Anime ATM 96 March Comes In Like a Lion S2

You know, here's a funny story for you. I meant to start Boku no Hero Academia. I really meant to. Sincerely I had the page open on my computer and everything. But somehow one thing led to another (Netflix had the second season of 3-gatsu online) and then I ended up here. And along the way I reached nirvana. Just kidding! I just had an epiphany about how much I love these shows that are a blend of slice of life and a little bit of competitive spirit. It's like how I love Chihayafuru so much because of the romance aspect mixed in with everyone trying to become better at karuta. Same thing here, except because of Rei's origin story in terms of why he's so committed to shogi it lends itself more towards the exploration of what it truly means to be youthful and explores themes of family and security.

{Spoilers}

When I first started the second season, I'll be honest with you and say that it was mostly so I could just say that I finished the second season because I'm a completionist. And then when I started the season, I wasn't too thrilled. The pacing seemed a little bit off to me. It was kind of slow, and it didn't really engage me as I recall the first season having done to me. But somewhere along the line, I became so drawn into what was happening it was actually insane. I could feel my body tense as the show went on and I can't really tell you why. That was just my immediate reaction to the plot I guess?

Well I think first of all we should do a quick overview of the season. So, we start off with pretty much everyone from the cast of the first season. We've got our main boy Kiriyama Rei and his home away from home with the three Kawamoto sisters Akari, Hina, and Momo. Unfortunately this season didn't have as much of Momo much to my chagrin.

This season really explored themes of friendship and a more sensitive topic of bulying surrounding Hina. It was kind of an unexpected twist because when you look at Hina you see this really sweet and cheerful girl that wants everyone to get along. But because of her extremely steady moral compass, she ends up bullied for standing up for her friend Chiho. And it's a really humanizing arc that shows how bullying not only affects the victim. It affects the bully, the classroom, the families of those affected, and the teachers. The way that Rei's teacher heard Rei out and tried to explain why it was so hard to address the issue and how he got enraged at how Hina's homeroom teacher wasn't effectively addressing the problem really reflected how I felt inside about the issue. But at the same time it was a realistic portrayal of not really having the silver bullet solution to the problem. It was also really startling to see Hina's homeroom teacher becoming overwhelmed with anxiety to the point of collapse. I think we see teachers as somewhat of a teaching vessel and sometimes nothing more than a wealth of knowledge when in fact they're most definitely human too and affected by the situation just the same as wea re. And that was definitely a good reminder to treat people how you wish to be treated and to think about how consequential bullying really is. It broke my heart to see Hina visiting Chiho and to see how much she still struggled with making friends after what had happened to her.

The whole concept of showcasing bullying and how it truly affects everyone that's involved on a deeper level was really moving and powerful. I mean just seeing Akari's breakdown and how her heart broke for Hina and how she kept asking herself why Hina did what she did when she could've just kept silent and even wanting her to have kept silent really showed how her feelings were in turmoil. You can't help but root for Hina because her heart is so steadfast and she's not afraid to stand up for her beliefs, but seeing the aftermath and how shattered she felt at certain points like when they went on the class trip really makes your morals waver. This isn't to say that Hina didn't do the right thing, this is just to say that the mangaka did a truly brilliant job with this part.

A short aside for the episode with Rei and Souya. There was something satisfying about watching this episode. Maybe it was just because I like the rainy aesthetic. Maybe because a lot of it was just silence between the two. And it might have been because some of the mystery behind Souya was finally brought to light. But seeing the two on the train back home and ending up having to find shelter from the storm together was kind of heartwarming in a weird way. I dunno, watch the episode and tell me what you thought. Maybe I'm just crazy.

And an arc that doesn't really speak to my experience would be the epic match between our two favorite oldies. There's Shimada who we've already become familiar with as Rei's kind of mentor and our resident sickly boy who's got big dreams from the countryside still. And then we've got Yanagihara who's the oldest active Class A member that honestly came off as a joke when we first met him. We didn't know a whole lot about him until now. And now that we do know a little bit more about him, wow this guy's carrying a heavy burden. The imagery in this arc was so striking. To see this old man who's got to take so many medications and put on all of those pain-relief patches to play a match is a sobering thought. Maybe this is because usually in professional matches you think of a physical sport maybe where after a certain age you have to retire. Since this isn't the case with shogi, I guess you just don't think about the physical toll as much. But Yanagihara is honestly a real inspiration. All of the sashes that weigh him down as all of his friends stopped playing shogi, for him to continue playing not just for himself but also for all these friends as well, I can't even imagine the toll. And for him to come to the realization that although all of these sashes are somewhat burdens, that they're also something to have pride in and to embrace the heavy weight on his shoulders is really admirable. To love your friends that much and to carry on this legacy is something I can't yet relate to, but is definitely something to look forward to in the future I guess?

