A good story needs to have, first and foremost, a clear plot/goal for the audience to see its characters work towards. The entirety of the show felt like I was being force fed word salad with the aggressively mediocre writing. You could realize that all the character backstories boil down to the same thing and skip basically the entire season except a couple episodes at the end and nothing remotely would change about the plot. Yes, because there isn’t one.
The plot is an amalgamation of slice of life, rom-com, and mystery interspersed with episode long trauma dumps. There never actually is any progress toward the main goal, which seems to be breaking out of the zodiac curse. The show is just so preoccupied with "setting the mood" using layers of traumatic character backstory (that always ends up being a variation of parental abuse) that it completely forgets what to do with them. Essentially, Fruits Basket is permanently stuck in an endless loop of exposition. There is an excess of inner monologue and no action to support the epiphanies everyone seems to get after witnessing Tohru's magnificent healing tears.
So first, let's ignore the fact that every backstory boils down to parental abuse. What sets each one apart, then? Nothing. They are all copy pasted onto each other with the sole difference being who Tohru Honda is providing her therapy services to. Pick any one at random, and you will see how the plot edges to a point where the characters can finally start taking initiative, but it always ends up in a fakeout involving Tohru crying hysterically, achieving nothing but fake pity points narratively.
The other major issue is the ridiculous double narrative. There was Tohru being quirky and obscenely happy all the time and then, separately, a storyline about Yuki joining and running the student council so he can stop being depressed. This is fine and all for developing his character, but in a show that is all about character backstory, it felt like Yuki was getting preferential treatment. And on a more subjective note, his struggles weren't really compelling. His character arc was needlessly convoluted and obnoxiously stretched across the entire season’s runtime. Every other episode HAD to have its mandatory 10 minute monologue about how he was horrifically and that Tohru Honda is an angel because she’s unique and quirky. This split narrative just eats up time that could have been spent trying to salvage the mess that was the main plot. The screen time spent creating all these new characters could have been utilized to actually develop the existing characters.
The double narrative could have been slightly more worth it if there was a well written pay off, but there wasn't. Yuki’s character arc was ripped from another show and stitched together with Tohru Honda’s happy-go-lucky slice of life. All the work on the student council plotline ends up in a weird big reveal fake out where Yuki admits that he sees Tohru as a mother figure (which doesn't make sense at all - his friend even calls him out for it). This had the potential to be a nice departure from the typical love triangle trope in shoujo, but here it only served the purpose of giving Kyou the green light with Honda Tohru. Out of all the things to do, surely there must have been some better way to write platonic love that wasn't so incredibly tedious and convoluted.
Honda is the most annoying character in the whole series. Her gimmick of being kind, ditzy and quirky was cute at first, but as the story progresses, her character traits are overemphasized to the point of practically being a caricature. Tohru only has two modes to her personality: she is either hysterically happy or excessively emotional. She manages to burst into tears every single time a character tells even a mildly sad story. Tohru’s constant crying is the writing’s best attempt at emotional depth, but only manages to superficially represent the complexity of the feelings people go through during abuse and trauma. It simply gets boring because the impact of these big blowout emotional moments is lessened every time the formula is rinsed and repeated. Most problems in the show are somehow always miraculously solved through a few kind words and tearful embrace from Tohru. It is completely unrealistic at best and insensitively demeaning to true victims of abuse at worst.
Tohru herself remains the same across the entirety of the show. This is probably fine seeing that Tohru’s existence is meant to serve as a catalyst for all the characters to develop. However, a character who doesn’t change isn’t necessarily a bad character or one without complexity. A few people have mentioned this already, but at one point, Tohru is called out by Hiro for constantly mentioning her mother, unaware that most of the zodiac family has strained relationships with their parents. Tohru gets depressed for a bit and then returns to being happy again and this plot point is left completely wide open. This was a golden opportunity for Tohru to have some kind of development beyond being the same “nice girl” trope she has embodied for 2 seasons already.
So what could have been done to "fix" Honda Tohru? Just my 2 cents as an viewer:
- Tohru drops her constant bipolar sugar rush hyper emotional state
- Tohru says things other than “Yes!” every time someone says a nice thing to her
- Tohru doesn't burst into tears immediately when someone says something mildly sad
- Tohru calls out people for their overreactions (she can’t atm because she herself is melodramatic)
- Tohru shows the audience that there are more sides to her than being happy/sad (trying to be logical would be a good start)
- Tohru actively tries to solve the problems that she notices
- Tohru’s flaws (being too complacent and trusting) are addressed in a meaningful way
- Tohru’s relationship with her parents is explored more, specifically her feelings about her absent father and her mother’s past
- There is actual romance on Tohru’s side (she is happy and complacent and nice to everyone that the only thing that indicated she liked Kyou was the blush lines)
All of the other characters are aggressively mediocre. Where most badly written characters are simply one dimensional, Fruits Baskets characters are (surprise) also one dimensional, BUT at least they come with a tragic past to explain their unreasonable actions!
