More than anything the reason I just had to give the series such a low score is the unrealistic take they have on music. Within a few weeks of getting her guitar, Yui can't really play chords, but she can shred like the best metal musicians, not to mention she has no idea of the other basic components of playing or keeping a guitar. Well maybe there can be one genius who picks up the hardest art that quickly (outside the fact it takes time just to build dexterity to allow you to move so fast) but later in the series her sister Ui mention's holding Yui's guitar a couple times and that alone was enough for her to be a great guitarist. It sets a terrible standard for people who watch the show and want to pick up an instrument. If they feel it was supposed to be so easy, but now they can't play after months, they'll just give up, not realizing it can take years to just be decent. Instead of plowing through two years, shorten the time span but add Yui taking lessons, learning different things or at least just make a her an average player until later in the series.

Animation - 4/10

The pilot episode's animation was all over the place. There was a joke, and a liberal attitude towards, the animation in FLCL and I think these guys took it as a serious way of doing things. There's points when within a scene the animation style would change rapidly, not even waiting for a change or a transition of changing rooms. It could be attributed to using many different key animators in order to get the episode finished, but it was just very jarring and throws you off right at the start.

Things settled down in future episodes and everything started to flow much better, so there is a plus in them getting their act together. Throughout you can see an inspiration from shows like FLCL and Excel Saga, but it just didn't work here. The two shows mentioned are comedies, but they are created for a wide audience with elements of actions, drama and comedy. K-On is a comedy but it seems singularly focused on one demographic, particularly ten to fourteen year old females, so the already cutesy look doesn't need to be enhanced with the chibi looks and wacky faces, or at least not to the degree they did.

As a musician I was always going to nitpick the equipment used, but after that train wreck of a first episode I would have been happy with proper shapes for the instruments, boy was i wrong. When they walked in the music store I was shocked how they got so many instruments correct and to a high detail that was amazing. Between the guitars, amps and drum sets seen in the show, you can see they spent months researching and drawing these items alone.

Sound - 5/10

The music for the show is both decent and terrible at the same time. While the music itself isn't that bad, the lyrics to the opening and closing are horrible. They'd probably make anyone who listened to it a feminist, because the lyrics just make girls out to be morons who want to shop and chase boys. I can understand the lyrics to band's songs being this way, as they are suppose to be from the perspective of the young girls, but the opening and closing songs aren't, heck unlike the songs within the series these two songs even have terrible melodies. The songs the girls are suppose to write have a pretty good sound to them, but again terrible lyrics, but I can let that pass as it seems intentional. One shining star in their song catalog is Fuwa Fuwa Time (I believe that's the one i'm thinking of) which sounds like an Andrew W.K. song but with females singing it.

The voices aren't so bad either. They're cutesy, but they match the girls pretty well and never get to the point you want to shut the show off because of them. Out of all the girls I'd have to say the best voice was that of Tsumugi, they picked a voice that sounded very authentic for the character, but somewhat out of the norm for Anime shows, where every voice is so stylized. The actors did a really good job with the range of emotions they had to put in for each character, it would have just been cool to see if they could do the song lyrics in english too, as they did with the show Beck.

There are very few minor characters or even one off characters to rate, but the fact they were able to keep each girl distinctive might have been helped by that, limiting the doubling up on voice actors and leaving out many other characters in an all girls school that would have to sound somewhat similar.

Characters - 5/10

The characters are pretty run of the mill and due to the speed in which the series passes we don't learn much, but still there's room to grow and that counts for something.

For the whole series there are only eight characters and two or three minor characters. The band consists of Yui, the previously mentioned solo prodigy who can't play simple things on the guitar, who's also a bit of an imbecile. They try to cover her playing and out of the blue perfect test by saying "once she sets her mind to it she'll do anything" but it's a cop out. Ritsu plays drums and is also a bit of moron. Her (Ritsu's) friend from grammar school, Mio, plays bass and is afraid of basically everything. Tsumugi shares the spotlight as the pretty girl (along with Mio) who also comes from an enormously rich family, she's oblivious to the real world and a complete stereotype of dumb rich people. Later in the season underclassman Azusa joins the band as a second guitarist, she's pretty normal and just wants to play her best.

Rounding out the main characters are Nodoka, Yui's childhood friend and member of the student council, she's everything Yui isn't. Yui's sister Ui, who is basically the same character as Nodoka but bubbly, she acts like the mother at home and takes care of Yui. FInally theres Ms. Yamanaka, possibly the most fully developed character in the series, we actually learn about her past, her likes and other little things about her life.

Again I would have loved for them to just develop the characters over a year's time instead of two, but instead we just got many many copies of things we've seen before.

Overall - 5/10

I came in having high hopes for the series, I love being a musician and as I said I think shows geared towards kids that push music are great for growing the art form. But instead we got a fourth rate school show with a little bit of the life here and there. I wouldn't have been as disappointed if it was just marketed as a school show, but they pushed the music angle then ran from it. After each episode I did want to get on to the next, but part of me thinks it was in hopes it would be different.

It's a cute show, just not a rewatch type of show.

With a second season and movie still here for the viewing I hope the series gets back to it's intended path, the bonus episode was a good start, but this show easily strays.

So I heard you like music...too bad, we don't play any!

Story:
Let me summarize everything up to episode 9:
(first episode)
Ritsu: We're a band now - Mio: Kay. - Mugi: Excuse me, where... - Ritsu: Shut up, you're in our band now. - Mugi: Kay. - Yui: I just wanna waste my life in peace. - Ritsu: Cool, you're in the band. - Yui: Kay.
(multiple episodes)
Mio: I think we should practice. - Everybody: LOLNO! - Mio: Kay. ._.
(Sawako joins)
Sawako: I don't want to. - Ritsu: Do it or everybody will find out you like...METAL! - Sawako: PLS NO! ;_;
... (multiple episodes)
Sawako: I'm gonna molest you now. - Everybody: Kay. - Mio: I think we should practice. - Everybody: LOLNO! - Mio: Kay. ._.
(Azusa joins)
Azusa: I think we should practice. - Everybody: LOLNO! - Azusa: Fuck you guys, I'm gonna quit. - Everybody: Please don't, we'll practice, we promise. - Azusa: ...okay. - Everybody: LOLNO, just kidding.
1/10

Art:
Look at Yui walking through school in episode one. That is horrible animation. It's not always that bad, everything looks fine while the show keeps being a comedy, but as soon as it tries to portray fine movements, it fails. Which is surprising, because the instrument handling looks good to me, they are not looking like they play, they actually play. But an awkward character design (they try WAY too hard to make the characters look cute) and cringeworthy movement animation make this anime unpleasant to watch.
3/10

Sound:
The music the girls play is pretty good. It's random J-pop, but it's done very well. The ending song is actually really, really good. The opening is your standard cutesy happy song, but it works for K-On. So, what's the problem? THEY NEVER FUCKING PLAY! In 9 episodes they played like, 2 or 3 times. This should be the average of an episode if the anime is about a band.
4/10

Characters:
People have talked about no character development in K-On, which I don't think is a big problem in slice of life shows. The problem are the characters themselves. They are so incredibly bland that some of them don't even qualify as characters. For example, take Mugi out of the anime. Now, what is different? If they aren't non-existant, they are annoying. Yui and Ritsu are people I would never want to get involved with in real life, yet they are supposed to be likeable. The only character that I kinda liked was Mio.
2/10

Enjoyment:
I knew that K-On could be considered boring, even people who liked it told me. But boy, was I in for a snore fest. I found myself constantly looking at the leftover playtime and groaning after realizing that I was only 5 minutes in, not 15. It wouldn't even be that bad if I could say K-On was terrible, because it wasn't. It was just...nothing. If you want an anime about music, stay away from K-On. If you wanna watch cute girls being cutesy, try it, though there are better alternatives. All you do is watching people waste time, eventually wasting YOUR time.
2/10

Overall:
2.4/10

Okay, firstly to start off, I was persuaded by a friend to watch this and downloaded in batch so I sort of felt responsible to sit through the entire thing.

