「主役!」 (Shuyaku!)
“Leading Roles!”

It’s a play for the school festival from the seniors’ class, where majority voting lands Mio the leading role as Romeo. That’s not all that surprising given her fan club, but her manzai partner Ritsu is forced to play Juliet. It was a casting breakdown of epic proportions and beautifully summed up by Satoshi’s reaction when he caught wind of his sister playing Juliet. I honestly couldn’t stop laughing at the sight of him spitting out his Coke like he had just heard the most absurd thing ever, because I was thinking the exact same thing when I first heard it. There were a lot of other good candidates, but none of them wanted to be paired up with Mio when Ritsu’s her natural partner. Mugi’s working on the script and Yui’s best suited for the “Tree G” role she got. (lol) Now it could just be me, but common sense says to just have the two of them swap roles. Ritsu’s a tomboy anyway, whereas Mio’s the best candidate to play a female role with her bashful nature. It’s too bad that people don’t quite see that at an all-girls school, though it’s safe to assume some of them voted for Mio for the hazing-like entertainment factor.

Of course, swapping roles was just the logical side of me speaking, because things were way more fun with these huge miscasts. Quite frankly, Mio would’ve fainted in her seat or on her feet in light of any lead role she was forced to play, so it was more Ritsu’s miscast that led to a lot of unexpected laughs. Before the run-in with Satoshi at Ritsu’s place for some additional practice, Azusa of all people was the one getting the most amusement from their club president’s predicament. Now when the hard-working and diligent junior is the one who’s laughing at her seniors, it’s almost a sure-fire bet that I’m on board as well. The best part of that was watching Azusa try to contain her laughter in front of Ritsu and fail miserably doing so. One would think that seeing that multiple times this episode would grow old fast, but it worked wonders on me every time. People are laughing at Ritsu trying to be feminine and she’s getting all flustered over it! How is that not great material? If that weren’t enough, she even started raging over how needlessly important-sounding Shakespeare’s writing is and bitched about why Romeo and Juliet don’t just ditch their families. lol

To top it off, Mugi’s special training to cure Mio’s shyness in front of people by taking up a part-time job at an acquaintance’s upscale cafe landed all the girls in maid outfits. They weren’t quite as nice as the ones in Kaichou wa Maid-sama, but I’ll take whatever I can get as long as it’s not the usual school uniforms. The one exception to that would be the really hot look Mio had going after Yui and Mugi ruffled up her uniform to get her accustomed to acting like guy. That untucked dress shirt and loosened button highlighting her collar bone had all the right stuff in combination with her reluctance. Let’s not forget the open blazer either! Now if we’re really going to go with school uniforms again at this year’s live performance, it better be like this! Heck, even Azusa was swept off her feet by Mio’s new look. Hopefully Sawa-chan will have something to say about costumes this time around, as she was all enthusiastic about making the ones for the play. It was pretty funny how she volunteered despite being the teacher and slyly added that she won’t do anything bad to them, causing Mio and Ritsu to hold onto one another in fear of what they’re in store for.

Building on the previous episode about their clubroom, the humor’s been really clicking for me as of late. A lot of the laughs were naturally due to Mio, as she tried to escape from reality and even suggested she had to transfer schools to Irkutsk, Russia. Her attempts to imagine an audience full of Ritsus and later Ritsu and Yui as her customers only to get annoyed by the idea were mildly amusing as well, but her depressed reaction over the waist of her maid uniform being too tight was absolutely priceless. Who would’ve thought that Yui actually has the bigger bust out of the two and Mio the bigger waist/hips! Unsurprisingly, their special training serving customers didn’t help Mio one bit, even after Ritsu drove her into a corner by making her work alone in an attempt to forcibly bring out her confidence. (This isn’t Goku getting Gohan to go SSJ2 against Cell!) However, the two of them impersonating how the other would play their role looks like it’s going to lead to decent performances by both. Funny how mocking one another is what works for them — and how the seiyuu can purposely voice bad acting prior to that — but it’s all fine by me since we’re school festival bound next episode. There hasn’t been a lot of practicing, but there should be at least one new song performed then. It looks like there’s going to be a sleepover at school too and Yui’s not going to let Azusa-nyan sleep a wink. Ohhh snap.

* In the meantime, we have the full versions of the second OP and ED ahead of their scheduled August 4th release dates, which I’ve had on the sidebar for the past few days.