A real left fielder though was in the last episode where Rei visits his adoptive mother's house and they have this awkward relationship. It's not quite resentment, but I'm not convinced it's fondness either. It's kind of this weird limbo that was both awkward but heartwarming at the same time. The dream she had when he left and her perspective of how he grew up in their house was different from what we've seen from Kyouko, Ayumu or Rei's perspective and it was refreshing. But also sad don't get me wrong.

Overall, I felt like this season was definitely worth the watch. I wasn't disappointed by how things have turned out and progressed. If they make a third season I'll be looking for Hina and Rei's doki doki high school life together. There was so much depth and thought into the season and we've explored some exciting things throughout the show. You definitely don't have to know anything about shogi in order to fully enjoy the show. Yeah, so please if you have some time, try it out. It might seem a little slow, but it's a definite one for the soul and kokoro.

Anime ATM 94 3-gatsu no Lion {March Comes in like a Lion}

Oh man oh man. I sure didn't think I was going to be watching anime for a while. In fact I had pretty much given up on the idea that I would be watching any for a while, forever chained to my desk to study and make my parents proud and so on and so forth. But to my surprise, I found myself starting this quarter off with a bit of time on my hands. Throughout this time without anime I've been thinking about what exactly I should be watching. Lots of people had been recommending me Boku no Hero Academia and I'm sure it's wonderful. And lots of other anime and anime movies to watch. However, something just called me to watch this anime. It's sure been a while since I've watched a 22 episode anime. I mean sure it seems like I have with my blog post schedule, but in actuality it's been a minute. It felt really good to binge; it felt like I was going back to my roots as an avid anime enjoyer of sorts I guess. Haha, I don't want to say that it was honestly to fill a void in my heart at the moment...but it kinda was. I felt a little bit off-centered as I tend to feel at the beginning of most quarters or the start of something new in general. It's a little weird. But you came here for the Anime ATM not my rambling so:

{Spoilers, obviously}

Wow it's been so long since I've binged something and felt all of my feelings becoming an overwhelming barrage of thoughts and opinions that I documented throughout my time watching the anime. Perhaps I should journal it all down before starting my blog posts, but I kind of like how they're just a whirlwind of my thoughts as well.

A good place to start is always the "short" plot synopsis. So basically there's this boy named Kiriyama Rei and he's the fifth ever person to become a professional shogi player in middle school. On paper it seems like this amazing achievement until you unpack all the reasons why he became so great at this game. He actually has a lot of trauma from his parents dying at a young age, not having any relatives to take care of him, so he relies on his father's old shogi friend to take him in as his shogi apprentice and his foster son. His father's friend Kouda asked Kiriyama if he loved shogi more than anything, and to avoid getting put into an orphanage he lied and said yes. And all throughout the show you get glimpses of this little boy that's fighting for his life, doing anything he can to survive. And it's really sad when you think about this little boy that played shogi just to spend bonding time with his dad and ending up playing shogi as a way to survive. It doesn't make it any better that because of Kiriyama's intense shogi training that he surpasses Kouda's blood related children and makes their relationship even more strained. And it's not like Kiriyama doesn't feel bad about this. The real kicker is when he talks about how he broke that family. How he was the magpie's offspring that was born into the wrong nest and killed off the parents' real chicks. That was the real sinker right there. I can't even imagine how it would feel like to believe that you've ruined someone else's family for your own survival.

And it's this constant question to Kiriyama, at least for me, of if he actually really loves shogi or if this is the only way he can survive? Throughout the show he encounters so many different people who all have their lives impossibly entangled with shogi. All of these men are professional players that go through their troubles all linked to this strategic game. Some of them want to bring honor to the small towns they came from, others have dealt with physical ailments from the stress caused by the game, and others still are trying to keep their rankings to maintain face after all of these years of competition. It's hard to describe or encapsulate even in this limitless blog post that I'm writing, all of the stories that were told throughout these 22 episodes. Yes, most of it was focused around this lonely, broken boy Kiriyama, but it was also just beyond him. It was beyond shogi. It was honestly so many twists and turns and switch in tone from one of trauma and somber reality to happy and comedic times that I felt like I got whiplash from how fast it changed from one to the other. In fact, at times I felt like the transition between the two was too jarring, and I'm not sure if that was really the aim of the tone shifting so fast. However, it was definitely memorable.