To start off. I'm not much of a writer. Its my second attempt at a review (first being completely shot down and its kind of an embarrassment now that I think about it...) So I'm going to try to follow a template of sorts with
the help of that rating bar at the top.

To open. K-On! was a drag. The fact I even mention that bit at the top pretty much makes it seem like I ... forced myself through it. And I did. Its supposed to be a slice of life anime, usually slice of life anime starts off with a slow pace and work on getting you to like the character. And then quickly go into a deeper plot that keeps you wanting to know more. But it

Story : K-On! has no story. Okay maybe that is exaggeration but it is close enough. The general plot is about 4 girls who join a school's music club to save it. Thats pretty much solved in the first few episodes and after that plot is thrown off a cliff. Then there is the theme! Music. Which seems to have been more of an excuse to start the series off rather than and the actual point of the story, there are a few points in the story where music is implemented but it feels forced and they are pretty forgettable. Most of the time is spent in their music room eating cake and listening to them talk about mundane things like in Lucky Star. The only difference being that its not funny. A plot is supposed to be about problems and solving them, but everything in this anime seems to be just work out. Yui can't play any instruments, she also can't read notes. So somebody tell me how this fits the realism part of "slice of life" anymore...

Art : This part of K-On! is what people love or hate. The art can be seen by some as simplistic to add to the light-hearted feel of the anime. Other can say it is poorly drawn with little attention to detail and makes it feel unprofessional. I go with the second view. The manga's cover illustrations were pretty good though. Although that is off topic.

Sound : Pretty much the only song that I found mildly appealing was the first OP Cagayake Girls!, the ED Don't Say Lazy seemed to have generated quite some interest from the fanbase but I wasn't my taste. The insert songs slotted in here and there in episodes were dry and made me feel like an idiot listening to them. They really should know when to limit the entire moe moe kyun thing here. It seems to be their only selling point. I already compared it to one show with Aya Hirano so might as well again. Even the God Knows bit from Haruhi alone is more enjoyable than any of the songs here. And it wasn't even a music anime.

Character : At the start there is a little bit of development with the four girls. But after that it pretty much centers on Yui being a complete retard. I would normally say this would be cliched but most idiot anime characters actually have good points at times that redeem them. Yui fails to do so.

Enjoyment : It seemed interesting at first. But it quickly went into the gutter with the originality and actual story. I'm guessing if you are that kind of person you would like this anime, but for myself I found it to be a drag and uninteresting.

After reading about the hype and suggestions I decided to give K-on a try. I thought I'd be doing myself a favor by watching it. Coming into the series with that in mind I didn't realize I was watching an anime with 1 episode, by that I mean every damn episode is the same as the last, there is little to no character development, there is really nothing to see in K-on. Save your time and just don't even think about watching this grass grow.

Story:
It's hard to talk about because it's not even there. There is no story worth following in this anime. Sure, it's ... a slice-of-life anime but the story consist of a girls life with boring scenarios. At the start there are some problems that the girl faces, then slowly once that's over you'd expect something more, something exciting and dramatic, but no, nothing happens and I'm sitting here wondering if my Media Player is broken, why does the same episode keep playing?

Art:
While the artwork is not exactly dreadful, it's nothing to show off. You may come into this show thinking that the artwork is wonderful, it's not. It seems like every character in the anime is a copy and paste of the last with the hair/hair color adjusted.

Sound:
Being a music based show I'd expect Kyoto to include a lot more songs and performances into K-on. The OP and ED are by no means bad, but going into the show if you were expecting to be blown away by any songs, you won't be. The singing in the song is just flat out boring, I'm not calling it bad, but there is nothing that makes you go "Wow, I would love to DL this.". There are no voices that stand out, and while there are groups that don't have a voice that stand out and they just simply harmonize, K-on fails to do that.

Overall:
I don't know why I even finished K-on, maybe I expected it to get better, maybe I wanted to listen to good music, maybe I was trying to find a story, but in the end what I found was that I downloaded the same episode 13 times, and watched the same one, 13 times.

Finally done up 3
And I can safely say this show is not for me
I was bored outtalk my mind, the MC is annoying stupid with no redeeming qualities bar the moa factor which for me isn’t a pull
When your mc is annoying and really on her cuteness to draw the audience she becomes less of a character and more of a plot device.
Which doesn’t work in this show considering there is not plot?
So she is just a device
The more interesting characters which actually nice quirks are Mao and Ritz to a lesser extent I Mio I Can see being the mature one of the group ... but succumbs to certain things like when they are talking about jobs and she gets overwhelmed
This adds to her personality and makes her a more likable character
The art style isn’t for me; it looks like everyone is one Hugh blob
It’s not so much as I hate the show I just am not interested what so ever
If I wanted to watch a show about drinking tea, eating snacks and talking I would watch downtown abbey
And even that has an overarching plot and story
K-on proves that character development itself isn’t enough for me
The story itself needs to build its character through an expansive setting. But k-no’s setting hits so close to home that it is monotonous
I get why people like it but as I stated earlier it is not for me
there is a show airing right now called your lie in April and it's about music and a boy who was a genius pianist whose mother died and he lost his ability to play until he meets this free spirited violinist girl and she changes his life forever
I think this show is more to my tastes as it still set in daily life but has a more interesting plot and story wise can develop the characters is a more interesting way rather than k-on
I will give k-on this it did revive my interest in music based entertainment just as kids on the slope and more earlier in my life the school of rock did
so I will thank k-on for resetting my mindset so I think ill appreciate shows like your lie in April and shows with a cohesive story more often
^In-depth enough for yak
Bitch

This wretched excuse for an animation budget pisses me off. What a waste of resources. This show is your typical bottom-barrel, garbage-tier "overreaction" anime. Everything has to be fucking overreacted to. These characters can't just have a normal fucking conversation for once in their life. Do people actually enjoy characters like these? To me it's Sturgeon's law in action. You get nothing but unrealistic "UWAAAA!", so the characters aren't even conceivable in this multiverse. It's a show I get it: doesn't need to be 100% realistic that's not what I'm about. It's perfectly understandable to exaggerate emotions internally, but not externally through a character's behavior ... when the situation doesn't warrant it. It's so incredibly exhausting I want to climb into a coffin and wait until nonsense is wiped from history because humanity evolved past it. We should delete this before we meet the aliens because this is embarrassing.

