I’ve been reading Perdido Street Station by China Mieville and finishing up K-On!!, and believe me I have tried to come up with a solid mish-mash title for this post. China Mugiville, Perdido Street Sawako, Chazunyan Mienyan, I just couldn’t do it. So titleless post of the day is about liking things you didn’t think you’d like and about getting suspicious of things you’ve newly decided to like after all. Oh and it’s kind of about world-building and also about ridiculousness and having a functional scarab beetle for a head.

Here’s the self-indulgent background paragraph: I did my stint with Tolkien and Peake in school then I mainly dropped fantasy and sci-fi, only beginning to feel a sort of inverted-snob’s guilt about doing so about a year or so ago. I did my stint with K-On! a year or so ago out of a somewhat misplaced interest in watching what everyone was talking about, didn’t mind it so much, and came back to season two to help me relax after work.

The thing about fitting K-On!! into some kind of fan-defined canon is that it’s a show which fulfils (and then exceeds) a function. I’m really very sure that the second season is just a great deal better than the first, but at the same time I can’t help but be aware that what makes me like it more than the first season is that I’ve been watching it for relief rather than as some kind of project of diversity in anime consumption.

Not that a sense of mission is necessarily a bad thing. I’m not sure anything else would have sold me on starting up Dennou Coil, or Revolutionary Girl Utena for example. And when it came to “New Weird” China I got kind of the opposite of my reaction to K-On!!. Coming into the game for the sake of broadening my horizons I quickly found myself dragged into the fun of bonkers excitable creativeness. As things go on I’ve drifted from admiring all those juxtaposed metaphors and allusive salvoes into a place where I mainly want to see plot resolution.

It’s just that these alterations in function can be odd. In Perdido Street Station the way the plot has steamrollered the book, turning it into this massive monster hunt, has detracted from the pleasure I got from just kicking back and letting the author abuse his adjectives. I’m enjoying it, but I don’t feel evangelical about the writer any more. K-On!! though? Oh boy. The mono no aware of that show left me stranded between the need to indulge in more relief and an irresistible melancholy. Oddly that personal pull, the surprising artistry of the thing, has pulled me back into feeling for the series as a community thing. Because everyone else has also been feeling the parallel between the sense of loss in the story and the sense of loss as the series concludes.

The cast are leaving and we’re losing them, by feeling like more than a database game it secures its position in the database once and for all. Those circuits of significance are what make K-On!! so disarming, or maybe they’re just the product of ruined critical faculties. I’m not sure being a fan of something necessarily means rotting your brain, but I do kind of think it involves dragging yourself into a frame of mind where critical impulses lead into endless happy loops. And if that applies to one anime it can also apply to the whole damn hedonistic project of being an anime fan.

Writing about K-On!!, hell, thinking about it, can be pretty ridiculous. It’s not even ridiculous in the way that writing about dumb action anime/manga is, because I find it hard to honestly enjoy K-On!! in terms of subtext or irony. I think it might only be so much as tolerable on account of my having accidentally hardwired myself into that method of watching, a method which turns every idea about it into another circuitous celebration. I want to say that there’s not enough honesty, not enough earnestness in it for the show to be absurd in the way that a book with a beetle-headed heroine might be. Only then I wind up deciding that’s because the ridiculousness in K-On!! is entirely at my own expense. And if the show works, that personal silliness just feels like another accidental celebration.