Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Fruits Basket the Final
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KitKat1721
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Akito had the power to put Rin essentially anywhere she wanted. She could have isolated her in any of the other multiple homes on the estate, locked her in a room in the main house, and the Soma family even owns the hospital (which is frightening enough as is). The Cat's Room isn't an area set aside for the Cat so that others can gawk and think "ugh how dreadful/what a monster." It's the ultimate symbol of abandonment. A place to lock something (or someone) away so we don't even really have to ever think about them. Out of sight, out of mind. And to a God, abandoning one of her "chosen" would be seen as the ultimate punishment, deserving for Rin's crime (on top of Akito's general distaste for her already).
It takes weeks for anyone in the Soma family to realize where Rin has gone. Word of mouth spreads, but plenty of people (except those much more directly involved like Hiro) almost brush it off saying "oh she's probably in the hospital, a shame she missed her graduation." Actual worry trickles in pretty slowly, even from the people who love and care for her the most. Reminder that that's the kind of danger that awaits Kyo. Not one where everyone is worried or even concerned about him being unjustly locked away, but one where's he's isolated for so long that he's essentially forgotten, within an entire, generational system (not just one person with a lot of power) that actively supports it. All of the Zodiacs seem to know its a thing, and barely anyone has said squat about it. After that conversation with the old maid, is anyone shocked that Akito is so deeply deluded that her decisions and actions are always right by the very nature that they are hers? She's lashing out so strongly (to the point where they're framed like childish tantrums rather than the frustration or malice from earlier seasons) because those same victims who used to quietly accept everything just... aren't anymore and its not just making her angry. It's confusing the hell out of her. Another thing to note that I don't see discussed a lot: the Zodiac member's instinct to immediately blame themselves rather than Akito's actions (like Haru saying he was selfishly blind to the fallout Rin would deal with by them being together) is often written off as a typical "melodramatic" writing trope in shoujo. Like, "ok why would Hiro feel guilty about Kisa when Akito's the one that hurt her? Its such forced character development and unrealistic/emotionally manipulative." But with Fruits Basket specifically, it should be a major red flag to anyone watching of just how difficult it is for them to hold onto anger towards Akito. Or looking at the bigger picture, shining a light on how difficult it can be not to blame yourself/hyper-focus on "what you did yourself to be in this situation" with abuse. Esp when someone else is hurting. You don't need to be under a centuries-old curse to feel trapped by that sort of inescapable weight. Speaking of the Curse, while Takaya loves elaborating on the mindsets/emotions of her characters (even on occasion to a detriment), she doesn't like to spoon-feed us with certain aspects of the story. A good example would be the different "reasons" for the more troubled parent-child relationships. For example, Momiji's mother's depression/postpartum from marrying into a giant clan as an immigrant, leaving behind her entire family in Germany, plus not ever being able to even hold and form a bond with her son. People also took at face value that Rin's parents just "randomly decided one day they didn't love her," and not that we are 1) hearing from Rin's POV and are put in her shoes of utter and abrupt confusion in order to better emotionally connect with her and 2) they were pushed to a breaking point with the burden of raising a Zodiac child for years that not only wasn't at all favored, but actively disliked. Implying they got very few of the benefits someone like Yuki's mom received. spoiler[That sort of "pay attention and fill in the gaps" is easily the most prominent when it comes to the Curse itself. What it is, how it works, why its breaking, etc... And it makes sense considering just how old it is and what Takaya considers important in her stories. So that being said, I am very curious to see Lauren's interpretations in particular moving forward.] |
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ErikaD.D
Posts: 660 |
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Is it just me or season 3 is begining to rushed and has weird pacing (based on episode 5
and possibly more) because I heard that season 3 will be only one cour instead usual two cours like seasons 1 and 2. If it's true, sadly not surprised but what a letdown. Why only one cour but not usual two cours? Are they trying to ruin season 3? And because of one cour, I'm worried that they may skip Kyoko's backstory, because we don't get to hear an annoucement of who'll voiced Tohru's dad. I thought they promised that they'll cover the rest of the manga but apparently not in season 3 due to being only one cour. I'm worried that TMS will ruin Furuba season 3 with chapters, scenes and dialogues removed due to one cour like Clowerworks ruined The Promised Neverland season 2. |
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1460 |
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The first three episodes covered two chapters each, which was the same pace as the previous seasons, but episode four covered chapters 104-106 (plus a small bit from chapter 115), which was understandable because it would have been awkward to shift the conclusion of that Haru/Rin mini arc to the first half of the next episode. Episode five, however, was a mishmash of moments from four different chapters (111, 115, 116 and 128), although the bulk of it was from chapters 111 and 116. Still, I think the show will probably go back to cover chapters 107-110 instead of outright skipping them, and I honestly can't see how it could cover what's left of the manga in just 8 more episodes. |
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crazieanimefan1
 Posts: 413 Location: Auburn, AL |
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I think when the focus turns toward Tohru again with her angst about her mother's death, it should dive into her backstory. To me, they fit things in when it should fit like a puzzle. So they should put it in soon. |
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1460 |
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Yeah, that's what I'm hoping for. Chapters 90-93, which season two skipped, are too important not to get adapted, and I hope they don't get squeezed into a single episode. |
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Greed1914
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I'm so curious to see more about how the curse breaks. The hints are there, but the reactions to it as of episode 5 are so different. One still opts to stay with Akito, resigning to being miserable, while the next realizes he is basically indifferent towards her and the minute it happens Momiji has no problem telling her to go away because he doesn't have time for her crap anymore.