I would compare this show to Your Lie in April in terms of how the trauma follows the main protagonist and weighs him down at times. This was definitely a lot more sad because Kiriyama was outcasted by his classmates in school and also had to deal with the eluded to trauma inflicted by his foster sister, but it was the same tone of pain caused by inescapable circumstances. It was also like Chihayafuru. There was of course the sports aspect of the show with the constant rounds of lots of jargon that I didn't understand. Don't expect to walk away from this show knowing how to be a professional shogi player (or maybe that's just me and you'll really walk away an expert) because they definitely don't give you step by step instructions on how everything works. They do give you lots of interesting strategies and even a cat illustrated book on all of the different pieces and shogi basics, but not a whole lot. Although maybe if you already know how to play chess it'd be easier to learn shogi? It was also like Chihayafuru in terms of the tournament style and sometimes how these competitions were portrayed with it not just being able the game, but also the training and camaraderie that surrounds the whole show, although perhaps less so in this show because there's no team aspect to it.

There is definitely something to be said about the motif of water throughout the show. I'm not really sure what to make of it. At times seeing the water appear during the rounds inside of Kiriyama's head it was almost suffocating. In fact, most of the time it was meant as a tool to convey how he couldn't breathe inside the round or how overwhelming it was. And they often did kind of random zoom ins of his beverages or of anyone's beverages really which was interesting. Not super sure why they did that. But I think these kinds of engaging scenes where it wasn't just shogi pieces on a board being moved around and losing me because I actually don't know anything about this game. Instead it was more of an atmospheric thing that allowed anyone to be enraptured by the tone of the show and what was going on. And this was much appreciated for someone with actually no idea how to play the game :')

As someone that is constantly found watching slice of life, I thought it was only fitting that I also talk about how I found the slice of life portion to be. Like I said above, sometimes the transition between the two sides of the show with the seriousness of shogi on the one hand and the domestic scenes of the Kawamoto household was too startling. There was no easy transition between the two, and maybe those sweet slice of life moments are meant as a chaser for the bitterness of Kiriyama's life. Like little splashes of sunlight to an otherwise gloomy day. And honestly some of these moments with Kiriyama at the Kawamoto's house were so heartwarming. Like when he was sick and they took him to their house to nurse back to health. And how he got to experience what it felt like to live in a really warm household just like a kotatsu. At the same time though, it wasn't completely unrealistic. The Kawamoto family welcomed him in, but it was definitely not a parasitic relationship with them just giving and giving without Kiriyama ever giving back. He gave them a welcome reprieve from some of the heavier stuff like dealing with the deaths in their family during Obon and someone to care for. And Kiriyama got to experience a warm family, although he was scared of breaking their family like he thought he did to his foster parents which is really sad. I wish I could go in there and talk some sense into that boy that what he was doing was perfectly fine and that he deserves to be loved too. I love all of their little moments together with the cats getting voiced as well hehe. And Momo is absolutely adorable with her child's innocence. Like when they were trying to come up with new product ideas for their traditional Japanese confectionery store and they really wanted to know what flavor she wanted as daifuku flavoring and she said gum. I couldn't stop laughing honestly.

Maybe I also felt like I resonated with the Kawamoto sisters because I have two younger sisters of my own. So it was kinda like a reflection of my own family? And seeing Akane's silent maturity and Hina's awkward moments as a middle school girl in love really reminds me of how my younger sister who's around the same age as Hina is going through that and how many parallels there are between the two of us.

Can you tell that I really enjoyed this anime? Haha while I did think that there were definitely some places where I felt like there was somewhat of a disconnect, overall it was an amazing experience. Hopefully I have time to watch the second season before I forget the characters and this story line. Ugh it's been a while since I've felt this way about an anime and it feels really good to be honest to watch something and feel on fire to review it. Yeah. So there's that. Obviously there's a lot to unpack from this anime like why it's called March Comes in Like a Lion (because it's a proverb apparently) or about his school life or his mental state or how wack his sister is. Yeah it's a lot. But that's all for now!

