Crying about magical furries and horrible families: Tumblr's #1 problematic manga [FRUITS BASKET]

please get started on Rin

 

But yeah, like, Machi always felt very... natural to me? Like, Tohru is the kind of girl you don't often meet, but Machi is a lot more realistic

 

I'll talk about Rin tomorrow, ha. Too many feelings to sort today.

One thing, thought - she's moody, mentally ill, and stand-offish, and very well could have been played as the 'bitchy rival' because of that, but she wasn't. She was portrayed as a good person with good intentions who just wanted to help people.

 

Kakeru is underappreciated favorite, though? Because

Spoiler

I feel like he sees a lot of himself as he used to be in Yuki--the family issues and trying to be perfect and everything--and he tries to help him. Like, maybe not in a way Yuki likes at the time--but as much as Kakeru annoys Yuki, he's never deliberately hurtful about it. He also witnesses a lot of weird stuff from Yuki--including a black-paint-induced panic attack and some sort of stuttery not-quite-references to the curse--and he never demands an explanation. He just sort of keeps aggressively befriending him. Kakeru is BEST.

 

I also want to say I don't like Shigure at all.

Spoiler

He's so manipulative and cruel and even when he's helping people out, at the same time he's setting stuff up so people get hurt just for his own goal. It's played for laughs sometimes like with Mitsuru but as more and more of his sadistic and manipulative tendencies get revealed it's a lot less funny. The part where he slept with Ren to 'punish' Akito for sleeping with Kureno just made me viscerally ill. I was kind of horrified he ended up with Akito in the end, because I don't feel like he's going to stop being a boundary-pushing asshole just because he 'got' the person he wanted.

 

yeah. I really like Shigure as a character and as a force getting the plot to move, but is is pretty terrible as a person.

Spoiler

i think the situation with Akito is a whole clusterfuck of what the fucking fuck happened, tho. That is... a pretty terrible situation all around, and neither Akito at the time or Shigure are exactly good people.

 

Spoiler

And like I know Kureno probably didn't say 'no' to Akito but it was still emotionally coerced sex. But I just don't see Shigure and Akito together as a happy ending, at all. Shigure is waaaaay too toxic to Akito when he's not being actively abusive towards her, and frankly she's the same for him. Happy ending would be them getting space to think and sort their shit.

Stuff with Kureno and Akito also... I don't think she intended to fuck him up as badly as she did, and I don't think he's totally wrong in that he ended up enabling her at some pretty poor points, but they weren't just toxic, it was an abusive relationship. It's easy to say that Kureno could have said no to her when she was just a child and before things had gotten so bad, but when his curse broke, she was just a child having a complete breakdown that Kureno, already a very kind person, had spent his entire life being magically and socially conditioned to protect and serve. The magical conditioning broke, sure, but the social conditioning was still there.

As for Akito, I think when she says near the end that she doesn't know what the proper course of action is because nobody taught her, they just filled her with their own agendas and worshipped her and coddled her and abused her, she was being honest. But I think it's also not like she doesn't have her own agency, she just... it was easier to go along with things and keep her place by force if necessary than to have to actually be her own person, because nobody taught her how to be her own person and it was, frankly, terrifying as fuck. She knows enough to apologize to Kureno after berating him, even if it's a shitty apology. There's mental illness and a toxic environment there, but also her own choices she's making because the alternative is too scary.

TL;DR my endgame ship for Akito is nobody, what the fuck, she is clearly not in a good place for a relationship.