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NeedMoreCats
 Subscriber Posts: 333 Location: Westchester, NY |
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From my anime-only perspective, I think that their different responses had a lot to do with their ages in relation to Akito‘s age. Since Kureno is older than Akito, he watched Akito grow up and felt protective towards her, perhaps viewing her violence as the actions of a hurt child. Momiji, on the other hand, always saw Akito as a senior person of power, and more as an adult abusing the children in her care, which is a completely different dynamic. |
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Spastic Minnow
Bargain Hunter Exempt from Grammar Rules  Posts: 4630 Location: Gainesville, FL |
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Not sure you should state that in such a way that makes people think that's definitely the way it works. I don't believe it is that, exactly. And I believe the story is explicitly constructed so you can come to your own conclusions about why the curse breaks. To me, it's more like the Zodiac members spoiler[have to "self-actualize"- realize that they are living for themselves, not Akito. Even Kureno's reasoning is personal- he no longer HAS to live for Akito, he chooses to. A little different than having "no emotional reaction."- and they certainly have visceral reactions to him. Whether it's Kureno's pity or Momiji's disdain- they have emotion. And we'll continue to see that.] Plus, there's just the plain age of the curse. the bonds have been getting weaker for generations, allowing the all-consuming mania previous members used to have dwindle into an unwanted obligation. |
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KitKat1721
Posts: 974 |
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I mean to be fair, Lauren has always approached her reviews from the perspective of someone who hasn't read the source material, and I think that's just her current takeaway at this moment, which is fine. For now, I'm definitely not going to dive too deep into my own thoughts about the curse until later on, outside of what I've already said in a previous comment.
This absolutely. The relationship dynamics between the older Somas and the younger ones in relation to Akito are very different. Based on flashbacks we've seen, for a good portion of Kureno's young life, Akito was a happy child with only hints of a god complex. On top of her seemingly being pushed in the wrong direction from birth by her father and those veteran maids when it came to her role in this clan, it wasn't until major events (some of which we've seen and some we haven't) that everything really went downhill too fast and that complex grew and turned out toxic at best, abusive at worst. And it probably was much easier for a teenage Kureno to feel guilty and justify her actions as a hurt child lashing out, and not the giant warning sign that it should have been. For the younger Zodiac Members, Akito has not only always been in a position of power in their eyes, but has always been someone who has used that power to hurt others. If anything, it really speaks to Momiji's emotional maturity that even then, he can recognize that Akito is only trapping themselves along with everyone else the harder they lean into the "bonds of the Zodiac." The only other characters who express that are an outsider, Tohru (a very brief thought in S2) and Shigure (who is far more familiar with her past and her as a person). |
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1460 |
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Considering how this week's episode blew through chapters 107-109 and 114, I guess I'll have to resign myself to the fact that this season really will be just 13 episodes long after all.
Also, since the title of next week's episode is a line from chapter 93, I'm guessing they really will adapt the entire flashback arc that season two skipped in a single episode, which could be done by omitting spoiler[the material about how Kyoko and Katsuya got together, which I'm sure many would find objectionable due to how young she was when they met, not to mention the fact that he was a student teacher in her school]. Last edited by Zhou-BR on Wed May 12, 2021 11:05 am; edited 1 time in total |
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crazieanimefan1
Posts: 413 Location: Auburn, AL |
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That wasn't Kureno's grandpa who was the cat. That was Kazuma's grandpa.
