When Gene Rodenberry told the writers of the original Star Trek that the show couldn’t have any inter-character conflict, he inadvertently destined the Enterprise‘s maiden series to be a horror anthology. How else do you tell a story in which everyone is cool and gets along? If you’re going to remove “drama, as it is traditionally understood,” from your series, you kind of have to replace it with something.

But it turns out you can square that particular narrative circle with more than just salt vampires and albino murder-chimps – all you need are bops and vibes, baby.

K-On! The Movie

I have now watched two anime movies in my life, and both of them made me look forward to the Rapture slightly less. Yeah, yeah, selection bias and all that, but you need a generous menu from which to pull that biased selection in the first place, now don’t you?

No one is angry in this movie, and their decency infuriates me. It makes the guiding principles of my life – anger, caffeine – seem petty by comparison. All this time there were other, non-yelling ways to confront the vicissitudes of the day? I could have just learned to play a fucking trombone?

Yes, apparently – K-On! The Movie never deviates from its central thesis of “life is best experienced as an opportunity for wistful misadventures, rather than miserably accepted as the inevitable degradation of both body and mind, the culmination of which abandons you, screaming, in the midnight fire of an endless awful,” a concept they obviously never bothered to run by the Pope, because that’s the exact opposite of everything Catholicism has ever taught me.

I swear to God, this movie teases you with potential cruelties like the sauciest of vixens, only to slap away your rage-boner at the last second, just when you were about to give her an angry pearl necklace. When Sawako is talking about the girls playing a show for their class and she darkly remarks that, “I doubt they could handle the scolding we got – they’d be crushed,” I had to change my underwear. Pettiness? Spite? Sawako, the ostensible mentor of the group, showing her true colors by looking forward to the public humiliation of her young charges? Oh, movie, you dirty, dirty girl, you know just how daddy likes it, don’t you?

Except the next fucking thing Sawako says is “I have to protect them – I have to protect them!”

Jesus Christ, movie, we get it – you’re like if a rainbow boned a unicorn made entirely out of winning lottery tickets while Bob Ross painted the whole thing in a relaxing landscape. Quit hope-humping me, bro. I have vengeances to plan, and I can’t do that if I’m weeping over the infectious innocence of youth.

The End

Whatever, I give up. Maybe hope and vibes really are the answer to everything, and my attempts to spite-fuck all of reality are both childish and self-defeating. I’ll let love in, movie, I swear.

(But I’m never going to stop pounding caffeine. Even in heaven on Earth, daddy still needs his jiggle juice.)