Fruits Basket 2nd Season

A good show always establishes its objectives early on to keep its audience interested. Whether that be a particular goal of a character, an overarching conflict, or just have a wholly devoted linear plot -- which then you could branch out to a more complex narrative. This show, Fruits Basket, failed in that department.

Story:

Episode after episode, we, the audience, still don’t know what this second season is about. Each passing episode, we get to see characters interacting with each other, going on an excursion, or just sitting around and talking about nonsense that doesn’t serve in the progression of the ... over all plot. It has become increasingly difficult to make through each episode because there is nothing, and I mean zero, things going on. If you have to make characters sitting around and talk in your show, at last make it interesting, and most importantly, it has to serve in the progression of the narrative. What this show has done so far is having the characters talking about each other’s feelings. However, once there is an opportunity to explore that element, the show does a complete 180. Outside of that, the each episode of the show shifts to different scenes in trying to taut together the plot. By the end of it, you’re left knowing nothing.

Characters:

Because of this show’s incompetence to form a decent linear plot, the characters of this show suffer. We do not know what their motivations are, and how they serve the overall narrative. Which makes them an empty shell. Sure, there is some hint of their involvement, but it’s barely explored. Just as an example, when Hiro Souma criticized Tooru’s every mention of her mother, she goes into this melancholy mood. The narrative could have taken advantage of this and do some character explorations. But nope, she got over her feelings within a span of a single episode. When Yuki was called to meet with Akito Souma, it alluded to a possible event that could instigate what the plot is about, but it cut to the scene of the beach. Just to be clear, I have no problem with this type of presentation. But, if the show has not presented its objectives -- which this show has not -- people are going to lose interest. This type of cheap baiting writing is what hinders this show from being at least attractive.

Enjoyment:

Like I stated earlier, this show is not easy to make it through unless you’re willing to turn off your brain for 25 minutes. Which you could have used that time doing something more productive.

Score: 4/10

I've never written a review before, but I just had to for this one.

The show is such a dumb one, the story is SO much repetitive and boring, and jesus christ - it's a big drag and NOT at all fun to watch.

The story tries to be emotional but it's like they have the few characters with the few "bad" things that happened to them - and they just repeat, repeat, and repeat the same dreadful things and there's no fun at all!

Why did I watch 15 episodes? I have no idea. Perhaps I wanted to complete it, but the show is so boring, I ... really cannot see it anymore. I have not seen a more boring anime ever before.

I would recommend only the first half of season 2, up to wherever you feel that the story really starts repeating itself. All the characters become the same. It's an endless cycle of events:
A new character is introduced. The story then proceeds to tease at the deep problem/troubling backstory/whatever the fuck happened that made them so "uniquely" similar to every other character in the anime. The reveal then happens, with much dramatic flair. I find myself feeling less and less sympathetic for each new character as we learn about their mental illnesses. The new character's savior tries to help. The character refuses the help. ... After reaching the climax of the tug-of-war, the character breaks down, and. the. cycle. repeats.
It's not just this storyline that keeps repeating. It's also the characters themselves. Everyone is so... cliched, shallow, and unrealistic that I'm starting to cringe at every action. I'm going to direct that especially at Tohru and the characters who needed a savior. The only thing that's keeping me from dropping this is our childish main antagonist, who hasn't appeared for at least 3... 5.... episodes because we're onto another character arc. Basically, this series is worth watching. But it gets bad real quick.

Haiku review:

First season is good
Second, superfluous pad
Third, a masterpiece

This review covers the entire “Fruits Basket” remake.

As most of us know, there was an excellent and widely loved “Fruits Basket” series that appeared in 2001. Its lone real shortcoming was that it appeared before the manga was complete, so it couldn’t reveal how everything turns out.

... The story was the kind of shojo that appeals to a much wider audience. The characters were compelling, the plot moved forward at the right speed, and even though it was incomplete it led to a satisfactory ending.
The original series did not, apparently, find favor with Takaya Natsuki, author of the original manga, who was in some measure involved in the three-season remake that’s the subject of this review. The chief production connection to the original is the presence of much of the original voice cast in the English dub, which is nice.