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KitKat1721
Posts: 974 |
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To be fair, its been obvious for a long time that the third season would only be one-cour. I felt 99% confident way back when S2 was still airing. I'm not concerned though because the anime has always restructured events to make things "flow," and I don't think less meandering is automatically or necessarily a bad thing. The latter third of the story touches on A Lot at a very rapid pace, and while some things are definitely going to be cut for time, I think this can also allow the episodes to have a stronger focus, compared to a more serialized manga medium that almost allows for a stream of consciousness when it comes to its big emotional beats. Just this week alone, there's now a really interesting and new dynamic to having Tohru open up about her dad/Kyo telling her "I won't be disappointed in you" moment after she has already come to terms with her feelings for him. At the same time, having Kyo relive that nightmare in front of Tohru never happened in the manga, but I don't think its a bad call, and might give Tohru extra perspective for latter events down the line. A lot of people were sad not to see Rin attack Kagura after she slapped Tohru, but I always thought that made Kagura's action's seem even worse than they were. Same with Kyo being completely calm after Tohru woke up from the hit... like Kyo wouldn't have given Kagura complete shit for doing that. spoiler[I do think most of Kyoko and Katsuya's story will be cut (personally I've always been in the "change up the ages or just focus on the aftermath" camp). They touched on the most important takeaways for Tohru this week (the impact his death had), and I think if anything - we'll just see Kyoko's POV of her grief, rather than the build up to that point. I also could see some of Kakeru's relationship with Komaki + his connection to Tohru cut (or at least shortened).] Do I think all of the re-structuring works? Of course not, no adaptation is perfect. For example, I don't think Yuki realizing he wants to tell Machi the truth about the curse makes nearly as much sense without most of their build up from the manga. But you could tell they threw that moment in there because they wanted to show various "couples" starting to move on right at the start before the curse broke a second time for Momiji. I also think they should have 100% cut Motoko's storyline this season to maybe a scene since its honestly really not that necessary, and given that time to any number of more crucial moments for the main cast. That being said, I still feel really positive about the choices being made this season, and I'm not worried about the episode count. This was clearly always the plan from the start, and most of the stuff that's happening (small cuts/re-structuring) has been the case from S1, there's just more understandable anxiousness now that we're headed towards the finale. |
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MF65
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It's not, though. That's Akito's line from chapter 117. I'm guessing the next episode will either go back and tell Ren/Akira/Akito's backstory or it will ignore it and the episode will likely end with spoiler[Kyo telling Tohru about his connection to his mother and her death]. Either way, this season has been pretty frustrating to watch. We're finally reaching the climax so this should be the part that is completely faithful to the manga. If FB was planed as a 63 episodes adaptation from the very beginning, it just feels pointless to have wasted full episodes on filler-like characters like Yuki's fanclub. There's so many storylines that could have been shortened too! It's truly a shame. |
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Zhou-BR
Posts: 1460 |
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My bad. I'm terrible at telling female seiyuu apart, although spoiler[Kyoko does say "it's empty"] at the beginning of chapter 93.
Yeah, the first two seasons even had a few episodes that only covered one chapter each, which feels like a waste now that they're rushing through the last third of the manga, covering as many as four chapters in a single episode. It's as if the director and head writer only picked the chapters that would work best as season finales and weren't mindful of how much material they'd have to cover in the last 13 episodes. Last edited by Zhou-BR on Thu May 13, 2021 7:38 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Alexis.Anagram
 Posts: 278 Location: Mishopshno |
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I think what's been especially frustrating about this is that the reasoning behind these changes has been mischaracterized in an attempt to justify them and deflect criticism; the argument that they're doing this because it fits the animated episodic medium better or because it helps the narrative flow doesn't hold water when considering how the previous seasons were composed and the pacing with which the arcs were adapted. But by framing the alterations as a natural result of any adaptation process the actual impact they have on the episodes, the story and the characters doesn't enter the conversation because "it can't be helped," and those who are disappointed with this trend are dismissed as purists who simply can't handle the transition from page to screen. If we consider the 2001 anime adaptation, it also made significant changes to the source material in order to better serve the story as it was being told, and there are many of us who love the manga and also love that adaptation (Takaya notwithstanding haha) as a separate and distinct approach to the series. Longtime Fruits Basket readers are not strangers to how an adaptation can stray from the source, indeed the entire conceit behind this remake was to give the manga's full story its due because that original adaptation (whatever one's feelings about it) took the story in a different direction, so it's strange to see that dynamic being erased from the discourse. We've already been down this road; of course the anime should be appreciated on its own