When the first episode of K-ON! was released however many years ago, I watched it, I felt queasy, and I dropped it. It wasn’t my thing. It was too moe, too braindead, too clearly Kyoto Animation’s money machine. I didn’t look back. I had no regrets. I didn’t need K-ON!.

Then something funny happened: I went to a convention, and at this convention they were marathoning the show. I joked about going to see it with my friends, the “joke” being that obviously K-ON! was so bad, who would want to watch it? My friends reined me in. “C’mon, we’re not going to watch that, didn’t you say it was bad?” Yeah. I did.

But what did I do when I got home from that convention?

I’ve always claimed to be weak against suggestions, even my own. I downloaded and marathoned K-ON!. And I liked it. I felt squeamish—it was outside my comfort zone, if only for its aesthetic characteristics, and the characters’ maturity was a bit on the low end of elementary school—but I liked it. I wrote a post exploring a similarity between Yui and President Aria, explaining how even slice of life with faults can grow on its audience and “become” good.

So I had a pretty well-reasoned explanation for why I liked K-ON! in the end. But I like looking silly, so whenever I’d see those friends with whom I’d gone to that convention, I would say overenthusiastic things like “OMG K-ON! IS THE BEST OMG” while they shook their heads and sighed. I was exaggerating, I was looking for laughs and retorts. I liked the show, but I didn’t think it was the best. However…

With episode 20 of K-ON!!, this is no longer an exaggeration.

Would we cry when Alice loses her second glove if we had not been with her for 47 episodes? No. Similarly, HTT’s final concert would not impact us the way it does if we were to skip ahead to it. So episode 20 of K-ON!! is not a standalone best episode of all time… much like Aria the Origination episode 9, it is only as great as the sum of the preceding installments.

If I cried for episode 20 of K-ON!!, the show is good.