 

Spoiler: shigure and akito and tohru

tohru is definitely a good influence on akito, and i would sign the whole "akito needs space from shigure and vice versa", at the very least until akito can build up her own self without shigure butting in and moulding her to his wishes, whiiich is basically what the rest of the family already did but no really guys this time it's totally different because its true lurve.
i wonder if akito would politely but firmly reject shigure on grounds of "this would end in a disaster" if given the chance.

but tohru <> akito

 

yeah, the Shigure/Akito pairing is rly fucked up (ngl it's my trash ship) and I hope they don't have kids unless both of them go through therapy separately. I also want Rin to beat the shit out of Shigure bc she directly suffered from him stirring shit up between Akito and Ren. like, the cards were already stacked against her bc she looked vaguely like Ren, but holy shit he did not help, and he had to know that she was the one Akito would hurt w/o hesitation

 

I am hoping a Shigure/Akito kid doesn't show up in FBA, ngl.

 

I'm hoping a Shigure/Akito kid doesn't exist

 

Yeah. Shigure and Akito are terrible to each other and for each other. the magical compelling to love/protect/serve basically is a fertile ground for dysfunction and i don't think shigure is capable of not... i'm not sure how to say it in english, but loosely translated from portuguese, making a stitch without a knot, which is just... not what would be healthy for each other. i think that without a lot of outside positive influence they would spiral back into being toxic and abusive pretty quickly.

but HELL YEAH Tohru <> Akito
(honestly, Thoru <> everyone is my ship, she is the village pale two wheeled device, she and karkat need to have tea sometime)

 

Same, but especially Tohru<>Akito, since they're developed as foils who help each other by the end.

 

as someone who does crochet and sewing, I rly like that saying, "making a stitch w/o a knot" and will definitely be using it in the future. like, that saying is perf and we need it in english now

 

I have NO IDEA if it's conveying the right meaning because it's something so abstract, and i have no idea how to say what it means in English. it's one of my favorite idioms.

 

Man I read this series really young, like, 11-14, and reading through the comments there's a lot i never fully parsed because like. hello, kid with a rly happy life, how's reading this series about complicated abuse?
that said, thanks for scanlation link but aaaaaaaaaaaaaagh idk if I can read it, it's a fanlation not the official and i read this series in book form so much that I can tell that the words are wrong, does anyone have an official translation copy online ;-;

 

Haha, I'm from a happy family too and a lot of this stuff resonated with me.

 

also, Machi is one of my favorite characters ever bc I absolutely understand her thing about being unable to say (or even figure out) what she likes or dislikes, and I loved seeing someone who was good in school but couldn't (and wouldn't) keep house for shit, bc those are all me, esp w the anxiety disorder stuff. and Yuki's thing when she apologized for wrecking the student council office- "doesn't it feel like you're just forcing yourself to say the words? instead you should try figuring out why" has stuck w me in the best way

 

And like, Kakeru loves her so much but is also really not sure how to help her? They spent their entire young childhood being pitted against each other and before Yuki he's probably the person who understands her the most but the way he copes with stuff is completely different from the way she deals, so when he tries to help her out a lot of the time he's really just helping things not get worse but isn't sure how to make it better.

It pisses me off even years later that her parents were just like 'CLEARLY SHE IS A BITTER SHELL OF A PERSON TRYING TO KILL HER BROTHER, TIME TO THROW HER OUT'. I imagine part of that was even tho Machi would rather chew off her own arm than hurt her little brother, that had to be after the time she started violently wrecking objects and not being able to explain why? So with that in mind I understand why they weren't sure if she'd be willing to hurt herself and others, but what we hear of the story makes it sound like they felt like she was 'broken' so time to remove her from the family environment and start over with their new kid. Like her mom keeps in contact with her but it's very...

The most positive reading of her family situation is they want to help her but are completely unable to because they're only barely admitting that maybe they made mistakes with how they raised her, and how they word that admitting is in terms of 'oops we broke this one'.

 

@amberbydreams yeah, I'm not exactly sure if anyone has a complete set of the official translations online. for that, your best bet is probs torrents

also apparently the series has been re-licensed by a different company, and they're putting out collector's editions of the volumes, though I doubt that actually means that much. amusingly enough the collector's editions are cheaper than what I paid for my copies of the original run ten years ago