Things about this last season of Fruits Basket I’m not jiving with:
The loss of the box and the lid metaphor–the anime dropped that with Yuki, and the emotional parallels and theming’s for the series has suffered. Akito’s physical box that she didn’t want to open is no longer as striking, because we’ve lost the ongoing metaphor of each character having a box with the emotions they don’t want to look at/process locked inside. In the manga, this theme continues on with Tohru’s internal monologues, where she’s placed her feelings about her mother and her father’s deaths and the trauma she’s endured because of it. Kyo has one as well, which brings me to:
Kyo remembered Kyoko every second he spent with Tohru, and it destroyed him. The broken promise, her death, and his helplessness is an ongoing thread as he processes his emotions for her and his place in the world. He didn’t repress the memory, he surpressed it, and shoved it into that tightly lidded box. (In ch. 120, he says “I wanted to pretend… to forget everything that happened to me. All I had to do was hate.” not… that he iterally forgot.) In ch. 90, when it really starts weighing on him, it’s shown explicitly that he remembers reaching for Kyoko, and he asks himself if he’s okay pretending that he’s “forgotten”.
Are we just entirely skipping Katsuya????????? He’s in the chapters where Kyo remembers meeting up with Kyoko (ch 90-93) and should have been covered last week/this week.
I get that people don’t like that storyline, for obvious reasons, but it’s intensely important to not only how Tohru was raised, but why she is the way she is. It also highlights how Kyoko herself was raised, why she parented the way that she did, why she was so gentle with Uo-chan, why she treated Kyo with such kindness, and why his last memory of her is so intensely jarring. Just hinting at Kyoko’s depression after his passing is doing Tohru’s intense trauma disservice, and why it’s such A Big Deal that she casts Kyoko’s last words away, and why she’s so hesitant to admit that someone else comes in her heart first. People saving people by teaching them to be human, that their emotions matter even when their current actions are toxic and harmful, because all people suffer and should be treated with basic care and dignity, is such a huge huge huge plot point in Fruits Basket. To do away with one of the largest binding threads in the manga is to lesson the impact that basic care had on the cast. I know that Takaya was very particular about terms in order for this anime to be made after the original anime, so she may have greenlit this change herself, but I still dislike it.
WHERE IS MY MEAT WIFE!? Komaki, while only a side character, is someone I definitely miss because I’m sure she’s cut entirely from the anime despite the setup for her intro being baked into s2. She’s from chapter 112, and it just is a small aside to the fact that the crash that killed Kyoko was not a single-person casualty, and is an alternate look at grief, blame, and loss. It closes the open thread to Kakeru’s original interest in Tohru, and gives Yuki more context to Tohru’s loss. Also: I just think she’s neat.
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