March Comes In Like a Lion E4: "May Comes In Like a Cheetah"

This episode is called "Versus," but that's a stupid name so I'm not going to use it.


After the OP, we open on the family - damn, what was their last name? I know it must have said it at some point. Anyway, the three sisters with the grandfather - living room. No sign of grandpa at the moment, though it appears to still be dark outside so it's not that much later. Hina is calmed down, and looks just exhausted as she sits at the table with her sisters. Akari is making lunch for tomorrow, which Hina insists must have bright, non-depressing colors in it. Rei is just kind of sitting there silently, as is babby Momo.

And...now Akari is talking about some boy that Hina has a crush on and how she should approach him. Okay, nevermind this is a different night. Rei confirms this when he says that tomorrow is Sunday, which means we've jumped ahead nearly a week. Ah, okay then.

Also, Akari and Rei are skinning some chestnuts for boiling. Akari bought way too many of them, and is impressed at how quickly and efficiently Rei is going through the lot. Lots of practice on extra small shogi boards or something, I imagine. Also, she phrases it as him being "good with his hands," which doesn't make it seem any less like she's hitting on him. Too bad he's too busy being depressed to notice.

Also, Hina angrily denies that she has a crush on this boy whenever someone says it in those words. He's just a boy who she really, really wants to impress and make like her, not a crush. Okay Hina, whatever helps you make sense of the world. Meanwhile, Rei waxes depressing-poetic over the shucking of the chestnuts, because of course he does. A fight starts to escalate when Hina reveals that she wants to make a big fancy lunch as a gift for her not-crush at this sportsball game, and Akari looks at the ingredients list and says that that's way the hell outside of their budget, especially after their holiday spending. Also, it would result in a pointlessly large meal that she couldn't even carry to the location, much less deliver to him in a form he could accept at a damn ball game. Hina freaks out at her over this. The talking cats randomly butt in and ask for food and petting. Akari asks her little sister why they should shell out so much to buy someone else's kid's lunch. Hina responds by calling Akari a hypocrite who spends money constantly on feeding the talking cats and Rei, why can't she buy someone else things for once?

Oh wow. Dick move there, Hina. Especially right in front of Rei. AND right in front of the talking cats.

Youngest sister Momo is struck by this declaration. Apparently, she'd started just thinking of Rei as an extra sibling, and now starts asking him who he actually is and why he's in their house if that is not the case.

Man. Between Akari providing much more of the household's income than probably anyone else, Rei having been shown to not just help them pay for groceries but outright splurge on them at times, and Rei having helped protect and comfort Hina personally just last week...well. I guess this is a reminder that middle schoolers are only honorary humans. At best.

Cut ahead a few minutes to Rei having felt so guilty over his uselessness and parasitism of the family that he goes with Hina to buy her all of her ridiculous ingredients. She apologizes for saying what she said about him, but then indirectly doubles down on it by going off about her sister "can't resist strays. Any strays at all."

Hina, can you just stop existing until you're about 16 or so? Also, if you could relay that request to the rest of your age group, that would be nice as well.

The talking cats, apparently, were scraggly stray kittens when Akari talk them in. She tamed and nourished them until they became friendly, sleek, and fluffy. She also taught them to speak I guess. They also had a dog at one point, with similar origins. Rei was the first time she's done that with a human, though. Hina, just shut the hell up, seriously.

...

Although...now I'm wondering more about that weird, owl-like cat that showed up once. Did Rei hallucinate that?

...

The next morning, Hina predictably is too stressed and overambitious to actually make the stupid meal for her stupid crush properly and in time. She has to tell her friends not to pick her up, planning to somehow get there on her own and on time...somehow.

Time runs even further out, and she scrambles to put a wardrobe together that's perfect for the occasion without looking too tryhard and needy. That fucking owlcat monster reappears to watch her with eerie silence as she scrambles around the house.

What is the deal with that thing, seriously?

Cut to Rei out for a walk. He doesn't have any games for the next little while, and winning those tryout matches and interacting a lot with the sister family seems to have energized him a bit, so he's deciding to finally buy some damned furniture for his apartment. That's some good progress for him. As he's thinking about what to prioritize and where he should shop for things, he realizes that he happens to have wandered near Hina's middle school, where the sportsball game is in progress. He hears someone calling the name of a player who just made a sportsball fly really far, and recognizes it as the boy Hina is obsessed with.

