Another look at K-ON! 01: The darker side of KyoAni’s new anime

Posted: April 5, 2009 | Author: flomu | Filed under: Uncategorized |4 Comments »

Enma Ai has come, and the revenge has been granted.

Jigoku Shoujo only appears when somebody has taken revenge on somebody else, or somebody has asked for revenge, right?

Because we have not seen any reason for Yui herself to feel the need to send somebody to Hell, we can only assume that she is the recipient of another person’s revenge.  Thus it follows logically that the rest of the episode, and indeed, the rest of the series, is all part of the revenge that somebody has placed on Yui.

 

Proof that K-ON! is a twisted anime

In the opening scene, Yui rushes off to school, thinking that she is late when she really isn’t.

This essentially shows that the red string has been pulled before the start of this episode, and that Yui is already suffering.  Yui is not actually late, but is rushed and hurried into thinking that she is late.  The clock in her room has been set forward an hour by Jigoku Shoujo, and Yui is actually woken up by an associate of Jigoku Shoujo, not her real relative.  These two manipulations of reality combine to give Yui the impression that she is late when she actually isn’t.

From this one scene alone, we can assume that in life, Yui was a punctual girl who was on-time to everything, a perfectionist.  She is scared of being late, and thinks of being late as a sin.

In addition, as Yui has already been dubbed a perfectionist, we can now begin to make guesses as to why she is the recipient of revenge.  Because she wants to achieve, Yui was probably a teacher’s pet.  She studied hard and tried to do everything perfectly.  In the course of this, Yui probably infuriated the other students who also wanted to get to the top.  Yui most likely used underhanded methods to beat out the other students in her quest for perfection.

However, Yui could not survive on being a teacher’s pet alone.  She needed to have friends, and as she used other students as stepping stones to the top, Yui probably had no more than a few friends… perhaps only one, Nodoka Manabe.

In this episode (the hell that Yui is going through), Nodoka tries to persuade Yui to join a club, and points out that Yui has never been in a club.

From Yui’s point of view, this is both ridicule and trickery.  Nodoka tricks Yui into thinking that clubs are needed to prevent NEET syndrome, and takes the higher ground by mocking Yui’s clubless history.

In essence, this is another thing that Yui feared while she was alive: the loss of friendship.  As Nodoka was her only friend, Yui probably treated her incredibly nicely… if not only to preserve their friendship.  To have this scene occur is to trash all of that hard work.  Nodoka is dropping the bombshell, making fun of Yui and deceiving her, essentially mocking her intelligence.

From this, we can deduce that Nodoka was the one who went to Enma Ai for revenge.  We can hypothesize that Yui was the one who severed their friendship in life, as Nodoka is getting her revenge in this episode.  But why?

It’s obvious.

Yui had found a new group to hang out with, and left Nodoka in the dark, friendless and alone.  Ritsu, Mio, and Tsumugi were of the same ilk as Yui: perfect in everything, and snobby to no end.  Of course, they were each from different schools, or else each would have attacked the others academically, vying for the valedictorian spot of the school.

So why, then, would Yui’s personal hell involve making a band with Ritsu, Mio, and Tsumugi?
They were friends in life, so wouldn’t that be a good thing for Yui that they could socialize and have fun together?

No.  It’s the worst-case scenario for Yui.

Because Ritsu, Mio, and Tsumugi are all perfectionists just like Yui, putting them together in the same school and in the same club is a recipie for disaster.

They will compete against each other, and resort to sabotage, blackmail, and even violence to get the upper hand over the rest.

This future for Yui in hell is bleak, and has started already.  In this episode, Yui listens to her “friends” perform, and says that they suck.  Mio, Tsumugi, and Ritsu are livid, as seen in the screenshot above.  They will try harder than ever to beat this newcomer Yui in music and everything they do, for she has said that they, the perfect musicians, suck.

Yui says that she thinks she will “fit in” here.  On the surface, this line is nothing more than a simple acceptance of the clubmember’s request for Yui to join their club.  However, it is truly the darkest moment of the episode.  By “fitting in,” Yui is stating her superiority.  She thinks that she can beat her three friends at music, and thus joins the club with the intention of outshining the others.

Not to be done in by Yui, the other three ridicule Yui’s lack of musical instrument cost knowledge, knowing that Yui is below them on the intelligence ladder.

We can see the beginning of Yui’s hell: a time of being the worst person in the pack, unable to quit the club both because of her perfectionist nature and because of the club’s 4-person requirement.  Yui is most definitely the worst musician, and will literally be going through Hell as she tries to outshine the others in vain.  She will have no chance at beating the others and will always remain the worst, most definitely her worst nightmare when she was alive put into reality.

---