I can't help wonder why I can only write negative reviews, and K-ON is one of them ofc. And I'll begin ranting about it step by step :

Story-2-

First of all I can't even begin to understand why people even like K-ON, its just so freakin' dull, it revolves around nothing. Every ep is completely pointless and boring. And I know slice of life is pointless most of the time, but this one was just empty all the way. As a matter of fact the plot ends in the first ep. I'll use an example to express my views more clearly : Lucky Star, another pointless ... anime, but it was so totally funny it kept me hooked on till the last ep, and even as it ended I wanted more eps for it. But K-ON had nothing special about it, I practically died of boredom. Whenever I watched it my mind was totally blank as if I was asleep. And let me tell you it was hard keeping awake. Reading the Synopsis or Description on K-ON's page gives you the entire summary of the 13 eps.

Art-1-

K-ON is the artwork of an elementary kid trying to pass off as a mangaka. I know its suppose to be moe, but still. No shading. No detail. No skill. K-ON is made of only one colour shade and the drawings of the characters imply that they had no bones in their body. As crappy as my art style is, I have to admitt I can draw better than this. If I can I would have given it a zero, but there are two reasons that I didn't, 1st is the fact that its not possible to give it a zero, 2nd is that the intruments the characters are well drawn and is as realistic as they can be in an anime. Another problem that I have concerning the art is that it has no style or originality of its own. Lucky Star art also stinks but atleast its original and creative.

Sound-2-

Why 2 ? Lets start with the songs of the light music club. At first they seem to be catchy and fun, but after a while you realize that they all have they same pattern and genre. In short if you listened to one of their songs is listening to all of them. As for the voices of the characters I have no comments on it.

Characters-2-

All of the characters and all their personalities in one word: moe. Thats it there is nothing else in to their personalities beyond that. When they get angry they get moe angry, when they get sad they get moe sad, when they get happy they get moe happy. Everything thing about them is moe, can this anime get anymore pathetic? Again I'll use lucky star as a reference. In LS the characters have their own peronas. Kona- otaku, Kaga- bossy, Tsuka- airhead, Miyu- classy. In K-On Yui- moe, Mio- moe, Ritsu- moe, Mugi- moe.

Enjoyment- 1-

Like I mentioned before i fell asleep throughout the anime. So yea, it was pretty hard to enjoy it. I will never watch this anime again, even if someone pays me to do it.

Overall-2-

The actual overall is 1 but I decided to pity this anime and give it a 2 instead.

This is a review of both of K-on's seasons, spoilers and stuff warning here.

K-on was one of the first slice of life/school club/girls doing things shows I watched. It was one of the first because I got told by a lot of people on several websites, anime "experts" and lists it was one of the best anime shows ever and I saw it talked about and memed just enough to give it a try. Upon my initial viewing of it, my opinion was that it wasn't the best anime show ever, but that it was the slightest bit above average. I had some reservations ... with it then, but I could generally understand what people liked about it or at least I did until I started watching a lot of shows like this. I really like to try and see what people like about something like this so I even went through the trouble of watching the second excruciatingly long season and listen to some of the songs independently. My enthusiasm of this rather than grow just keeps getting lower and lower the more I tried to understand it's appeal. How do I put this... I find it hard to bluntly state what I find wrong about this show in clear terms on it's own, so let me illustrate the broader issue with it, by pitching my own anime here:

I have this really great idea for an anime show, it will be about a school club. It will start with one girl but over the span of a season or possibly just the first episode we will introduce each new girl in the show. We will have about four to ten of them. We don't want to have too little because we want to cover all the obvious types and flavors possible in terms of desirability. We also don't want to have too many because we don't want to dilute the character pool or run into redundant archetypes. Each one will have different hair and eye colors and possibly if we have time after doing everything else regarding their looks we might write them a differing personality to distinguish them a little bit. We wont actually make them interesting, we will just give them one defining character trait like they're the seven dwarves. Angry, Mopey, shy, arrogant, submissive, smart-erish kinda and of course the "motherly" one that works from behind the scenes and convinces one of the angry ones that they really want to be a part of the school clubs fun times as well.
Aside from this their faces and basic body structure will be so similar it's almost as if we just palette swapped some features onto a generic body and head, because we did. Some of the girls will be reluctant to join the club at first and maybe even two of them will seemingly be obstinately against the clubs existence at the start, but through the power of friendship and smiling as we utter each others first names and without honorifics as we all agreed "tee hee," we will come to realize the necessity of being part of this awesome school club experience. Also with the aforementioned "motherly" types help. There will be some hardships along the way and some of the girl's might regret even trying to accomplish what they're attempting with this school club, but our plucky main character will keep things going with her nonstop "can-do" attitude. Will make the clubs existence a necessity beyond this because... The school is being shut down because no one enrolls there or something that isn't good like that is going to happen if:

-the school astronaut club doesn't complete it's first successful manned mission to Mars by the end of first term.
-the school plumbing club cant clean out all of the cities disgusting sewers by the end of the fourth week of school.
-the school astro-physics club cant prove the existence of dark matter after a week of light studying.
-the school hentai club cant accurately depict inaccurate body proportions and graceful sensuous movement by this afternoon.
-the school music club cant put on a professional level musical event with immaculate singing and dancing after three months of work.
-the school ninja club cant eliminate all of the targeted foreign leaders by next Wednesday.
-the school general practitioners club cant pap smear all the students in a ninety day period.
-the school art club has to help the hentai club in the prequel sequel where we have to save the school in three different time lines that converge into Picard playing Poker with the crew.

Yeah will do something like that to slightly raise the dramatic tension. We will have an episode where the girls go to the beach, at least one scene at the hot springs and we will have one where they go to a mall and/or that one shopping district in Tokyo. If they live in the city we will have them visit the country and if they live in the country we will have them visit the city. If they live in Tokyo or Kyoto we will have to by law mention how much different Osaka is at least once if not multiple times. If they live in Osaka, this is impossible because they only exist in the same way that "Thebes" exists in Athenian tragedies as a place that is referenced and used as a setting to reference "others" but doesn't really exist as is. Will definitely have an episode where they all sleep under the same roof and pillow fight, but to be "funny" one of the girls will be grumpy and not having a good time, but in the end she too will join in the fun. <HILARIOUS HIJINKS HERE>. After all these heartwarming moments, the girls will accomplish the thing we want them to accomplish in the end and we will have at least one scene of them all smiling about it and possibly a musical number about how great the experience was even if the show doesn't have anything to do with music.