merits, but the implicit promise made at the start of the series was that it would prioritize faithfulness. But in just a few episodes we've gone from simple rearrangements and cosmetic changes to speculation over *what storylines will even be adapted* and I don't see how it's possible to qualify those concerns as bearing any similarity to one another. I've had my issues with technical and directorial choices this series has made but none of them fundamentally altered the basic underpinnings of the story that is being told: episode 6 effectively did that, not only because of what happened in the episode itself but because of what it portends for the remainder of the series and what it's even possible to accomplish in 7 episodes. We're talking about entire character arcs getting axed which is not an adaptation decision that gets made because the narrative will be better served, it's one that is made because the project is being rushed and there's no other way to reach the endpoint. Whether one personally cares about those arcs is beside the point: this is not an adaptation of the full story anymore, it's a clip show of key events which make up the third act of this drama, and that's a far cry from how this show has approached the material thus far and what viewers were primed to expect from it. Even if we allow for the fact that all of the "major" plot points will be resolved, episode 6 is indicative of how the story's cohesiveness is undermined without the connective tissue to properly communicate the meaning behind each moment. Consider Rin's perspective in this episode: she begins by learning that the Sohma family curse, the center of her conflict thus far, is breaking by itself (Shigure never tells her this in the manga); what impact does that have on her? How does she process this information? We don't know, because the next scene she's in is lifted from a completely different context and she behaves as though this bombshell was never dropped on her. And because that scene also features Tohru in a completely different context from where she was in the manga, they've altered how Kagura's interruption impacts her and what it leads her to do, and that necessitates changing how Rin reacts to that moment. Ultimately, Rin is portrayed in this episode as a passive bystander who has no internal narrative, who learns something with incredible personal consequence for her and says nothing, who watches her friend get hurt emotionally and physically and does nothing. Does that sound like Rin? At all? It's creeping right up to the line of character assassination and the only reason it doesn't cross it is because the changes aren't being made specifically for that purpose, it's just the domino effect of shuffling story beats without properly accounting for the fallout. Fruits Basket is a series that lives and dies on the incredible precision and nuance with which it constructs its characters' internal realities: missing Kyo's and Tohru's individual thoughts about the gap between them and the fears that reinforce it (not to mention key details of their personal histories) means that moment of vulnerability and connection with the sheet between them is no longer payoff for a long and bitter struggle to hold back what's bubbling up between them, it's a brief interlude after an episode of sort of dancing around each other for reasons that aren't entirely clear to the audience to begin with-- if Tohru has already accepted her feelings for Kyo, then incentivizing him to reject her in an effort to hold them back makes no sense, and by equal turns it's not clear what led her to accept her feelings for Kyo in the first place because that was the whole significance of that moment. Similarly, Kyo's internalization of a worldview rooted in the pain and death that constantly follows him has basically just been flattened and abstracted into a pattern of behaviors which we as the audience recognize as trauma responses but only ever perceive from the outside looking in; there is no sense of scope offered for the way in which each of Kyo's traumas has compounded the other and how it's not just an amalgamation of sadness, he is constantly juggling each and every one of these shaming memories and the impulses that stem from them as individual and distinct psychic threats that are always haunting and threatening to overwhelm him. To put it in the language of the show itself, while Tohru and Yuki were able to compartmentalize their traumas into boxes and place a lid on them until they felt ready to face them, Kyo has never been able to make the same adjustment to his internal state-- instead, he lives with his demons fully facing him and can only manage them by constructing a box around *himself* and being extremely selective about who gets let in. This is critical to comprehending the degree to which his relationship to Tohru, his feelings for her, and his fear that she may reciprocate them is infringing upon his own sense of psychological safety and why he works so hard to suppress any possibility of that coming to pass. The suggestion at the end of this episode that he "put a lid" on his memory of Kyoko misinterprets and undersells what Kyo has been up against this whole time, and why he hasn't been able to push through it the same way Yuki and Tohru have been. The idea that this is all going to come to the fore in an episode that also has to multitask Akito/Ren/Shigure drama (lest we forget the meat of Akito's arc is also in this latter third of the series) sounds kind of catastrophic. If we aren't going to get any dramatic punctuation, how are we supposed to recognize the momentous value of the events as they're unfolding? At the end of the day, I want to love this third season for what it is and I'll try, but even without directly drawing contrasts with the manga, episodes like this are in and of themselves internally fraught. To the extent that they work at all it's because the core story is strong enough to weather weakening through adaptation, but that's a very different recognition from pursuing the tact that the adaptation is somehow making moves to strengthen the material. |
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