In these days I’ve saw the final season of Fruits Basket and I’ve cried all my tears. It was my favourite serie since when I read the manga years and years ago and I loved this new adaptation. Although, honestly, I missed the old opening theme “For Fruits Basket”, a delicate and perfect melody for the atmosphere that I will always love.
It’s amusing to me that in every manga that goes on too long, the art gets better and more beautiful…and the story starts sucking more and more.
So now you associate that prettier artistic style with a shit story that couldn’t live up to its strong beginning. And you long for the days when the art was rougher because you remember that in those good old days, the story didn’t suck ass.
This is so true, but I feel like one of the times this wasn’t the case was with Fruits Basket. The story got better and better and the art style went from good to gorgeous, so it only really went up.
can we just take a moment to talk about their glo ups? i mean, it’s the best glo up i’ve ever seen. don’t get me wrong, they still looked beautiful in the beginning of the manga, but wow the change is real and i’m living for it. i absolutely love it!
Guys I really need your help. Please keep on reading.
Recently I got Crunchy roll so I can watch the new Fruits Basket, but it says the second episode is locked. Since I’m new to Crunchy roll, does anyone know if it’ll ever get unlocked? Or are the rest of the episodes going to stay locked until I get premium?
Kyo is so very observant and understanding of Tohru’s moods. As such he has picked up on all the little signals of her cycle. He’ll go “Okay so this is the week where she’s especially hungry and I’ll buy her some snacks to eat becuase she won’t want to spend the house money on them. That means next week she’ll be crying about things a little more often so gotta be sure to always carry a packet of pocket tissues. Then the week after that she’ll be feeling sick, so I’ll make up some meal plans so I can take over the cooking that week.”
Except, he’s also Kyo. So he’s probably not connected this to Tohru menstruating AT ALL, he just thinks she works too hard and gets herself so much in a tizz that by week 3 she’s practically on the floor. Once she’s taken a few days rest, everything goes back to normal again!
Once they’re sharing a bed, it all becomes a bit more obvious but damn, for a hit minute there things sure were confusing! Guess he should make sure to carry around a pad alongside those pocket tissues, just in case.
i’ve been thinking about that scene where tohru is holding rin and saying “being alone is scary… being all alone is terrifying”
and it shows a tiny flashback panel to tohru alone in the apartment when her mom abandoned her…and here’s what i realized: so there are all the obvious reasons that tohru wants to keep kyo from being confined after graduation….but i’d never thought about how the thought of him being alone and confined in complete solutitude would hit her so deep because she experienced that herself when her mom abandoned her after her father died.yes it’s different because she wasn’t being locked up for life because she was considered a monster, and kyoko did eventually come back… but being such a small child, she was in a sense trapped in a small apartment, not that different from a single room, because it’s not like she could really escape that situation even if she wanted to. she doesn’t want kyo to get locked up because she loves him and wants to stay with him and getting confined for life is bad, true…but it goes past that, because she has, in a way, already felt the pain of being trapped and all alone personally—being abandoned—and she doesn’t want kyo to experience the same thing by being confined. that was her past, and she doesn’t want that to be his future.
i can’t really write about this without also bringing up the parallel of kyo and tohru both having mothers who abandoned them at one point or another, because i think for both characters the idea of being all alone is completely tied to the concept of being abandoned by someone they love. obviously kyo’s mother died when he was very young whereas tohru’s was much more recent, but when you think about it, kyoko’s initial abandonment of tohru came at a similarly young and formative age (even if it was temporary, the abandonment had a lasting effect on her throughout the story… and it is later followed by kyoko’s death, anyway). that parallel is the key to unpacking their resulting abandonment issues, although those issues manifest in different ways. kyo’s are coming from a lack of self-worth and from self-doubt (he thinks he was abandoned because of something inherently wrong with him, thinks that every choice he makes causes pain for himself/others and causes people to leave him). tohru’s are coming from a denial of her own needs and feelings (in chapter one she thinks, “don’t feel bad for me, Sohma, because my mother had it so much worse”; she thinks it’s morally wrong and disrespectul to—even a betrayal of—her mother to acknowledge her feelings of pain, particularly regarding her abandonment, rather than redirecting her focus to someone else’s pain; being selfish means she’s someone who deserves to be abandoned).
and it hits me directly in my windpipe when i think about how these formative experiences allow kyo and tohru to empathize with each other like no one else can and influence their actions in the narrative so greatly. kyo has to confront his own self-hate, all the voices in his head, and move past it with his own inner guidance—to accept that he is someone who didn’t deserve to be abandoned and is actually capable of 1) being loved and 2) giving that love back. meanwhile tohru has to actually acknowledge her own feelings for once, above anyone else’s or what she thinks is expected of her, and accept that she doesn’t want kyo to be locked up because she doesn’t want to lose him—not for some greater moral purpose or to save the world, but because she would be devastated to be, you guessed it, abandoned by him. and because of this, she stands up for what she selfishly wants and learns that it isn’t ungrateful or a betrayal of her mother to act according to your own needs, and that she won’t be abandoned just for having ugly facets to her. and he recognizes that he can make choices and exist without it harming anyone, that he can trust himself going forward, and that he can be accepted by others and himself as someone who can be loved, someone people won’t abandon. this growth for both of them is all about action, emotional acceptance, and making choices, at its simplest level. it involves acknowledging what they want now and moving on from their past abandonment, from a time when they were all alone. and then they finally get their shit figured out! and they’re not alone anymore, they’re together.
and i think it’s absolutely bonkers that a pairing that looks like “opposites attract” on the surface actually features two characters who are so intertwined and similar on so many levels. sure, tohru accepts and loves kyo because she’s got a big heart and is very naturally empathetic, but so much deeper than that, she empathizes with and understands him because she’s actually been through some very similar experiences. that’s also why their dynamic works both ways, and he’s able to understand her and empathize with her right back. (which is fantastic for reciprocity’s sake and makes me happy!) those similarities continually reinforce and inform the narrative and give context and motivation to everything that these two do. and to bring it back to the reason i even started writing this, i’m just marveling at tohru’s line to rin because, in literally one or two sentences, in one panel, the narrative connects kyo and tohru and shows how and why they understand and ultimately need each other so deeply.