 

Preview

51 Comments

  1. It’s going to be hard to let K-ON!! go after all these episodes
    Had keion trending last week on Twitter for 3 hours

    Ritsu was really awesome for this episode 🙂 Never seen her so frustrated and out of sorts, but the 2 of them will work it out together

    Can’t wait to see how they do the school festival musically hmmm…
    Be disappointed if Tsumugi doesn’t perform her song, but I’ll settle for it another way:)

  2. If it haven’t been for their MOE BLOB faces, K-ON would have been better. See, the hardcore anime “story and depth over fun-service and moe” fans are using this anime as a bad example. They say, “if this anime is the future of Japanese animation, then anime is dead”. If you win the hearts of otakus then merchandise will sell. If this trend continues, I fear the survival of why anime is anime.

    Still, anime is here for entrainment purposes only, and K-ON….. well it delivers for many.

    Ci23
    1. they’re in a maid-themed cafe, what can we expect out of that?

      on the other hand, it’s weird on how they did 2 chapters this nice (after the anime originals during the last few weeks)

      info600
  3. Alright! It’s the Ro-Mio and Ritsu-let chapter! Lovin the parts where Azusa makes fun of Ritsu and her little brothers reaction.

    …and everyone who watches this wishes they were a bass or vienna sausage pillow.

    fall3nbs
  4. I’m pretty certain Mio still has the bigger bust…
    Show Spoiler ▼

    mrwan
  5. Wow.. Azusa really picked up some notes on Jun’s trolling nature. This episode was entertaining primarily because of the people’s reaction about Ritsu being Juliet. I laughed so hard when Satoshi was surprised about it.

    I’m quite surprised that kyoani decided to join the play chapter and the maid cafe chapter together. Good thing they kept the part where they switched roles. Mio was out of character but still looks ok with that.

    On a side note I’m quite surprised that the extra from the gym(Ichigo as Ritsu called her) last ep was their classmate. Some folks at /a/ began postin fanarts of her like this one. I must say I’m liking her! 😀

    Overall this episode was quite hilarious. I lol’d when Yui was doing her tree impression. Fast dawdling walk. (No gifs for now.. Too tired… And I’ll trip the spam yet again.) Everything in this ep satisfied me. More extras, nice reactions, trolling Azusa, etc…

    Also to point out.. The tall girl their resembled one character from ROD TV. The tallest sister.

    megalith
  6. Ro-MIO x Ju-RITSU (OK, lame attempt at pun) – Script by Mugi

    I think I just heard Mugi whisper “Just as planned!” XDD

    Good job Mugi, even the usually straight-faced Azu-nyan couldn’t resist giggling. And then there’s Satoshi’s epic reaction. LMAO

    Yui seems to be catching up with her sister in terms of bust size, which cannot be a bad thing. New bikinis for her, perhaps? 🙂 And LOL at her “practicing” as “Tree G”.

    Kinny Riddle
  7. Coalguys is still on vacation… in China this time. He says on his blog that this week will likely be the last time in this series he’ll be late. Subbing in the summer sucks, but he should KNOW what he’s getting into before planning a vacation and subbing a show at the same time!

    starss
  8. For some reason, this episode was by far the one that made me laugh out loud the most. From Yui’s TREE G! to Ritsu’s complaints about Shakespeare to Satoshi’s reaction to the Ritsu army, this episode was full of win.

    I was disappointed that they didn’t put a MOE MOE KYUN in there though. They had the perfect chance…

    akani
  9. great episode, laughed quite a lot due to Mio…

    next would be better! and I think they would only focus on the romeo and juliet instead of their band performancem which is gonna be interesting…

    kaineng
  10. A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
    The cake, for smile, will not show her head:
    Go hence, to have more talk of these HTT things;
    Some shall be pardon’d, and some punished:
    For never was a story of more moe
    Than this of Tsu-liet and her Ro-Mio.

    LQY
  11. Let’s have a run over, shall we?

    Show Spoiler ▼

    Just goes to show that the animators are always one step ahead. They know what we expect and they make it a notch up.

    Razgriz
  12. Who knew that Mio would look good as an unkempt beauty?

    And it’s nice to have Himeko appear again after all this time! Woot!

    I can’t believe how much I’ll miss this show once it ends, more so now that the manga is wrapping up next month… But even if K-On! ends, I’m sure it will live on through shout outs and take thats from other anime… Not to mention the merch… THE MERCH!

    Incognito
  13. Damn, I keep on switching my Most Favourite Episode of K-on! almost everyweek. So far, I’d say this (and the Mugicentric ep14) is the best so far among all episodes including Season 1 due to the screentime and detailed characteristic KyoAni gave to the background casts of Class 3-2.. I’m demanding a spinoff OVA featuring the whole class now~!!

    MaidNiac

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