K-On! Special Episode (Episode 13)

Remember how I said (err, wrote) that one of the things I like about K-On! is how it has a little more focus than most slice-of-life school series? Episode 13, “Winter Day”, chucks that aspect of the show out the window. I still like it, especially Ritsu’s storyline (primarily for reasons that are relevant to this blog), but it wasn’t K-On! at its best. Nonetheless, it was a cute episode and I still liked it, even if I probably would have had less patience with it if it were the school year right now. (See my vicious shredding of episode 1 of Saki for evidence.)

The episode begins with Mio writing the lyrics for a new song for After School Tea Time on what looks like a MacBook. (Yay, Macs! ^^)

The next day in the school club room, Yui tries playing her pet guitar with gloves on since it’s cold because of the winter, and after giving up, she decides to make a hotpot with her sister Ui at their house on Saturday.

She invites the other club members over for hotpot, but Ritsu has to take her kid brother to the movies, Mio needs to spend some time alone to write her song lyrics, Azusa has to cat-sit for a friend (last time I checked, cats were okay being left alone for several hours), and Mugi has some unspecified thing to do. (Sketchy…) More importantly, Ritsu is behaving different than usual because she received an anonymous love letter in her mailbox, unbeknownst to her friends.

Come Saturday, Yui and Ui are out shopping for hotpot ingredients and Yui thinks about which freakish creation she can concoct. (Chocolate curry hotpot?? o_o;;;) Mio takes the train to the beach for a peaceful place to write music, but finds that it’s just as hard to do when she isn’t around hyperactive Ritsu and Yui. After Ritsu takes her brother to the movies, he leaves to spend the day with a friend, and she has the rest of Saturday to kill. And Mugi’s top-secret activity is a new part-time job as a server at a fast food restaurant.

She seems to be having the time of her life (I have never seen fast food servers in either Japan or the U.S. who seemed that happy with their jobs), until she accidentally spills some soda on one of her co-workers and freaks out about it. Finally, Azusa begins freaking out when it looks like the cat she’s looking after is sick.

After Yui sends her friends a text message asking which nasty hotpot they would rather eat, she goes to Azusa’s house and tells her that the cat was just coughing up a hairball. I find it a little baffling that Azusa can play a guitar like a pro and be trusted to care for someone’s cat, but not know about hairballs. Azusa and Yui meet up with Ritsu and Mio at the restaurant where Mugi works and Mio asks Ritsu if she got the lyrics that Mio left in her mailbox before.

Ritsu has a “!!??” moment and realizes that her “love letter”, which described a person fitting Ritsu’s description, were song lyrics by Mio. Once again the answer to exactly why the lyrics are like that is left vague for the (yuri) fandom. I can see doujinshi and fanfiction being written as I type this now about how Mio struggled to indirectly convey her feelings for Ritsu through her lyrics, or how she received another text message from somebody in the group that she cribbed for her song. The possibilities are endless with yuri goggles. Lol

Besides Ritsu’s storyline, this episode overall was kind of so-so, but it was still a pleasant way to pass twenty-something minutes.

Art: B
Story: C
Overall: C+

Speaking of Saki, now that I’m 12 episodes through the series, I like it. ^^ A midpoint series review will come later this week after I watch episode 13.

And I just realized, what happened to Sawako-sensei in this episode? I missed her crazy mood swings.