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Forum Name: Source Material
Topic ID: 137
Message ID: 39
#39, Great Moments in Supporting Casting
Posted by Gryphon on Aug-27-14 at 01:54 PM
In response to message #0
One of the key members of the K-On! supporting cast is Yui's best friend from kindergarten, a girl named Nodoka. At first Nodoka seems like she's going to be the Token Normal One. She's smart, responsible, upright - the stock "class rep" type, the girl with glasses, all that. She's a member of the Student Council (president of it, their senior year), so part of her function on the show is to be the peer-level authority figure, and in that capacity serve as a foil for Ritsu's bureaucratic bungling as president of the Light Music Club. She's also one of the very few people in the show's world who can bring herself to be stern with Yui and achieve some kind of result by doing so.

The great thing about Nodoka-chan, though, is that as the series progresses it becomes obvious that she's not just the Student Authority Figure. She's much nicer than the stock Student Council President character, for one thing; she has a real affection for Yui in spite of her foibles, and often bends the regs to help the Light Music Club out of the various jams Ritsu's inept presidential style gets them into. She's a Bureaucrat Who Knows What She's Doing with a fine and rare humane touch.

And then there's the glorious moment, late in the series, when she and Yui are going separate ways on the staircase at school with a promise to meet up later and walk home together, and - without comment - she busts this out in parting.

One of us. One of us.

(Yui does it in reply, too, which - without any elaboration on the part of the show at all - provides an automatic mental image of the two of them sitting down to old-timey Star Trek reruns after school in about the fifth grade. Really nicely played, show.)

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
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