Will try to keep the uniquely Japanese things the girls do at an absolute minimum as to not scare or confuse dumb western audiences too much. I don't know maybe will say the word "senpai" once or twice so they can meme about it, but aside from that will go full western to the extent that we believably can. The whole idea of a school club is "patronizing" to American's whose schools cant even get funding for the basics let alone extra curricular clubs, because rich politicians and the people they represent need an excuse to lower their taxes and poor kids enjoying themselves on the riches dime is just too much to ask for and they cant vote yet anyway, so fuck'em. In spite of this we think they can mix the idea of school and clubs together enough to understand the concept.
The girls will have zero romantic interests despite being hormone crazy teenagers and they will live their lives according to such a prudish moral standard and work ethic that it would it would make even the Cleaver family and Archie comic characters wince. We will even have lines where the girls recite the value of doing homework and chores with a smile and we will expect the audience to not laugh at this but to take it seriously. I don't think audiences will be ready for an experience quite this unique and ground breaking. No show has been made like this EVER. This show will inspire people and change lives with it's sheer positivity.

So in all seriousness I can be talking about a lot of shows with the above and while K-on doesn't fit every single one of these cliches or this general crappy school club formula it does hit quite a few of them. I find this to be the most formulaic and lazy genre in anime currently, which is unfortunate because I really like the idea of "slice of life" stuff generally and I go into each one of these shows wanting to like them. Even school club shows with a seemingly outlandish premise like Girls Und Panzer end up following the same general arc and use the same filler episodes and archetypes. I find that even shows that aren't necessarily about a school club like Senran Kagura almost have this same cliche structure at their heart, but they don't quite put enough effort in or admit to the fact that it's just another "school club" show in an attempt to seem more unique than they are.
Before we go on and I explain in more detail why I don't like this. I want to make clear just in case it wasn't that I'm not one of those people that only likes "manly man" anime, that seems to have become it's own cliche in anime culture, my problem with these shows and K-on in particular isn't that it's about girls doing supposedly girly things. I can imagine a show about much more traditionally feminine things like a school nail salon club or the school cosmetology club and I can imagine it working for me if the art, characters, general story etc are good. I don't give a damn what a show is about as long as it is interesting to me in some way and I think almost any subject can be made interesting. I can imagine a good show like this in my head. The problem is I just haven't found a good show in this genre yet and the more of them I see the more I start to resent all of them as a whole. Which brings me back to K-on.

So K-on doesn't buck any of the previously mentioned cliches or subvert them, in fact the most charitable thing I can say about the show is that it was slightly more sparing with it's cliches than some of these shows, "Love Live" being what I see as the purest platonic cliche form of them all. Love Live is going to be a show of comparison for a lot of this so brace yourself for that. Unlike Love Live though, K-on is argued to be a great work of art and a pinnacle of it's genre. When I hear something is those things I expect a lot out of it and I expect it to be either reasonably different from the rest of the works in it's genre or I expect it to be the origin point of these said cliches, as in it's so ground breaking other shows have felt the need to copy it. K-on isn't fundamentally different from these other shows and it wasn't the origin of these trends, it was another surfer on the trend wave.
A cliched piece of media can still be enjoyable in a simple way. It can also be argued that not every piece of art needs to aim to be groundbreaking and "unique." Some things can be good just as a particularly well crafted or more polished take on a previously established formula. Sometimes you just might want more of the same thing, because the same thing is good enough. It can also be said, that some things might be cliche on the surface but have depth in between the lines or in the subtext of it's particularities in the general formula. I'm also not above enjoying some cliches and predictable things myself, I really like horror films for instance and slashers in particular, I've come to enjoy their cliches and predictability and on a day where I just want to unwind instead of think deeply about something this is what I'll turn to for that. Closer to home, I can say I really love Dragon Ball Z, but I recognize that a lot of my love for that show is nostalgia and it having a special place in my life. There is nothing inherently special about the shows story aside from a few standout moments and it is very typical or cliche for it's genre. I really like Akira Toriyama's designs in Dragon Ball, Dr. Slump, Chrono Trigger and Dragon Quest, but the art and more specifically the art style is about the only thing I would say has stood the test of time from DBZ and even with that I'm not sure how impressive successive generations will find it. I gave these two things Slasher Films and DBZ as examples to say not everything I like is an immaculate piece of unique art or even just great works of art. The difference being I wouldn't make arguments or excuses about why other people should enjoy them either, which is unfortunately what people do with K-on. But if you don't, for the sake of fairness I'll say I'm cool with people liking something if they acknowledge it's derivative or cliche nature. I can understand a guilty pleasure and I can imagine someone just really enjoying these school club cliches even though I personally don't.
So to recite the obvious with K-on, I don't think it's a notable or polished take on the formula, I don't want more of this same thing, because I dislike this genre now and I don't see any depth beyond it's surface level school club narrative. In fact one of the main arguments for this shows greatness I've heard a lot is how "simple" it is, in comparison to... Ummm, I don't know, the defenders of this show tend to leave this defense as context-less as I just did. I think they mean in comparison to anime in general, but most school club shows have the same plot at the same pace, so I don't really see anymore inherent "simplicity" against the rest or that would make it special by comparison.

A lot of people like to say that one of the main appeals of this show is how the characters truly feel like a group of friends. The immediate problem I have with this is these girls don't feel real ever, they feel like most of the archetypal girls in this genre, from the happy go lucky nonsense to the cliche "moral" dimension of these characters. Even though school club shows are always about secondary/high school kids, I could understand people liking these simple characters with their simple archaic morality if they were made for a much younger audience and I wouldn't berate kids for liking this. Again the problem is that so called "experts" in the highly important field of anime criticism constantly tout this as one of the greatest shows ever made and these people aren't children, they're my age and even scarier sometimes older.
The impression I get of high schoolers from Japan in these shows is that all of them are compliant robots whose main want in life is to be the best student in school. I would call these shows an implicit dystopia where all resistance and teenage rebellion has been made futile. I'm more than certain this is probably not reality. As most real life Japanese films depict more conflict and tension in teenagers. I might have a personal bias as I just never cared about school, I wouldn't ever have joined a club and I certainly wouldn't have looked at another student dead in the face and say some nonsense about how home work is the best part of my day. Where are the losers, outcasts and scumfucks in these shows? Do all Japanese kids want to be goody goodies or do some want to wear black Timbs and black hoodies? The best hypothetical moment in one of these shows for me will be when these lame girls go up all happy to another girl to ask her to join their club and she bluntly tells them to go suck a dick. She has better things to do after school, like shitpost on the net, try Fentanyl and listen to trap rap loud enough to piss off mom and dad. Fuck a light music club.
Reviewing things negatively like this has this weird way of making me optimistic about real life. I think kids in these grades are smarter and more complex than this and I think their lives could give us a more interesting story than what is given in these school club shows and I think that about kids all over the world. The kids are alright, the show is just bad.
This show reminds me of things like High School Musical, Glee and Saved by the bell, where the characters are "high schoolers," but the target audience and the mindset needed to enjoy it is much younger. You know what I wouldn't call any of those? The height of their artistic medium. In fact I would call them calculated commercial properties aimed at the lowest common denominator viewer that doesn't have a whole lot of point's of comparison. These shows and K-on are the television equivalent of a Katy Perry song, lifeless uninspired art trying to be inspirational and fun.

You know as a kid I lived through one cliche in this show, I had a sleepover with an older cousin and a few friends. I tried doing that thing where as the younger person I keep talking before we sleep. Well my cousin adorably said at the age of twelve "STFU and go to sleep already" and that was the end of that heart warming memory. Well I guess reality isn't like my Japanese animez's.

