[shino]
I hope you didn’t facepalm when you heard the word “keionbu.” If you did, you probably won’t like what I’m about to say.
K-ON was a bit more controversial than most moe shows, and needlessly so. While its premise isn’t anything unique, the over-the-top presentation and glorification of moe was a bit too much for some to handle, forcing it to play the role of either a punching bag or an object of worship. From a meta perspective, it was pretty much a scapegoat for moe haters and fans to attack and praise.
Really, there’s not much to say about the show that everyone on the internet hasn’t already said, but to sum it up, it’s a spectacular example of how to do moe right. I always say that it’s not easy to create the kind of characters who end up with hundreds of posts on Danbooru, despite the superficial appearance of moe characters being a flat set of traits, and I think K-ON proves that. In the eyes of many, including myself, it’s one of the finest examples of pure, fluffy, delicious 2D bliss.
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In other news, back in the summer, lolikitsune released a demo of his meta visual novel, CCY-senpai wa 17sai. The final product is probably still a long way off, but since blogosphere parody/commentary style games aren’t too common (the only other one being Hinano’s RenAi Blogger), it garnered its share of attention.
This is a bit of a pointless reward since the final product won’t be released in 2009, but from the taste I’ve gotten of the game, I can honestly say that I’m looking forward to it. Games like this are usually irrelevant to the people outside of the community, but for the bloggers and readers involved, the experience is like nothing else. Everything from the dialogue to the character designs look great, and there’s even a bit of potential in the story – I still like to think of Gakuensuki as a metaphor for our blogging “careers”, but we’ll see about that. The bottom line is that if you’re an active anime blogger and you haven’t played the demo yet, it would be a NICE IDEA to do so.
~ ETERNAL
つづく
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Oh yes, I remember that K-ON hype as if it were yesterday.
That’s actually an interesting way to put it. It’s a bit similar to my case. On one side, I have ignorant fans who make the image of K-ON worse off by overexerting it on others. On the other side, I have people who just like to troll and/or moe-haters who feed off from the ignorance of the latter side. All in all, I get a never-ending cycle of idiocy.
But yea, it’s important to realize K-ON is just a light form of entertainment; nothing more nor less. But I guess people’s perceptions of things gets blurred by too much/too little expectations.
My problem with K-On! isn’t really the moe stuff — I actually enjoyed the first half quite a bit. But the second half is basically the same thing, except with Azusa added in. It felt really lazy to me.
I find a striking resemblance between the behavior of people bashing K-ON! online and my own behavior wrt music when I was a teenager. I remember being a fairly obnoxious elitist alt-rock listener that disregarded anything that was popular as trash and unworthy of my attention. Nowadays, I regard music (and anime) as entertainment and therefore feel no need to enter the pseudo-intellectual debate regarding whether a particular title has “depth” or “meaning” or “substance”. IMHO, although everyone has the right to dislike whatever they wish to dislike, the sheer amount of hate professed for K-On! has passed that into mindless groupthink.
If people were looking for depth in K-On, you’d know something is _wrong_. It’s not like it ever came across as pretentiously deep, it’s just fluff for God’s sake.
That being said, I’m certainly no fan of K-On myself; I merely acknowledge that it did its purpose with superb competency, that is to suck otaku’s wallets dry.
I understand why K-ON! isn’t exactly hailed as the greatest show of the millennium or anything, but I don’t understand why there is so much K-ON hate. K-ON could have worked and become yet another shining page in Kyoto Animation’s portfolio, right next to Lucky Star, if it were simply better paced and there was more evidence of effort in the episodes design. Many of the later episodes simply were not entertaining and they focused on random spot-gags and moeshots instead of writing. It’s an ok show, better than lots of the other crap this year, but really is there need for such rabid hate? :P