I’ve always maintained that tone and atmosphere can trump plot given the right author’s touch. This was more or less the case for Chica Umino‘s first manga series, Honey and Clover, which successfully finds the middle ground between subjective narration and a show-don’t-tell approach to character development. It’s an odd but effective style that results in characters that range from translucent to opaque depending on the time of day.
Her follow-up series, March Comes in like a Lion, hereby referred to as Sangatsu no Lion or 3gatsu, is similar. Its plot is a departure from Umino’s previous manga: it follows the life of a teenage Shogi pro who also happens to be an orphan (or the other way around as the story quickly implies). Unexpectedly, the plot is roughly the same as every other slice-of-life or coming-of-age anime, featuring lonely protagonists interacting with an upbeat cast to discover a less lonely world.
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