I don't mind a slow relaxing story, meant to be more calm than action or drama focused in fact my defense of Ghibli film's in my Totoro review was defending slow painstaking realism to an extreme beyond what K-on musters. This could be a twelve episode anime version of My Dinner With Andre and I could imagine it being interesting to me. K-on has two major problems that I think negate this common defense of the show for me. One, the world of K-on and it's characters don't feel real enough to be a true "slice of life." There is almost no struggle or real setbacks these characters ever have to face, their life is a line from one easy fluffy event to the next. Even in real life we feel relaxation by contrast with things that aren't relaxing, so it stands to reason that even if a show wanted to aim for "relaxation" being it's general appeal we would need some of the opposite to contextualize these feelings the problem is we never really get that with k-on. Secondly, the format of K-on is all wrong for this kind of story. In a show aiming for relaxation, I would expect a lot less of the school club formula I described above and more of a slow contemplative free form show, with possibly a slower more relaxing take on the musical aspects. I would also expect a different kind of music to be employed here, more of a singer/songwriter type of feel and less slightly abrasive pop-rock. Instead of the singer songwriter route they can also go the slow jamz route to relax to. Didn't the makers of this show listen to the brilliant anime expert Jamie Foxx? We want some Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross, a little Anita and we can get this anime started alright!

There is one cliche I left out in my pitch above about these shows and it relates to how they end. Almost every School Club anime goes through an excruciating three episode arc where they cry about the fact that they wont see each other anymore when school is over. This cliche is at least as old as the school club anime Grease (1978). Frenchy is best girl and you know it. So it comes as quite a shock to me when people say this here lame, hackneyed, overused and predictable bit of plot is what makes this show good. The fact that the girls are thinking about their future... I'm thinking about my future right now, there isn't a whole lot to think about as it looks pretty bleak at the moment. Does that make me deep? It doesn't give something existential depth, to have the characters slightly ponder about and feel emotions over obvious crossroads in life. The worst thing about this in K-on was they didn't have the kindness to limit this to the last three episodes, they basically have a whole seasons length of episodes about them being sad school is ending. None of these episodes are interesting or do anything you wouldn't expect out of a more abbreviated version of the same general sad emotional thrust you get out of the ending episodes of these shows.
This is also one of those ways in which I simply cant relate to this show, by the end of high school I was ecstatic at the prospect that I wasn't going to see any of the people I knew there ever again. Teachers and students alike, I felt trapped in the group of "friends" I had and I was glad to see them slowly trickle out of my life. I don't miss any of them and I don't reminisce fondly about the times we had. They changed, I changed and life moves on. Now maybe if I had joined a school club... Nah I would still be the same asshole in a different setting.
I also don't think of high school as a relaxing time. You're constantly being told if you don't get into college, your life will be ruined and you will forever be relegated to working the most menial of tasks, my guidance counselor told me I was destined to be a ditch digger or worse a moderator on 4chan. Then in a Zizekian fashion you are implicitly being commanded to enjoy high school as one of the "greatest times of your life." Well it wasn't, it was "a" time in my life, nothing more or less. Frankie Avalon was wrong Frenchy, keep the dream of beauty school alive, perk up that beautiful angel face and never fucking go back to high school.

I didn't know where to put what I'm about to talk about right now, but since it concerns the ending I thought I would dump it here. Alright, so let me take a breather for a second while I brace myself.... So the absolute worst episode of this show is episode twenty of season two. What makes this episode bad you say with anticipation, curiosity and trepidation? Well dear readers, the short answer is "everything" but I'm sure you're reading this already long review waiting for the long answer to be given and I will nicely oblige. Remember that this is a show about music, even though it's kind of easy to forget that since the characters seem to forget it all the time themselves. So like a lot of shows with a subject like this there is an "end goal" in mind and that is a school festival they're all going to perform at. Episode twenty just so happens to be the episode where that festival happens. Now in any other show like this the creators even if they consciously know they're creating a cliched piece of filth know that this episode has to be one of the great ones. It has to be that episode we remember and that pops out because everything is building up to this. I feel like this is a slightly functioning vestigial organ school club shows have taken from the previous era of spammed anime shows Shonens, where everything always built up towards competitions or a set (of) obstacle(s). The thing about this episode is all that build up is wasted on the girls playing two extremely boring songs and Yui doing an awkward unfunny stage performance that just goes on forever. I mean really bad performance, like not in the "it's funny shes a little nervous" like if she came up to me after my response would be "Well at least it looked like you had fun up there I guess." You know that passive aggressive way of saying "it fucking sucked," that still makes it clear it was the worst performance you have ever seen in your life. If I went to this concert I would ask for my yen back even if I didn't pay to get in. This should have been one of the shows best moments, but like with everything else in the show it is just terrible. Lets go back to Love Live again, when this show had the same cliche structure and buildup, it basically delivered and gave you what you expected out of a show like this concerning the Idol performance we knew this was all building up to. A big live performance with an exciting song that tied into what was going on in the show. It wasn't the best thing I ever heard, but it was basically what I expected out of a premise like this and it met my small expectations.

One of the truly terrible things about this show, is how little it uses it's underlying premise about music. People often note that it is has very little actual music in it attached to what the characters are doing, if you discount supplementary materials and merchandise, but it also doesn't really do enough with training and leaning about music. A lot of these shows about school like to jack themselves off about how educational they are, but I don't really learn anything about music or light music clubs from this show that I didn't know before. Compare this to a show like Dagashi Kashi, which isn't even about school or learning in the slightest and I still learned quite a bit more from it about Japanese candy then I ever learned from K-on about anything music related. I would think at least some musical activities and exposition scenes pertaining to how you go about learning musical stuff would happen even if just by accident given the premise, but a truly amazing thing about K-on is it manages to not do anything with this premise aside from use it as a way to advertise the shows supplementary CD's.
Now let's bring up Love Live! School Idol Suicide Project again. Love Live is almost as much as a cliched flat line as this show, but with Love Live I can say it taught me at least a slight smidgen about being an Idol and they did sing and practice for singing quite a few times in the show, at least once an episode. So as bad as it was it at least lived up to it's limited premise more than K-on did, which was not something I was expecting considering the shows differing reputations. I can also say despite the girls fitting each cliche I noted above in terms of emotional disposition almost each one had something to bring to the group initially concerning the idol premise. Like Nico's knowledge of school idol persona's, the red haired girls song writing, that one blonde girl's dancing abilities etc. So if you take anything away from this, Nico was why Love Live needed to be made, her demon like appearance, elitism, arrogance and narcissistic personality was just enough to get me to care in a special way. She wasn't my muse from heaven Chiyo Sakura level's of inspiring but I mean who is? To get back to the real point, each one of the characters in Love Live had at least some small level of importance in the story. The problem with K-on was almost none of the girls mattered in a musical sense and more broadly they aren't defined enough to matter as individual people aside From Ritsu whose an annoying asshole and if I was her "friend," I would commence to ass whoopin real quick if I had to endure her presence for longer than five minutes. Now in a better show the characters not being cliche archetypes might come off more realistic, if the girls were amateurs just jamming in a garage and they sounded that way it could have it's own kind of charm about it. Maybe they could even get Merzbow as a feature. The problem is they don't come off amateurish, they come off professional and despite being a light rock band with instruments, they play quite a bit of pop with some mild guitar sounds in it. Everything about this is wrong and I don't like it. Again Love Live was a bad show and I didn't care for the music, but at least they were idols singing pop idol music, so it fit the premise of the show.