Rei looks through the fence, and is impressed with the boy's appearance and confidence to the point where it almost feels like he's perving on this 13 year old.

He sticks around and watches the game. The cute sportsball boy gets a ball into a thing, and everyone claps. Hina runs up to give him the ridiculous lunch she panicked together into him, with all these ribbons around it and shut, only for him to get mobbed by a bunch of other girls and walk away with them before she's able to so much as get his attention.

Cue her standing behind the sportsball field's gate and staring catatonically long after everyone else has left. As Rei watches, she starts crying, and he has to intervene before she throws that huge lunch that she made him spend a bunch of money on in the trash. Once again, she sobs and he comforts her as best he can.

Rei waxes poetic-depressive to himself again over this, but this time I'm kind of rolling my eyes at it. Hina being forced to act all cheery while celebratory mourning her parents and running away to be able to actually grieve when no one is looking is emotionally poignant. Her freaking out over impressing a crush and then throwing a tantrum and crying when he doesn't notice her is just hormonal teenager stuff. Sure, her underlying emotional struggle of dealing with the loss of her parents and her resulting complicated relationship with her older sister might be exacerbating this, but...not necessarily? We all knew multiple someones like this in middle school. Many of us were that someone in middle school.

It's nice of Rei to comfort her and walk her home after this, of course. But then, it was also pretty silly of him to enable this in the first place.

He walks Hina home, where Akari tries to comfort her as she...bursts into tears once again. Okay, this is starting to go a bit further than "hormonal middle schooler" territory, even with cartoony dramatic exaggeration. Hina could probably use therapy, though I'm not sure how affordable that would be for them.

Also, given the traditional family, and Japan's social mores regarding mental illness and adjacent issues, that might be hard for them to do.

They decide to have the stupid oversized lunch themselves for dinner. Hina is shocked to learn that Akari did similar stupid shit as a kid, and was rejected or unnoticed as often, and that she'd been trying to calm Hina down the same way that their mother tried to calm Akari. Okay. Also, Hina gives a little piece to one of the talking cats, who babbles excitedly about it.

It's good that the cats like it, at least, because when the humans try eating some it turns out it kind of tastes like shit. Which is not too surprising, given that Hina made it in a blind panic that morning without knowing what she was doing out of more material than she could actually handle. She managed to make it look nice, but that was about it.

Cut to an unspecified time later. Rei has Nikocado over in his apartment, and they're playing shogi. Rei's apartment is still unfurnished, but at least he has some curtains set up over that window now, so that's progress. Apparently Nikocado thinks that playing against Rei a whole bunch will help him invent a new shogi technique that'll make him famous or something. Which is why he invited himself over. Rei tolerates this for a while until Nikocado's stomach starts growling loudly enough to be actually disturbing, at which point they go out to get fast food.

While out, they happen to run into Momo. Rei is confused about what she's doing alone on the sidewalk. Suddenly, she runs at Nik and starts hugging him.

Apparently, he reminds her of Ersatz Totaro. And is willing to play the part, due to cuteness that not even Nik can fail to appreciate.

Rei feels insecure because Momo thinks that Nikocado looks like Ersatz Totaro and is thus more excited about him than she is to have bumped into Rei.

Shortly thereafter, they run into the other two sisters who are looking around for Momo. Hina asks Nikocado if he'd like to join them and Rei for dinner, much to Rei's chagrin. Akari thinks that he's cute, apparently having a weakness for chubby things. When they get home and Nikocado makes a token effort to follow his medically necessary diet, and Akari has a reaction to it.

This goes on for a really long time. Then Nikocado's butler shows up to pick him up (he has a GPS tracker on Nik. Either in his smartphone, or implanted in his skull or something I guess), and gifts Akari, Rei, and the others with a big box of sweet rolls in gratitude for taking Nik off his hands for a day.

Turns out he bought those sweet rolls from the family's own shop. Seemingly without realizing. End episode.


Well that was...pointless? The previous episodes were mostly slice-of-life, but they were slice-of-life that felt like it was doing things and having characters develop. This one did not feel like it's doing anything or advancing anyone. Weakest episode of the show so far.