My initial thought upon viewing the remake was how the changes were pretty much limited to style – the characters are more moe, the “leeks” had become “chives” for no apparent reason, and the little androgynous blond character had acquired a German accent and a few German words. The places that could have benefited from the advances in anime making were largely unchanged. Kyo’s transformation, for instance, was little better in this series than in the original.

I have not read the manga, and if this remake represents the manga better than the original did, I’m glad of that. Because in the remake a good and interesting story in which we care about the characters is diluted by padding, a kind of flailing in which there’s an attempt to make this into a high school romantic comedy with zodiac animals and such. It’s as if the story was approached as something that could be hammered into a kind of anime version of a “Twilight”-ish drama. That might be good for the producers’ bank accounts, but it’s crap storytelling. The thing runs a total of 63 episodes, which is at least 11 episodes too long. And it was dissonant, like the first year I watched anime and alternated between “Elfin Lied” and “UFO Ultramaiden Valkyrie.”

It would have been better to have made a second season, picking up from the first, once the manga finished in 2006 – it’s not as if five years awaiting a sequel is unheard of in anime. That failing, the producers might better have remade the original series, changing it only to the extent that improvements in technology allowed it to be better on that basis and that basis alone, and added a second season to complete the story. Then, if they wanted, they could have done “Fruits Basket Fumoffu” or something, where the zodiacs are always getting hugged and there could have been aerial views of the brightly colored explosions and ho ho ho for those who are into it, without messing up the drama of the show. There were cute parts – the scenes with the editor and the school play – that were genuinely funny, but this isn’t a funny show. (And if they’d collected a dollar for every anime trope and cliché used in the otherwise unremarkable OPs and EDs, they would have been able to finance that sidebar series, with enough left over to improve the production values in the main show.)

To say nothing of the endless, repetitive back stories. We got it first time around: It sucked to be a kid in this family; apparently, it sucked to be a kid in Japan, period. No need to devote a half dozen episodes to how it sucked to be this kid, and this one, and this one. It’s less fun than the Endless Eight was. Then there was the soapy soliloquy at the beginning of second season, ep. 22, when Shinji, oops, Yucky, was going on about how Tohru was like a mommy to him (to which his friend said what sounded like, “Even though she’s Irish?” but on third listening I guess it was, “even though she’s our age?”) and how he wanted something more. I half expected him to burst forward in a chorus of “I gotta be me.” This kind of thing happens when they’ve lost control of the story and try to get it back by taking it way too seriously. Truth is, they could lost most of the second season with no loss to the narrative.

“Fruits Basket” is one of the enduring classics in anime. As such, it shouldn’t be messed with lightly, any more than “Neon Genesis Evangelion” should be redone as a rom-com. If it were to be remade, it should have been done with that near-sacred status in mind, with the goal of the heights to which it could further soar, instead of how many high school could be crammed into it, how much it could be homogenized with all the 5/10 shows that come and go without leaving a ripple.

THEN CAME SEASON THREE, “FRUITS BASKET: THE FINAL”

And oh, my God. Perhaps as a reward for enduring the aimless second season, the third season is one of the finest series of anime I have ever seen or can imagine. It is gripping, moving, tense, heart-wrenching, uplifting, terrifying – pick your superlative and there’s something in this short season that fits it. Talk about a roller coaster!

(It also demonstrates that, with a very small exception, all that high school stuff had no bearing or effect on the outcome. It was as out of place as it seemed.)

That third season also does something very well that anime usually does poorly if at all: Usually, if there’s an ending it takes place about 10 frames before the end of the show, leaving the viewer thinking, “and then what?” They hold hands and there’s fireworks, the end. (“Toradora,” I’m looking at you.) Not here. “Fruits Basket: The Final” devotes several episodes – more than necessary, really – to letting us know what happened then. It might be an apology for all the pointless high school stuff, but those producing the show seem to have realized that the audience has come to care about the characters and would like to know that they’re safe, if in fact they’re safe. We get to find out how it turned out writ large, not just at one point in time. It acknowledges that the “Fruits Basket” story is special, that it has a revered place in anime’s enormous body of work.