As for the story, well I basically outlined it above with my "perfect" pitch, little music joke there Yui, maybe your writers can take notes. Aside from that long series of cliches it doesn't add anything new to the formula or warrant any close observation and analysis. If the characters didn't have different colored hair and slightly different outfits, I would forget who they are really quick. They try to go slightly different with Yui's take on the happy go lucky can-do front lady, but there are two problems with the way they try to go against type. One, they make her clumsy and stupid, these are terrible traits for a main character, unless this is a pivotal part of the story and it isn't it's used for fluff "humor" and as a substitute for giving her a real personality. One of my favorite shows growing up was Futurama and a problem with that show was Fry started out as an average guy who reacted realistically to the crazy situations he was in, but a problem with this show over time was that Fry became an extremely stupid character to supplement the fact that other characters became more interesting around him. This was the exact wrong approach to go with his character he was fine as he is being the average fish out of water guy who was the foil to the strange world of the year 3000 and more interesting characters around him. The dumber Fry got the less I cared about him and his relations to other people and subsequently the rest of the show. K-on suffers a similar disconnect. I wanna like the main character of a show, but when they're constantly shown to be useless and they react to situations in a way I wouldn't and there is nothing to be gained by this otherwise, it just serves to further and further disconnect me with what is supposed to be this shows anchor. I want to state that by contrast I don't want the show to go in the opposite direction, where Yui is a perfect person who makes nonstop rational decisions, but what I want is for there to be a balance and for me to feel like she at least sometimes isn't just a worthless annoyance in the world she inhabits. People can be understandably ignorant or inept given their characterization and lack of experience with something. The problem with Yui is that she doesn't have enough of a personality otherwise to understand why she has these faults. Someone that act's this dumb all the time if they need to exist at all which I would argue they don't, they should be relegated to being the "comic" relief and nothing else. They definitely shouldn't be the main character. Yui is just awful, when you imagined in your mind what a terrible character from these shows would be like before watching any of them you basically imagined Yui Hirasawa without knowing it.
Another problem with this is like everything else in the show they don't even fully commit to her being dumb and inconsiderate enough. Almost every episode ends with them attempting some hamfisted "heart warming" moment where Yui realizes being a useless dumb ass is ok because they had "fun" or she is going to buy that guitar herself. Some of which in turn back fires because it undervalues the whole episode we just watched like with that aforementioned guitar buying episode. There is an episode in the second season where Yui and the younger twin tailed girl decide to play music for this old lady that lives next door at a talent show. The whole episode is setup like a classic I love Lucy episode where Lucy commits to doing something that is well meaning but is above her skill level and ability and she humorously fails trying to do something good for someone else. This also seems to be the case for Yui as she is trying to juggle training for this show and doing her finals. I kept expecting moments like this to happen for Yui where her faults and her supposed good aspects meet by her trying to do something good for others and her failing in humorous ways, like with this episode and despite all the comedic potential of her bombing hard on stage this never really happens. Her failures and their attempts at heartwarming moments never meet to make a fully realized character named "Yui Hirasawa." Instead she always manages by some miracle to push her worthless self through seemingly impossible odds given the setting. I would hesitate to call her a mary sue, despite her being that, but the bigger problem is that she is that in a world where every character is that. They all do everything with little effort and some slight positivity, it's like a self-help mary-su-niverse. So her dumb traits are just a mild annoyance until she faces a challenge and then despite doing nothing of value or putting in any effort she is given every consolation and win this show can throw at her. K-on you got some splainin' to do! I feel a pain in my heart, I think this show is trying to pull on it, but it's writing is too weak to play tug-o-war with my cholesterol filled veins.
I would like to say these problems with characterization were limited to Yui con corn queso senpai, but all the other "characters" have a similar problem. Mio is supposed to be like the sweet, smart and quirky one, I think, to the point that she has an on campus fanclub but she only does this a lot in one or two episodes which are explicitly about pointing this out. The blonde one is supposed to be... Umm the other smart one? The imaginative one? I'm not sure what her characterization is supposed to be, she is so muddled and undefined that I find it hard to parcel out what their intentions were with this character. Ritsu probably has the most defined character in the show and that is that she is an arrogant asshole, I should probably relate but I don't. Twin Tail gets the most episodes from her perspective that aren't from Yui's, most likely because she had the hottest selling figurine or something and I think the episodes from her perspective in particular illustrate why K-on is poorly written. In season two episodes thirteen and sixteen she is the POV character for most of these episodes we see her interact alone with other members of the light music club. In a better show these interactions would be used to define both characters more either through opposition or similarity. In episode sixteen Azusa even commentates on this possibility which makes it all the more laughably bad when it doesn't happen in any of these scenes. We don't learn anything more about the girls when they have moments away from the group than when they do. This is similar to the problem I outline in my Kantei review about how new situations the characters are put in don't give us any new information about them or reveal new aspects to their personalities. After every interaction that should make them more personable and/or interesting instead we get more nothing. In Love Live I thought the characters were boring and one note in their execution, but at least I could say I understood what their one note was supposed to be. They also were able to play off each other as foils because their personalities were defined enough to show how the girls were different in the first place. Three out of five of K-ons main characters don't have a personality I can understand on a basic level or apply a common archetype to and they aren't relatable in a more complex sense either. Yui's personality is garbage and Ritsu is an extremely simplistic take on the arrogant trope. Love Live wins again.

Someone might see all that and then say "Well yeah but does any of that matter?" I would immediately retort with "It depends." To get my reason for doing this entire review out of the way again, remember that I was repeatedly told two things about this show. One, that it is the bestest thing ever by a lot of people and two, that the characters feel like a real life group of friends. So these criticisms matter to me, because they tear away at both of those ideas. When I hear characters feel real in a story I assume that means a lot of things about them, but for your sake dear reader I'll condense them down to two possible options and you can imagine a mix of them in between. I can imagine that someone means by that these characters are good by the standards we usually judge characters by in a story, they are well defined, are relatable to their target audience, they have believable motives and reasons for doing things, they have believable pros & cons given their situation, they can be easily discerned from one another in ways more than looks, every character has at least one purpose for being in the story if not many for each character and they have arcs and development that make the journey we see them go on mean something. You know the things a creative writing teacher would look for aside from grammar and spelling errors. Secondly, it can mean they feel real more in a raw documentary style, personal or some experimental sense where an author or script writer is attempting to reach a new semblance of realism by either trying something new or just taking things directly from real life and trying to transcribe them in a way that makes them interesting as a story. I'm being a little bit purposefully vague with the second option because creativity should leave a gray area for people to try something new. I have already touched upon one type of example of the second option in my Totoro review. That aside, the main point of all this is K-on doesn't live up to either one. In fact it is painfully in the red in some areas as described ad nausea above.

