Okay, first of all, I know it’s been a while, and I apologize. I keep getting close to getting a job, and then I’ll get rejected, and it’s screwing with me psychologically, like I’m in limbo. Excuses, excuses, but that’s the fact, Jack.
Anyways, I’m going to talk about something a little off my usual beat. I’m a man. I’m also an anime fan, and one that is at the mercy of a friend who doesn’t really care about my taste in shows or genres. So if she wants to watch some goofy, moe-moe, slice-of-life, highschool girls show, I’m whipped enough that I’ll usually watch it with her. Which brings us to K-on!(!).
K-on! was popular a couple years back, though I believe its significance has faded somewhat as new anime has taken its place, but it’s about a group of disparate highschool girls that form a band in the “light music club”. The anime showcases their daily lives and adventures and focuses a lot on the friendships between the four girls, Yui, Ritsu, Mio, and Mugi. It’s one of those shows where there are maybe two male characters in the entire cast, and they barely show up, but it is damnably cute and earnest for the most part, and the music is pretty catchy.
Granted, the music is not actually a huge part of the show. It seems like most of the season is spent with them getting ready for a concert, but you won’t actually see them play until the actual day, and even then you don’t really hear the whole song. The opening and especially the closing songs are great, though, with a special emphasis on “Don’t Say Lazy”. The real focus of the show is the interactions between the four main characters. Yui’s air-headed natural talent and determination, Ritsu’s tomboyish antics, Mio’s dedicated level-headedness, and Mugi’s… well, Mugi is a bit of an oddball, really, but she’s amusing.
Now, as usual, I have to find something to complain about, and, like Sword Art Online, the thing I dislike is to be found in the latter half of the show. In this case, it is the heretofore unmentioned fifth wheel of the cast, the slightly younger Azusa. Azusa is introduced near the end of season 1, a talented guitarist who finds the girls to be far too laid back to be true musicians, but ends up getting drawn into their group as a friend and band member anyway.
Simple enough, right? It should be, but, for reasons I cannot understand, the show slowly ends up being almost solely about Azusa. I find this offensive. The whole draw of the show, the reason people stick around to even see Azusa, is because of the strength of the original four girls as characters. The fact that they become, essentially, window dressing to this new character is a detriment to the show.
Secondly, Azusa herself is not a particularly appealing character. Her schtick is mostly to try and get the other girls to focus on practicing instead of doing their silly slice-of-life antics. Okay, fine, but it ends up making her into something of a stick-in-the-mud. They try to balance this out by making her “cute”. Personally, I never really bought it. They put cat ears on her once, made her say “nyan” (something she hated by the way), and almost every single fan of the show fell for it. It was one, solitary moment, and we were supposed to buy into her “cuteness”. I’m sorry, but her bad attitude and stand-offish-ness made much more of an impact on me than the nickname “Azu-nyan”.
Finally, although the show’s emotional focus rests squarely on Azusa’s narrow shoulders, especially near the end of the second season, the anime itself doesn’t really seem quite sure what to do with the character most of the time. There are several episodes that feature separating Azusa from the rest of the group. The main four will have their (more entertaining) adventure, and Azusa will hang out with Yui’s sister and her friend or end up home alone. This happens a lot, and, while it helps to not have Azusa around to be a wet blanket to the main girls, there’s still episode time wasted on checking in on Azusa. It’s tedious and unnecessary.
I understand what purpose the character is supposed to serve. She’s the one left behind when the others graduate, and she’s left alone to carry on the legacy of the band and the club. Okay, fine, but I think it would’ve served that end better if Azusa had integrated better with the rest of the cast. She’s an outsider, by her own actions, for the entire show. And yet, despite that, when the K-on!! movie came out, a big part of plot was writing a goodbye song for Azusa. Once again, she is given far more importance than she deserves or has earned.
I know it seems like a silly thing to complain about. It’s such a light-hearted, goofy, harmless show. Still, I consider it a problem, and one that needn’t have come about. All the time spent with Azusa I would rather have spent with Mio (my personal favorite) and Ritsu, or Yui, or Mugi. Or even their teacher, Sawa. I liked those characters. Those were the characters that got me into the show. I don’t care about Azusa, and I don’t think that her story is the one that’s worth paying attention to.
An Otaku in Wisconsin 