Random Blog Post

Okay, not so random per se, but random in a sense that I don't do these type of posts.

But nonetheless:

March Comes In Like A Lion, or 3-gatsu no Lion, a show I just watched the first season of and really, really loved and wanted to share at least partly my experience with it.

Well, to give first a short summary that I was too lazy to write myself, here is one from myanimelist quoted:

Having reached professional status in middle school, Rei Kiriyama is one of the few elite in the world of shogi. Due to this, he faces an enormous amount of pressure, both from the shogi community and his adoptive family. Seeking independence from his tense home life, he moves into an apartment in Tokyo. As a 17-year-old living on his own, Rei tends to take poor care of himself, and his reclusive personality ostracizes him from his peers in school and at the shogi hall.

However, not long after his arrival in Tokyo, Rei meets Akari, Hinata, and Momo Kawamoto, a trio of sisters living with their grandfather who owns a traditional wagashi shop. Akari, the oldest of the three girls, is determined to combat Rei's loneliness and poorly sustained lifestyle with motherly hospitality. The Kawamoto sisters, coping with past tragedies, also share with Rei a unique familial bond that he has lacked for most of his life. As he struggles to maintain himself physically and mentally through his shogi career, Rei must learn how to interact with others and understand his own complex emotions.

Well, first of: I'm not an anime watcher, at least with the usual connotations made with one. ATLA can be considered one stylewise, and some could argue that the style of EqG is anime-like, but let's just stick with anime as being animated in Japan(?)—eh, point being, that I generally watched only few series at all, and these were from the western world.

March comes in like a Lion (MCILAL from now on) wasn't the first I tried, but the first I watched a season fully. There was an anime I tried to watch but… let's just say it was a genre that left me uncomfortable more and more, despite the shogi (basically Japanese chess) part being done very interestingly. But well, I gave MCILAL then a shot and it was the jackpot.

It's slowly paced with a mixture of deep, sad emotional moments that then shift with light-hearted comedy slice of life parts, and I'm all for it. Some reviews I read said that the plot jumps around (which I have to admit is kinda true, sometimes it jumps back to retell something that happened again instead of being timely linear), the sol genre didn't fit for them, the pace is too slow (tbh, I don't get this particular point) or that there was too much shogi focus on it.

Well, I generally stand by the point of "A review of a show is more subjective than objective", so in that sense, me loving it means it resonated with me and appealed to my likings—and it hit all the right nails. I like chess, and per se, the way it portrayed professional or general serious shogi playing is in a lot of ways similar to chess—and it was so well done, even with me having no idea how to play shogi. I like EqG more for their SoL part, like in the shorts, and the building of a friendship connection between the girls, and MCILAL does that too: SoL and building friendships with deep and distinctly characterised characters.

And of course, the struggle and depression the MC is going through. (To make it clear: I don't have depression, so no worries about me.) The show portrays it so well, the inner thoughts, the metaphors in how the emotions are portrayed, what struggles each characters has… Man, I love it. And the slow pace is what makes it all work, honestly. It's not an action show, it's an emotional show that slowly drags out of a state of feeling meaningless to finding the joy in so many little moments of life (or even shogi). So many times the show surprised me by its deepness and how more and more it added to what it had already told, and each built all itself up on top of each other.

Yeah, I don't have any real idea how to correctly portray my thoughts, nor do I have an outline in my head while writing this blog, but I had to share this show. Sure, it is not for everyone, and towards the end the focus on shogi becomes a lot more while the three sisters (the best part imo) get pushed behind, but with me wanting something like professional chess being portrayed in a form of creative media, it worked out—especially since it used that moment to drag the viewer into the different shogi player's emotions, state, history etc.

But yeah, I have to admit that the first half of the first season was a lot more emotional than the second (or first two thirds, something along these lines), but at the same time, it was inevitable: the MC does slowly build himself up overcoming himself and his depression, so you get less of these sad states and more shogi focused moments. There is a season 2 I haven't seen yet, and the manga series is as far as I know still going, so the MC is not perfect by now, but still: A much better state.

And all of this is what made the show so special to me. Shogi (replacement for chess), SoL, mixture of comedy and sad moments, and building up with or through your hobby or what you like to do (or even moments where it was harmful)—one of the main reasons Trixie remains for me one of my favourite characters: Her love for magic and how she keeps doing it despite everything (at least the EqG version).

But MCILAL did it all so special, so perfect, so well—I just can't do anything but share about it. Not sure if it'll inspire for a fic here in some way though, even if, I have at the moment other things I have to focus on, but yeah, this show is my personal recommendation for anyone who might be interested in it.

Well, if you went so far as to read to this part, thanks a lot for listening to my chaotic rambling, and if anyone had watched it somehow already, be sure to give your own two cents to it, I love reading other opinions