So was the story all terrible? Ok, I'll be nice end the story analysis on a semi-good note here. There were a few episodes in this show where the teachers back story and the history of the light music club was shown. Every time they showed a flashback to what her life was like and what the light music club was like back then I kept thinking "I wish I was watching that show instead." Her life and iterations of the club seemed far more interesting than the one I had to sit through and watch. I think you know a shows characters are bad when you find yourself exploring the potential possibilities of the side characters to distract yourself from whats going on with what the show actually gives you. Also they played metal, so for a second I felt my pulse again and the teachers singing wasn't bad. Maybe it was "vicarious quality" and I've just convinced myself it's good because it's sandwiched by blandness back to back, but this was probably the height of this show for me all around.

The art in K-on is below average. It isn't the worst I have ever seen but it is the worst art I have seen on a show considered the best of it's genre. It is also the worst art out of any of the shows I have reviewed. Even with Kill Me Baby I can argue that it had a "style" to it so some of it's awful artistic choices at least had an excuse. K-on is bad even just amongst school club shows and all the ones I have seen have had passable to bad art.
I noticed that the girls bodies and faces have this odd tendency to get scrunched up and not properly center their facial features when they have a lot of movement. Their eyes, mouth and nose recede into the center of their face in a bizarre way. Which is weird, because the problem with a lot of anime shows is the opposite where the eyes and mouth have a hard time keeping within the structure of a characters face. So you'll sometimes see these moving parts "clip" with the border of their face and sometimes just end up outside. I think this has to do with the fact that movement is sometimes grafted onto a 3D like model, but the face is still on a 2D plane so the features don't always match up or at least that would be my amateurish guess knowing zero about animation. I'm not sure at all what would cause K-on's problems, maybe it was a precursor to the "little face" memes.
This show is often labelled amongst those as being about "cute girls doing cute things." Well the girls need to be cute first, which I'm about to argue they aren't and they need to do "things" which I have argued in the rest of the review they have done poorly. I hate to so blatantly quote another reviewer but when it came to K-on's art I had to keep asking a very important question "What is wrong with your FACEEEEEEEEE?" Yui and the gang must like potatoes because they look pretty mashed here. Her sister and Ritsu might have encephalitis. That blonde girl's face and hair... Don't look into her eyes, you'll get lost in her eyebrows dead lights. How can someone look at that and say "Yeah this is an acceptable bit of art for a show we want to be a hit." They all have baby Grinch syndrome too. Alright I'll stop hating on their faces but my god they were awful.
Aside from their faces, there is also the problem that they all look way too young to be in the grade they're in. Every single one of the main characters looks like a toddler. Now granted I can sympathize with them a little bit here in that I too look like a gigantic toddler, but their characterization or lack thereof and their odd toddlerish looks just made this show even more excruciatingly childish. It does make me believe though that this show is intended for a much younger audience and for some reason out of touch, infantile older westerners have convinced themselves it is somehow appealing anyway.
I will give the show some credit here, not for what they did, but for what they didn't do. Given the above and how the characters look extremely young even for shows like this it would be especially appalling if this show tried to do fanservice and general sexual pandering. Luckily for the sake of my mind and the good of all humanity they don't really do this, the girls wear outfits that are realistic to their situation and the furthest they ever push anything is with bathing suits and they are almost always worn in appropriate contexts. I don't know if my face has enough muscles in it to handle the cringe that would have ensued had they tried to do that with this anime and this "art style."
General movement is just bad in this. When it isn't one of the few times they play music their limbs and body motion just looks off and during speedy sequences it looks disjointed. The backgrounds looked horrendous a lot of the time when they weren't in a confined space. I remember the mandatory beach episode looking particularly bad in this.
I will say there was a scene in episode eight of the second season where Yui is a child in what I assume is a playground and this scene had a lot more detail and generally looked better than most of the episodes of this show. This scene was about half a minute long and it was the highlight of the show's art out of a little less than forty episodes.
I want to mention something I noticed about this show and Love Live and that I started to see in a few other shows subsequently. In scenes where a lot of the girls are just lined up talking to each other or otherwise in a full group, I would find myself laughing at the way their faces looked when they were just standing there not talking, there was something humorous about it, but I couldn't quite pinpoint what at first. Then I realized that the characters faces never move when they aren't talking and their eyes don't blink. So it just makes them look like a derpy anime mannequin. This little bit of artificiality got me to notice that the girls almost never speak over each other by accident despite being a relatively large group of friends. As in conversations don't feel organic and real but rather like a cause and effect domino series of exposition. The animation on top of being bad is stiff and the characters look even more unnatural than is usual for animation.
There is a huge continuity error near the end. An unbelievably important plot point where Yui stupidly cuts too much of her hair and makes her bangs look terrible and this was so important we had to spend almost five minutes of a twenty four minute episode dwelling on it. Anyway in the next episode her hair is back to the way it was before cutting it, again even though in the timeline of the show only a few days should have passed at most. Maybe some people consider this "nitpicking" at this point and I probably wouldn't have brought this up if things ended here, but what makes this mistake even worse is in the next episode they change it again and she is back to having her botched hair job. Guess what happens in the episode after that? Her hair goes back to normal. How do you make this many mistakes concerning a stupid plot point around a characters appearance you previously thought was so important it needed damn near a whole episode dedicated to it?

This is one of those shows where people fawn over the voice actors, even more so than they do the actual characters. Which if that is the appeal is hearing these women and their singing voices, well than why not just like them as a musical act? Why does a lackluster show need to be made around this? Time and effort was wasted animating this show. I'm wasting time reviewing it, time I could have spent doing more important things... Like finding content for my porn Tumblr, trying Fentanyl, taking the tide pod challenge and racking up more hours on Steam. You know I jested there for a second, but I really wonder, why does a show like this need to be animated? What does a show about not so cute girls doing regular things gain by being animated especially when it is badly animated and it brings nothing interesting to the table? I think this is a fundamental question to ask about something that is animated, does it do anything or gain any value added from being animated in the first place? As bad as some of the other shows have been that I reviewed, I would argue that every single one of them before this, had a good claim for needing to be animated for one reason or another. To go back to a show I already mentioned in this review Girls Und Panzer, I can at least say it's subject matter about tankery made it's animation a necessity, despite it having the same school club structure as k-on. I can say that idol shows are already an over saturated thing in Japan, so Love Live gained something by being animated, by helping it stand out amongst a crowd and trying to pull in an anime viewing audience that might not necessarily care about idols. Nothing about k-on warranted it needing to be an animated show in fact I think it makes it harder to fawn over the voice actors when the ugly art serves to be a barrier to entry. I would rather the real life Japanese VA's just have a show about being in a light music club.
I didn't really like the music, but I didn't really hate it either, it was just kind of a thing that existed. Aside from their music, I noticed one of the shows bedding tracks sounds nearly identical to the Pop Corn Song, enough to be plagiarism. What a bunch of hacks, I mean can you imagine stealing someones work in the same field as you? Anyway, I would give the track a light to decent six, TRANSI-TIONNN. As I said earlier I think the music was the wrong fit for a relaxing premise and I can tell especially in the second season, they realized how limiting the concept of a "light" music club was with the school club formula they wanted to milk with this. They really wanted more members, because more female leads equals more merchandise, but the existing cast was already useless and bland, so adding even more people would just clutter the band and the music they were pretending to make. If this had been a show about the school band, this would have given them the excuse they wanted to add more members, but nah we gotta do this light music club stuff.

