#Momiji's a good bean who doesn't deserve the shit he deals with :(

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Fruits Basket 2019 2nd Season Ep16 [”Ask Him For Me”]:

This week on Fruits Basket, Momiji’s whole storyline continues being super sad, and Tohru basically spends 20 minutes having a prolonged emotional breakdown because she’s juggling like five different types of trauma at the moment, and most of them aren’t even directly related to her. Fun times! :)

Thoughts under the cut.

Like I said last week, this episode adapted chapters 74 and 75, so we’re back on track with following the manga’s pacing in a pretty 1:1 way for a while. The next two volumes or so of the manga are pretty neatly divided into two-chapter story arcs, and this episode is a good example of how neatly that translates to the anime’s pacing.

At first I thought that the scene at the start with Momiji and his dad was anime-original, but after double-checking it actually isn’t, lol. I think in general this episode was a super straightforward adaptation that didn’t really leave anything out or add anything, but it didn’t really need to.

Anyway, I think as a whole this was a really good episode that’s gonna make lots of people cry, and for the most part I liked it, but I think it ended up feeling a little too melodramatic, in a way. Like it was trying a bit too hard to make the viewer feel sad. But honestly a lot of that just has to do with how this episode focused on some of the plot points that I don’t care as much about, so I wasn’t really as invested in what was going on in the first place.

This whole episode’s pretty much focused on the two threads of Uo and Kureno’s whole deal, and Momiji’s family situation. I’ve already gone over why the Uo and Kureno stuff just doesn’t work for me, and how it just feels kinda over the top, but I also have kinda mixed feelings on these sorts of parts with Momiji. I like him a lot as a character, but in these sorts of dramatic moments he almost feels unrealistic in a way that’s kinda hard to describe.

I do appreciate that as a whole this episode served as a reminder of how shitty his whole situation is, and how much he’s been having to hold himself back from his true feelings and desires for basically his whole life.

Which is basically the whole theme of this episode. That for all sorts of complicated reasons, everyone ends up holding themselves back or being held back from pursuing their wishes. Which can be particularly painful when those things are perfectly achievable, and the reasons why they’re being held back are relatively flimsy and arbitrary.

But on the other hand you also have cases like Tohru where the wish that she’s unhealthily clinging to is one that fundamentally can’t be fulfilled because she wants to be with someone who’s already dead. And that’s a big part of why she’s so empathetic toward these people who want to be with others who are still alive.

In a lot of ways, I think Tohru’s basically projecting her own trauma onto everyone around her, and watching all of these other personal struggles is just reminding her of her mother. On top of her just being a fundamentally nice person, I think part of why she’s pushing herself so hard to help everyone deal with their issues is so she can indirectly fix her own problems, in a sense. Which she basically acknowledged to Momiji, about how she’s doing this because she wants to, even if it’s also about helping others.

Even though I already said that this episode felt a little too melodramatic for me, I think that it makes a lot of sense that Tohru is reacting so severely to all the stuff around her. I’ve seen a fair amount of other people being a bit confused about why she’s breaking down so much, but I think it’s just a mix of what I said about her projecting her own issues onto everyone else, and also her just slowly breaking down under the weight of all the different things she’s been dealing with in general. It’s less that Momiji and Momi’s situation in and of itself is enough to send her into this much of a spiral, but more that she’s already been getting more and more aware of the struggles everyone’s facing, and how the curse is binding them. Which has also been making her confront her own repressed trauma more, which has just made her more mentally unsteady. So it’s just a whole lot of things going on at once that are making her one giant emotional wreck, lol.

Anyway, aside from all that, we also got the scene that first properly teases at Ren, and I was curious to see how they’d handle it. It’s mostly the same as in the manga, but I think they changed it a bit so that instead of having Tohru straight up think it’s Akito at first, they were a bit more ambiguous about what her reaction to it was. I think they had to figure out a way to alter it because of how Ren has a notably female voice, so having Tohru assume it’s Akito would be kinda awkward. Whereas in the manga there’s no voice-acting so there’s more room for ambiguity.

It’s not a huge issue, but I think it really just highlights how awkward that whole scene is the more you think about it. And in a broader sense, it’s yet another example of how the story keeps awkwardly having to sidestep around the fact that Akito’s a woman. And because of that mix of ambiguous writing, and them giving Ren a notably different voice to Akito, I can already tell that it’s giving anime-only people the wrong idea, and making them think that Tohru knows who Ren is when she actually doesn’t.

But anyway, that’s about it for this episode. There’s more I could go over, but I already ended up saying more than I thought I would, lol.

I’m assuming that the next episode is going to cover the field trip arc, since that’s what happens next in the manga, but I don’t remember what scene the episode title is based on.