Ending B

What's a girl, to do when her one and only dream of forming a band with her best friend is falling apart? First the light music club is being disbanded for lack of members. Then her best friend tries to back out of their "dream." More importantly, their newest member has never played anything more difficult than the castanets.

Welcome to K-On! This anime is based off a manga of the same name by Kakifly. The four main characters are all first year students in high school and are looking for a club to join. Ritsu wants to join the light music club but learns that all of the members graduated last year. Unless four students join by the end of the month it will be disbanded. Ritsu recruits Mio, Tsumugi, and Yui and together they become the only members in the club. The next step is forming a band, but none of them can really play that well, or at all in Yui's case.

Mio takes matters into her own hands, Tsumugi is amused.

The characters are all interesting enough. Ritsu is the overly-zealous ambitious dreamer. Mio is her sarcastic voice of reason. Yui is a typical "moe" klutz who tries her hardest to do ... well she spent most of this episode trying to figure out what to do. Tsumugi seems to be very sheltered, but I can't define her as easily as the others. Her scene at the fast food restaurant confuses me...

On a scale from 1 to awesome this is ... pretty creepy.

I'm really hoping we get to hear the band play every episode. This first episode let us hear a quick jam session designed to lure Yui into joining the club.

Yui isn't afraid to speak her mind.

Sure they suck right now, but we're not talking a Kotomi of Clannad level of sucking. Even this early on it was still kind of enjoyable to hear the band play.

The band responds to Yui's bluntness.

It feels a bit like Yui and Tsumugi are only there because the script told them to be. They both acquiesced to Ritsu's peer pressure a bit too quickly to feel natural. The writers probably just wanted to get the four girls in the band quickly.

The club gets its four members!

Oh, yeah, the opening and ending themes are pretty awesome.

So I guess this means they won't always suck.

K-On just started airing last week in Japan and so far is off to a good start. Let's hope that it keeps up the pace.