I have a soft spot for tsunderes, so due to my bias I probably won’t have much to criticize about Kyou. After all, he was my favorite character of the series and despite knowing s3 doesn’t fix any of the problems the show has, I’ll still probably go ahead and watch the episodes that focus on Kyou.
Kyou and Yuki’s rivalry was overblown from a gag to becoming literally incorporated into their respective characters. It’s understandable that certain people might not get along or that they should get along, but the writing never made an attempt to bridge the gap. The audience is told the true reasons why Kyou and Yuki hate each other, but there is never a moment where both characters are forced into a confrontation and admit that on some level they admire the other.
During the confrontation with Akito at the beach house, Kyou goes through a rollercoaster of emotions that aren’t clarified at all. From my understanding, after Akito’s verbal harassment, Kyou has accepted that he’s a monster and he’s been gaslighted into thinking confinement is appropriate for him. So he makes up his mind to cherish the time he has left with Tohru. That’s fair and can be used to set up some cheesy but wholesome moment with Tohru later, but that it never happens because Tohru seems to forget all about it! Kyou doesn’t even seem to recognize the implications of this threat, and so his promise evaporates and he undermines himself.
Kagura was infuriating from the start. The good thing about her is that she appears only when the show feels the need to recycle the cheap violence gag. The tragic backstory about her unrequited love does NOT save the fact that she is still a cardboard cutout yandere. It’s hard to believe that Kyou forgave her after the amount of physical abuse she heaped on him.
Dark Hatsuharu was the show trying to be so edgy for no particular reason. The fact that Haru is aware of “dark Haru” but treats it like a completely separate person/entity (thus avoiding all responsibility) for comedic value is just bad writing.
Shigure goes right past edgy and straight into flat out creepy. Where all the other characters get at least some form of explanation for their actions, Shigure gets a one liner that doesn’t make any sense at all. Then, he’s shown getting freaky with Akito (which is even worse when the show reveals Akito is a girl and starts sexualizing her). Shigure gets his moment with the shadows on his face and makes his rude, snarky comments and then audience is told it's all part of his plan to get Mayu and Hatori together, which is somehow meant to show him being good in the most convoluted way possible.
Ritsu was plain annoying after the show reused the apologizing gag for the 10th time in a row and then he also disappeared forever, which is a good thing, I guess.
Kureno was built up to be this great info mine where the audience could finally find out how to break the curse. He then somehow rejects her because he made a promise to a little girl once (???). I never understood this line of reasoning, especially when he has indicated multiple times that he isn’t happy in his current situation and that he has an attraction to Arisa. But then we find out that he has been getting freaky with Akito, and then it's just weird.
Akito was underwhelming and frankly, kind of annoying. She trashes other characters and abuses them for literally no reason. The final reveal in season 2 of Akito secretly being a girl is supposed to be super shocking (?). All it really did was introduce an unnecessary sexual element to all the abuse Fruits Basket characters love to give each other. And despite all the hyping up Akito gets from all the other characters, she isn’t even remotely threatening when she finally shows up. The characters seem terrified of her, but she’s never shown doing anything besides pushing people. It’s just that the people she pushes don’t fight back. Her big plan of making everyone live with her because she’s lonely was so vapid because maybe everyone (besides the sexual abusers) wouldn’t hate and fear her if she didn’t bully them (???).
I really did try to love this show. For all the nitpicks and critiques I have, at least some of its other aspects were tolerable. The op/ed songs were fine and the Cinderella episode near the end was fun. It’s just that this show’s lack of proper plot and pacing was very noticeable. There were so many wonderful directions that the plot could have gone that would have enhanced character relationships, but in the end the writing stayed in its comfort zone of SOL with depressing copy pasted backstories. And that's not to mention the questionable glorification of creepy sexual behavior with Shigure and, more subtly, Kureno. But generally, most of the show’s shortcomings stem back to Tohru Honda and her ridiculously saccharine and lazily written personality.
If anything, Fruits Basket can be good in that it is an example of how not to write a bubbly character or characters with similar backstories.
In any case, if you’ve made it this far into my review, thank you so much for taking the time to read my messy and unplanned review. I don’t usually spend this much time thinking about a show, but for this particular one, I was so invested into Kyou and his individual character development that it was frustrating and even a little disappointing when the rest of the show didn’t hold up to my expectations.
Final Rating: 4
