Unfortunately, crappy, wet blanket Mio decided to come along for the ride too… And with that I’ve antagonized both the anti-moe trolls, as well as the Mio-moe trolls. By my calculations, this attack should have caused at least 80% of the anime fanbase’s collective heads to ’splode like Mio under a spotlight.

So K-ON! came in like a lion, with the buzz, hype and moe moe that only KyoAni can provide. Then it seemed to hit a bump in the road (or many bumps in the road) as the blogger fandom turned on it for not aspiring to be anything more than a moeblob. But then it seemed to end on a high note as the reception to its "finale" seemed pretty solid (let’s forget that 13th episode ever happened).

If last week was the spiritual finale to the show, it seems like the writers decided to mail it in for this week. Maybe they were only getting paid for 12 episodes, because I’d want my figurative money back for this episode, which probably shouldn’t have existed and unfortunately ends the show on somewhat of a down note.

Billing this episode as the finale is sort of misleading. More of a marketing ploy than anything. So the next episode (the real finale) is disconnected to the main storyline. Big whoop. It’s not like K-ON! is a real tightly wound, serial show where you have to see the previous episode to figure out what’s going on. Ad while it is a finale as far as their performances go, when you’re not animating the performances for all but one or two of the episodes, you’re not going to miss out on it just because it’s not in the thirteenth episode. Anyway, my bitching ends there, because I really liked this episode. Despite a couple short instances of forced drama – KyoAni did a great job keeping K-ON from devolving into melodrama (like too many slice of lifes seem to do) and staying true to its roots. And while the final performance was no God Knows, I was still quite content with it.

The big shocker this week is not Ritsu’s unexpected turn towards the serious, but the revelation that next episode is the season finale. Originally, K-ON! was expected to go for a 13 episode season. It remains to be seen whether that info was just wrong, if they plan on ending the show with a filler episode unrelated to the main storyline, or if it ends up being a DVD special episode (let’s hope not as bad as the Kannagi DVD special episode).

Unfortunately that means they’ll be ending the season with their second school festival performance and not the Budakan performance that I was hoping they’d end with. But that may actually be a blessing in disguise because that clearly sets things up for a 2nd season – not to mention they’re only halfway through their high school careers.