I waited until the end to call this show boring, because I expect people who like this show to see that as most peoples central criticism of this, but as I've shown all throughout this review, it's not just that it's "boring," it's boring because of a series of a failures emanating from it's core. The show is a paint by numbers take on the school club formula and it tries it's hardest to hit every single cliche possible within this sub genre. Even with this lazy structure laid out for them, the show still manages to underutilize it's core premise and be obstinately against doing something interesting with music. The characters don't feel real and are at best mildly less annoying than usual and at worst terrible, unfunny cliches. The main character is just moronic and unrelatable. It has a child like mindset but without the endearment and a whole lot of sappy overly sentimental attempted recreations of school life. Only with all the struggle and hardship filed away, leaving us with no strong character arcs, development or contrast for the so called relaxing moments. It's art is below average and looks horrendous on occasion, but it's biggest sin is that it doesn't make up for the lack of interesting things in every other aspect of the show. In fact it's animation is so poor it leaves me wondering why this show needed to be animated in the first place. The music is bland for it's genre and doesn't really add to my enjoyment in any way. This show is boring, but not for the reasons usually stated because "nothing happens" or "because it's too lighweight" a lot of cliche things happen and it's has plenty of girth in the whole lot of low quality writing department. I had to force myself to get through the second season, it was painful. I kept wanting to watch anything else and I found I had to slap my own hand away from going to my browser and my audio player to try to escape this. I was hoping at the end of this shit rainbow I would run into a pot of gold that justified all the terrible things I saw and all the praise this show gets. Alas there was nothing to be had, it was as bad from the first episode as it was from the last. This show is just every other school club show, but blander and with worse writing. Yui-son goku deku sensei I'm sorry, but Nico Yazawa is the better animated pop star. Say it with me "NICO NICO NIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII!"

This got to be ONE the dumbest shows ever made. That's just my personal opinion obviously and my bestfriend recommended this anime to me. Well, thank you for wasting my time. This is very first review by the way. But this show is so infuriatingly dumb I had to write a review about this show.
No Pros and ONLY cons.
Why?

PROS:
-None.

CONS:
-The four super generic girls are annoying as hell. Well, except for Mio, who is the most "acceptable" character in the bunch...
From most to least annoying:
... 1. Yui (I want to drown this retard in a toilet bowl.)
2. Ritsu (Ugh..)
3. Mugi (Thick-brows is somewhat ok -_-')
4. Mio (The most "acceptable" character in the anime, but that's all. Well, fortunately for her, she's NOT annoying like the rest.)

-Slice of life is not a bad genre (for me) all in all, and this show is pretty much slice of life. But still it's very bad.
-Moe-visuals are not for me. Background scenery were just passable but its not enough redeem the moe character designs which, again are ugly for me. Art gets 4 out of 10. The art section is highest out of the rest of the other scores in other sections, FYI.
-The show tries to be extremely "cute" or moe (When its not.)
-The humor here is only for the most simple-minded people (Because its so bloody annoying and very not funny)
-I love music in general; I play the guitar in my freetime and this is a show about music, but in all honesty, this show is HUGE insult to music. Majority of the anime consist of the girls just have their boring tea-time.

Conclusion: This anime is nothing more than a moe-infested trash heap that only caters to moe-tards. I'd rather rewatch Mars of Destruction than actually having to complete this. At least MoD was hilarious.

Quick overview of every aspect

Story: some girls form a band and one is really stupid but she wants to join the band. They let her join band, they barely practice, and somehow manage to preform better then most professional musicians at their "concerts". Thats the whole show. Their are some filler or beach episodes but they do nothing.


Art: Cute, holds up to modern day, works with the show.


Sound: The songs are pretty good and cute, and every effect added also sounds great, very good.

...
Character: Every Character has 1 attribute that makes them diffrent from another, and thats it. The backstory's are shit, the characters are bland, and I only like one of them because she has more then 1 trait.


Enjoyment: Eh, can only watch one episode at a time.


Overall: The thing that saves this show is art and sound, but thats not enough to save a whole show. Don't recommend

What did I just watch? I get that, slice of life, for the most part is very uneventful and the plot almost nonexistent. I get it. I've watched a fair share of SOL animes and they were all decent enough to entertain me, so what is this?

If you're worried about spoilers don't worry, there is literally nothing to spoil. I can't even think of anything to spoil.

Story 1/10
13 episodes of watching some girls eat, talk, and practice playing as a band.
You watch Yui get up for breakfast, go to school, go to club practice, eat, then go home to do homework. If you're thinking 'but ... hey that's what a slice of life anime is all about'. I guess you would be right, but there is actually nothing going on, no comedy, no romance, no drama, there is even hardly any music. Okay maybe I was exaggerating, but the comedy usually consists of "woops I forgot my homework and it's due today, hahaha",while the drama would be like "wow I caught a cold that means I can't go to practice, sad face". I can see that the sole reason people are liking this is because it's cute.

Art 7/10
Pretty good,and fluid animations. Although if you look at the characters for longer than a few seconds you can tell they all have the same face, just different hair styles. It's only Mio that actually looks different.

Sound 7/10
Music is alright, when they actually start playing, which they don't for the majority of this show.

Character 6/10
I guess everyone was unique in their own way, but then again nothing exciting ever happens so we don't see much of anything from anyone.

Enjoyment 3/10
Watching this made me constantly rethink my life choices. It got to the point where I was getting pretty sad, thinking about "Do I really have nothing better to do, then watch anime girls living out their awfully normal and uneventful high school lives?"

Overall 3/10
This remains one of the most memorable anime I've ever watched. To this day I still think about how I watched 13 episodes of anime girls doing nothing and wonder why I ever made that decision.
I would only recommend this to hardcore Slice of Life fans.

The spiritual successor that Seinfeld never wanted, this truly is a show about nothing. Girls initially pretending to be interested in music get to together to eat sweets and call each other nick names. There is no real dialogue or story or content. The author simply copy and pasted 5 generic anime girls, made a list of all the food they liked, and then proceeded to dictate that list to us. Writhing at the thought of doing anything other than this, the author eventually caves and makes his characters "play a show" that they never practiced for, but absolutely "rock the house". There is nothing ... else to continue this review.

Art is standard. Sound is standard. This show is a complete waste of time.

I've never been a fan of this oddly specific genre of anime where a band (no pun intended) of school girls do absolutely nothing because there's no real story, so obviously this show isn't for me. But what I hoped for was that the implementation of music to the show would help it discern from every other one of these types of anime. Unfortunately, I had no such luck. Despite this show being about musicians, the soundtrack is mediocre and the characters rarely play their own instruments. The animation was very bright and pretty, there was no story, the sound was servicable, the characters were ... KAWAII DESU, and I didn't really like it at all. I mean try it out by all means.