Anime ATM 75 Net-juu no Susume

This was the fourth installment I want to say of my binge before winter quarter started. I saw this on a list of upcoming anime a while back, but I always wait for the season to be over before I pick anything up because I like to binge it all at once. I find that when I binge I'm usually more passionate and involved rather than watching each individual episode and it getting lost in the everyday cycle that is mundane daily life. It's kind of ironic that I would describe life in such a seemingly negatively connoted way since I'm such a big fan of slice of life, but that's just life.

Mostly I just started this anime because it was only 10 episodes long and it seemed like a pretty cool concept. I haven't seen anything exactly like it, though I do feel that I've watched something similar to it at least. And I do like Comico things in general. I think the thing that comes most to mind is Momokuri which has a similarly cute feeling.

Say cheers to this last Anime ATM because I have a feeling I'm going to need to buckle down for a bit. Hope I can keep up the posts once a week though, if only for my own self-satisfaction.

{Spoilers}

Morioka Moriko was unsatisfied with her life. And though most people might stick with their job until they die just for the sake of stability, she decides to take the plunge and quit her job to become a NEET, but not just any NEET. She calls herself an elite NEET because she chose to live that kind of life. The story follows her online life as a super cute ikemen (is that an oxymoron? probably) named Hayashi who games with his guild the At Home Party or something like that. In particular the story revolves around Hayashi and Lily, his partner in game. It sounds pretty mundane and you kind of have to give it a few episodes to really get the feel for what kind of character Moriko is and what the story's going to be around, but it's really sweet once you get into it. As it's said in the anime, the online world is huge, but the real world is very small. Things take an interesting turn when Moriko starts to run into people she knows in game in the real world. And it only gets more interesting when Sakurai, Lily in game, starts to realize that Moriko is actually Hayashi, probably.

The first person Moriko meets is her local convenience store part-timer Fujimoto aka Kanbe, the guild master. And after that the real world just keeps getting smaller. Then she meets Sakurai who happens to be Lily, but doesn't actually find out about it until Sakurai connects all the dots and figures out who Moriko really is. All of these are just a series of coincidences that happen to line up in an extremely satisfying way. Honestly nothing like this would ever happen in real life, but there's something so satisfying about the way the two of them are able to reconnect from that first game as Harth and Yuki, to Lily and Hayashi, to Sakurai and Moriko. Seeing their relationship as true friends even over the internet grow strong and blossom gives me faith in humanity, or at least the MMO community.

Actually, all of the side characters were really precious. Like you didn't see them a lot, and a few of them you didn't even get to see what they looked like in reality, but you could still tell that they were really nice people. Especially Lilac. asdfghjkl; I honestly want to read the manga just for some more Lilac. Also Himeralda and Poko's relationship too.

What was so addicting about watching this anime was how they kept teasing you with Sakurai and Moriko almost getting together all the time, but being driven apart by misunderstandings and awkwardness. Something about all the misunderstandings and their individual awkwardness made it a heartwarming show full of purity and relatable value. The whole mistaken/hidden identity trope and the way it taunts you with the two almost revealing the other's identity really gets me every time actually.

The cherry on top was the socially awkward aspect between Moriko and Sakurai. The two of them together are just absolute cinnamon rolls that need to be protected because their characters are like everyone that has social anxiety or is just introverted in general. You see everything as kind of an attack on you and you see every single situation as something that needs to be overanalyzed.

In the end I think it's really sweet that Moriko realizes that she can't keep living her life as a NEET, no matter how elite she is. It's kind of a sad realization to come to that the traditional way to be satisfied with your life is by abiding by societal expectations, but I think it's also a comfort to have that there are guidelines to follow and as long as you do so you're set.

Overall I'd say this is a really sweet and succinct show. It's got great characters, some nice romance, healthy relationships, and relatable characters. And the OP is super artsy in a way and the ED makes me smile ahhhh Moriko is actually me. Excuse my lack of originality or word choice, school takes a lot out of me. I don't know how some people balance like two part time jobs, 23 units of class, and manage to create comics, write books, apply for scholarships, and exercise. It's a lot.

Just look at Lily wearing the brooch Hayashi gave her on her cape T^T I love them as partners

Just both their poses are me looking at me actually

His face when he sees her in his clothes *screams* I love a good cliche like this ughhhh

They're so sweet I hope they get married and have an amazing life together playing MMOs forever like Poko and Himeralda asdfghjkl;