girl cartoons

So, the first episode of the new season of K-ON!! has aired, and under all but the most superficial scrutiny it’s a completely different show - whether for better or for worse, one can’t yet know. But it’s definitely not just another 13 episodes of K-ON!.

I side firmly with the crowd who loved the hell out of season 1 - it sits among the 10/10s on my MyAnimeList account, for a very unique, very specific reason - it was *technically*-perfect. A technically-perfect specimen of the “girls do thing” slice-of-life genre. The animation was lively and frame-perfect, the voice cast were stellar, the joke timing impeccable. The character development was subtle and well-woven, and the show did a brilliant job of quickly and efficiently creating an emotional bond with the viewer. Essentially, if even the smallest part of you was open to what K-ON! had to offer, your trust was repaid in spades.

Granted, it’s not hard to understand the mindset of those who hated or disregarded it - it really didn’t offer much substance beyond that artificial emotional connection, and it was tailor-made to appeal to a very particular sort of customer. I use the term “customer” over “audience” here intentionally.

What this all equates to is that K-ON! was, essentially, a perfect product - nothing could possibly have been added to or taken from it to make it any more brilliantly-marketable. Which I unashamedly admit I am perfectly fine with.

Of course, anyone could tell you that, but I have my own theories about why K-ON! was so perfect, what elements of it served that emotional resonance. It’s something central to the slice-of-life genre, and I think its absence is by far the biggest departure from K-ON! in K-ON!! as well as the first OVA: K-ON! was intimately and obsessively focused on life.

Every moment of K-ON! was spent in close, delighted scrutiny with the details of everyday life. Overarching consistency be damned, what mattered in K-ON! was seeking out the inherent joy in every banal moment. It was a “slice of life” in the truest sense of the phrase - even the trappings of plot the show sprinkled on top every once in a while were swept away as quickly as they settled. Who cares about practicing for Budoukan? These cookies are divine!

While this is, I think, one of the things which most irritates non-fans about the slice-of-life genre, I would posit that for fans it is in fact the point. How much further do you have to look than Genshiken spending a full 22-minute episode on Madarame trying to tell Kasukabe that her nose-hair is sticking out? Slice-of-life in any medium thrives on taking the banal and analyzing and interrogating it until it becomes either absurd or relatable. K-ON! did so masterfully, with a cast of characters who, if somewhat ridiculous, were internally-consistent to a fault. Perfect simulacra of human beings.

The recent OVA departed from this strongly, and I think embraced all of the facets of the TV series which non-fans so rightfully criticized. The characters lost that sense of consistency and personality, and became mere vehicles for jokes off of the tropes they had perfected. The storytelling moved from a disjointed series of utterly-enchanting moments to an emotionally-detached summary of events. Distant shots of the girls doing… things… while uninspired incidental music looped behind them made up a disheartening amount of the runtime. Those wonderful little moments kept happening, but the director was too busy laughing at that Yui’s clumsiness or how much of a scaredy-cat that Mio is to give them a passing glance. The show discarded an already-perfect heart for the sake of a half-developed brain, which it showed no real interest of improving. It *became* the show everyone had been criticizing all along.

K-ON!! episode 1 appears to be following in the OVA’s footsteps. Yui has transformed from a somewhat air-headed but at some level earnest character into a walking failed punch line whose actions bear only the slightest relation to external stimuli. Mio has become even more of a fearful blob of moe. The hamhanded voice-over exposition has devolved from tongue-in-cheek to depressingly sincere. Hilarity ensues just off-screen, just out of earsight, while the viewer sits dumbfounded, unable to articulate just exactly when the spell was broken. K-ON!! has become a parody of itself.

But that’s actually the one hope I have for season 2, as flimsy as it may be - if K-ON!! steps up to become an intelligent response to K-ON!, it could communicate an extremely powerful message. The first episode contained hints of this - if the underlying theme of season 1 was “Budoukan would be cool, but right now it’s teatime”, the theme of season 2 episode 1 is “What are we supposed to do when teatime is over?”

K-ON!! finds itself in a somewhat opposite place to another popular slice-of-life show, Hidamari Sketch. In the former, the majority of the central cast including the ostensible main character is in their last year, and must cope with the fact that they are a short year away from leaving behind their shy junior; in the latter, the pivotal character of the show is among the juniors being left behind. Each of these shows is in a position to make a potent statement about maturity and the passage of time - Yui et al desperately want a way to feel like they aren’t abandoning Azusa; Yuno et al have to come to grips with their impending abandonment.

I think the shows will arrive at very different conclusions to this overall situation, but I’ll focus on K-ON!! here.

K-ON!!’s stance as yet, as made explicit by Yui near the end of the episode, is that teatime still hasn’t ended, and that that is perfectly fine. Straining themselves to build an artificial new Houkago Tea Time that Azusa can play with (in the sense of a toy as much as a band) is a futile and perhaps even undesirable endeavor. They can’t craft a new circle of friends for Azusa, and it would be wrong of them to try. In short, who cares about next year when we have tea to drink right now? Why should we force ourselves to grow up, at the price of our childhood? Where K-ON! perfectly distilled the timelessness of time spent with good friends, K-ON!! has charged itself with addressing the reality outside of the bandroom.

Whether or not that’s a defensible conclusion, and whether or not K-ON!! will muster enough substance to defend it, is as yet undetermined. But I’m nothing if not a doe-eyed optimist.