That’s good, though even the ending may be just a little bit stretched out, as if everyone involved didn’t want to go home yet, didn’t want to leave these remarkable characters behind. And who can blame them? We don’t want to be done with them, either. We want them to come over for a cup of coffee. We want to do what we can to help them along to happiness. Not many anime (or stories in other media) bring us to that place.

After watching a series that’s become important to us we often express a wish: for a different outcome, for a plot hole (or many plot holes) to get filled, most often, for a second season. I’ll do that now. I fervently wish (with no reason to think it will ever happen) that they go back and recut the whole show. That they take the vast majority of the high school stuff, the parts that have nothing to do with the story, and make them into a sidebar series. At least that they remove them from the main story, which loses its pace and just wallows around because of them. The pacing of parts of the series is just right, but in the second season it and much else goes terribly wrong.

If they were to do that, the remake of “Fruits Basket” would be just right, a perfect successor to and completion of the 2001 masterpiece.

I have so many feeelings for thisseries after finished watching 2 seasons. But shortly i am dissapointed and didnt like this series. I hate tohru bc obviously i shipped her w yuki and i freakingly hate kyo bc kyo always thought that he was the saddest person and the most unfortunate within the zodiac family. But he has master as a father, he got to be friend with haru, rin and kagura in his childhood. He got kagura to loves her and reach her when he was younger. But yuki on the other side, he had nothing. His parent sold him to akito. His ... brother doesn't care about him. Haru and kyo hate him, he doesn't have childhood friend. Even tohru had a lot of screentime w kyo rather than w yuki even it was yuki who invited tohru to his house. So why i hate tohru simply because she is a nice girl. And to explain this its better to look at Hikigaya Hachiman interpretation of nice girl. Shortly, nice girl treat everyone the same, thus making everyone like/love her, thus give everyone fake hope bc obviously tohru can't be in love w everyone. I really feel bad for yuki tho..

Fruits Basket Season Two can brag itself to be one of the worst anime I have ever seen, which is not a small thing. In direct comparison, the first season, which I thought comfortably average, seems almost like a masterpiece - there is an actual plot, and actual characters, and actual investment you get from watching the first season play out.

Alas; Season Two decided to take a step away from all that ‘actual plot that makes me want to watch more’ and instead takes us on a metaphorical twenty-something-episode school trip through absolutely unnecessary points of… of something I can’t quite call plot, because it ... ultimately added so little to the overall Fruits Basket experience, that I couldn't help feeling tricked.

Mind you, I watched every episode of it, and I, generally speaking, remember it all. But you know how anime have those episodes where a class goes to a trip? Or the protagonists go to the beach, and it’s an entire 'thing'? I’m not kidding when I tell you nearly the entire season had felt like that. The constant, *constant* melodrama, the both pessimistic and optimistic musing of main characters, the countless inner monologues, narration after narration after narration of one’s feelings and memories and very insubstantial flashbacks - it sounds like a good way to delve into a character… but not so much when that's literally all there is. Like I said, I wouldn’t find this so bad if there was some, some payoff by the end of the episodes or at least the season. But there is quite literally none, and you know why?

Because inner monologues always stay inner monologues. No matter what inner revelations, fears, concerns or breakthroughs develop in the hearts and minds of the character the episode is focused on, hardly any of it matters because the characters refuse, for the drama’s sake, to trust each other with more than a bare minimum of their true being. I know this vulnerability is part of the plot but everything has its limits, and so does my patience. Again, ultimately, it feels as if quite literally nothing had happened.

If I'm looking for a single word to describe it, it’s boring. It is simply boring.

… The saving grace of this painful experience is that the season decided to pick up the actual plot about four episodes before it ends, and it is, almost literally, the only part worth watching, and the only reason why this isn’t rated with a ‘1’. The last few episodes reveal a lot of interesting information and propels the plot into motion - and it makes the entire experience incredibly frustrating, because if I knew that’s how it was going to be, I would simply skip the entirety of the rest of the season easily.

Which would bring is to season three and its, uh… humble way it ended things.