K-ON!! Episode 20

So since pretty much every aniblogger on the planet is talking about this, I figure I should too.

I've been complaining about how K-ON!! season two has little to do with music in a show that is supposed to be about a band. While episode 20 was finally a concert episode (Indeed, their last concert), it didn't win me over again for that reason. Instead, it made me realize something about K-ON!! as a whole.

I'm not sure why I didn't realize this before, but K-ON!! isn't about music. It's not about a band; music honestly plays a very small role. Instead K-ON!! is a slice of life show about the people in a high school band. There is a very small difference there, but it causes the show to go from just "okay" to "great". A very large part of what makes the show so great was episode 20, and the fact that every major character had a role to play made the episode that much better. As http://enryoshitaino.tumblr.com/ said, episode 20 of K-ON!! was good because of all the episodes leading up to it. For me though, episodes 1-19 of K-ON!! were also made better because they led up to episode 20. Before that, they were a lot of random episodes that didn't seem to build towards anything. That's fine for, and expected from, a slice of life show, but all of them were somewhat validated at the end of episode 20. For me, the first 19 episodes of K-ON!! were simply there to endear the characters to me, which is why I nearly cried at the end of episode 20. (I really wish I could cry at anime/movies. Even when I feel like I should, or even want to, I can't.)

However, no matter how good episode 20 was, the next few episodes will help to make or break the show. They'll have to be a good balance between the regular slice of life episodes and episodes like this last one. If they're all just slice of life, the show feels like it will fizzle, but too many like 20, and the emotional impact of them will become expected, even boring.

I'm pretty sure I didn't express myself as well as I'd like to, but I think I got my point across.

Edit: I should clarify some of those statements. First, everything I wrote about K-ON!! was referring to the second season, hence the "!!". Episode 20 of K-ON!! can't compare to episode 12 of K-ON!.

I would argue that K-ON! is about a band that happens to be made up of high school girls, whereas K-ON!! is more about high school girls who happen to be in a band, which as I've said in the past is not a direction I liked. My point was that K-ON!! 20 redeemed the second season somewhat, not that it made it as good as or better than the first.