Don’t Say ‘K-On!’
I was originally going to attach this to the end of the Cross Game article, since I was already talking about K-On!, but I figured it deserved its own post.
I’ve found myself recently fascinated not so much by K-On! itself, but the fan-produced stuff that it has spun off from it. In particular, I’ve gone nuts for this video:
Now I’ve been thinking about what it is that makes a rather silly Idolm@ster based dance sequence so fun and addictive, and the conclusion I arrived at is that it’s basically the combination of a whole heap of things that are varying levels of wrong into something which is oh-so right. K-On!? Wrong. Slightly overweight Indian guy dancing like a maniac? Wrong. Idolm@ster? Wrong. (It’s a game I wouldn’t play in front of friends and family, I’ll put it that way). “Don’t Say ‘Lazy’”? C’mon, as if there aren’t at least ten better J-pop anime theme songs this season. A remix of “Don’t Say ‘Lazy’” with a heavy Indian influence? I’m not even gonna comment…
But bring all these things together and suddenly we have win on our hands. But I’d also say the sequence has an element of randomness to it that’s so sorely missing from the show itself. Now, I’m no fan of random comedy, since I think any monkey can write random and there’s a chance it’ll be funny. What I am a fan of is slight deviations from randomness that, if you look at from the right angle, turn out to be incredibly ordered and carefully thought through (South Park and Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei are examples of what I’m talking about). I guess my point is that there aren’t many jokes in K-On! that are like this… hell, there aren’t many jokes in K-On! that aren’t predictable. I think that’s why so many people were crying out for more Sawako when she was first introduced: she was at least someone who would be unpredictable every now and then. Pity she hasn’t been given enough screentime to really make full use of it.
I guess the other thing that lets the Idolm@ster style “Don’t Say ‘Indy’” video works is that they replace the “big-boned” Indian guy with the much more aesthetically appealing K-On! girls. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the Indian guy, I love that he has the energy to go absolutely nuts, but I’d much rather be watching the super-moe K-On! girls. There’s just something so amusing about watching them, knowing what they’re copying (and how that itself is a copy, so they’re therefore taking part in a rather ironic copy of a copy).
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Click here for the comparison video. Oh yeah, and feel free to share wacky K-On! related videos (Nico or Youtube) in the comments. We’re starting to get something of a collection of them on the forum. It might be interesting to catalogue them.
Oh my god, K-ON! is becoming more like a disease~!
Oh thought this was going to be the one where you finally laid bear all of your thoughts on this show. Disappointing….
Anyway, K-On is basically just a template whereby the world has been given these moeblob characters with no real definable character traits to do with as they please. That’s it’s “secret”, that nobody can really support or dispute any of the content generated by this series or it’s fans.
@AC
This isn’t really new. Most big anime get this sort of fan-generated content. I mean, you just have to look up “Code Geass” on Youtube. Or, better yet, look up “Spinzaku”.
@Kaioshin Sama
Probably not going to happen. I’ve given K-On! about as much recognition as I think deserves. Most readers probably have a fair enough idea what I think of the show, and even if I wanted to say something, I couldn’t put it better than this.
But you might be onto something about the correlation between the lack of traits in the characters and the fan-generated content. Certainly, it’s true that Mio has very little in the way of definitive characteristics, and the same is probably true of Yui and Azusa, though to a slightly lesser extent. I’m not completely convinced, though, since this tends to happen when and anime gets really big.
@Sorrow-Kun: It works for voice actors who get really big too I’ve found. Try going on niconico one time and just browse around a little and I guarantee you’ll bump into a Rie Kugimiya themed video of her voice broken up into a song before long. Usually it’s a Kirby one.
There’s also Norio Wakamoto ones as well with his other roles being replaced with popular lines from Code Geass, but it doesn’t seem to match the sheer number of Rie Kugimiya vids. Strange, but true.
The real question though is what drives niconico otaku to create these videos. Is it a process or is it just entirely random? That’s kind of what I’m curious to find out.
Love? Nah. There’s probably several reasons, but I think one of them would be just a case of being in on a joke. It’s just meme propagation ultimately. But it can be quite fun and creative at times (as this video shows).