#and immediately switches to i think i have Issues (tm) in the next line

[rosquinn]

this shit is sending me

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Fruits Basket 2019 Episode 12: “You Look Like You’re Having Fun”

My brain’s still kinda fried from the Sarazanmai finale, so my thoughts might not be super coherent or detailed this week, but I still wanna write up my thoughts on this new Fruits Basket episode, especially since it was even better than I expected it to be.

Thoughts under the cut. [Spoiler warning for the whole manga]

I think I’ve said before that by this point we’re in the midst of a fairly good stretch of episodes where the reboot is going to be very similar to the 2001 anime in what material it covers in each episode, and that continues in this one, as I figured.

This episode covers chapters 19 and 20 of the manga, which is the same as what episode 13 of the 2001 anime covered, and from what I remember of that version, the two versions are pretty identical in how they just adapt the manga 1:1, so there’s nothing particularly noteworthy there. I think episode 13 of the 2001 anime was one of the relatively few times where I think they actually did a good job of preserving the emotional depth and darkness of the manga, but I still think this episode did an even better job.

I’m kinda meh about the whole first half [since I’ve never really been the biggest fan of the part of the manga to begin with, which I’ll get into in a minute], but the whole second half with Akito was fantastic. It had been heavily teased at in some of the PVs we’ve gotten, but it still managed to be even more disturbing than I was expecting. It’s not like they added in anything that wasn’t in the manga [aside from a short flashback to that one time Akito had a mental breakdown and painted Yuki’s room black, which I don’t think had been hinted at this early in the manga], but it just executed the material really perfectly. [Though I think the bit at the start of the episode with Tohru seeing Akito’s car pull up at the school might have been a new scene]

The improved voice acting and animation really help drive home the extent of Yuki’s trauma in particular. Even though this is like the billionth time I’ve seen this scene in some form or another, it still kinda shook me, lol.

This whole part also really goes to show how important Tohru is as a person to Yuki, and also to all the other zodiac members in general. She’s someone that’s willing to stand up for him, and to give him happy memories to help outweigh his bad ones. Especially with his whole monologue near the end, I think the badminton scene is probably where he first becomes at least subconsciously aware of how he’s seeking out a mother’s love from her.

Come to think of it, it’s kinda funny how recently we’ve been in a bit of a pattern of going from a fun episode to a more dark one, and so on. It’s not a complaint or anything. I think it does a nice job of not spending too much time in a row on a particular emotional tone. And that sorta pattern should hold up with how the next episode is gonna be Ayame’s introduction, and after that we should get Momiji’s backstory and the grave visit.

And on the note of Ayame’s intro being the focus of the next episode, I’m still curious to see if they incorporate the part where Tohru and Yuki visit his shop in chapter 36 into it, or if they’ll just stick to adapting chapters 21-22 alone, and leave that other chapter for later. I don’t think it’d change much one way or another, but still.

Anyway I guess I gotta address the elephant in the room and say that I’m just not really a big fan of the material covered in the first half of this episode. I don’t hate it, but I just don’t like it as much as like 99% of the fandom seems to.

For one thing, that one Tohru-Kyo scene has always stuck out to me as being a little too . . . generic shojo romance-y for my tastes. It’s one of those few moments where the series unironically indulges in Kyo’s Bad Boy Aesthetic [tm] and it just doesn’t work for me. But I obviously get why lots of people love it.

The part that I’m more annoyed at is the whole sequence with Haru and Momiji’s outfits, and I feel like it’s something that I need to add a whole list of disclaimers to so that people don’t misunderstand me, lol. I just feel like it’s a really good example of how Takaya’s heart is genuinely in the right place when it comes to some of the more progressive sentiments in the series, but the specific angle she approaches certain things at leaves a really bad taste in my mouth, especially when you think about the story as a whole and how things end up.

Specifically I just have issues with how Momiji’s cross-dressing is handled. The part with Haru is fine and I definitely appreciate the whole point of how whether or not someone wears jewelry and piercings and stuff has no inherent bearing on their personality, though the whole bit with him dragging Makoto off to the bathroom, uh . . . maybe hasn’t aged well, lmao. But anyway, I feel like the whole thing with Momiji seems perfectly fine on the surface, but the more you think about it in the context of the whole story, the more it feels uncomfortable.

The message that he should wear whatever he feels comfortable wearing is completely valid, but I just dislike how the story goes about it by saying that ‘it’s fine because he looks good in it, and he’s going to dress normally when he grows up anyway’. There’s a lot going on between the lines here, but I just think it’s really shitty and deceptively regressive that they justify it by pretty much saying ‘don’t worry, it’s just a phase, he’ll grow out of it and dress like a “normal man” later on anyway’. Which is bad enough on it’s own, but then we actually get to see him grow up later in the manga and he definitely does seem to unceremoniously switch to more conventionally masculine fashion because . . . it’s what’s expected of him, I guess? It’s not like he ever seemed to lose interest in wearing feminine clothing, he just stops wearing it after he hits his growth spurt, and it’s framed as something natural and inevitable.

Even the sentiment of ‘he looks good in it, though :)’, in the context of the series as a whole, carries this uncomfortable undertone of ‘it’s fine because for the moment he’s short and looks sort of “like a girl” but once he gets taller and looks more “like a man” he’ll obviously start dressing like one’. It’s the sort of thing that seems like a genuinely progressive and accepting message about how we shouldn’t judge people for the clothes they like to wear, but if you look closely there’s an asterisk and a whole paragraph of fine text at the bottom of the page about how it’s actually only acceptable to cross-dress as a man if your body type, height, etc, make you look ‘like a girl’ in the first place, and that once you hit puberty you should dress like a man because feminine clothing ‘doesn’t fit you anymore’.

In general this series has some weird recurring hang-ups about the specific idea of ‘men wearing girl’s clothing’, to the point where it comes up in different ways with at least three different characters. I know it’s something that a lot of people in the fandom don’t like hearing negativity and complaints about, but I’m not gonna shut up about this, lmao. Y’all just have to deal with the fact that this series isn’t perfect and that I’m allowed to criticize it while also really liking other parts of it.

And on the general note of how the series kinda drops the ball when it comes to pretty much everything to do with gender presentation, this episode brings us another round of the fun game known as ‘the Fruits Basket fandom is in shocked-pikachu.jpg mode at the fact that pretty much every new fan immediately “““figures out”““ that Akito’s a woman’. I wonder what gave it away? Was it that unavoidably female voice? The feminine/androgynous character design that’s explicitly compared to Yuki who’s already meant to look like a girl [apparently]? The fact that we’ve only ever seen Akito wearing either the sort of kimono that at least from a Western perspective would seem very feminine, or this tight-fitting turtleneck sweater? The fact that she’s had romantically/sexually charged moments with at least one or two dudes, which for better or worse ends up making most people view her as being feminine? The fact that like 90% of the dialogue referencing Akito ends up not even using gendered pronouns in the first place? I wonder what could have possibly lead to people naturally assuming that Akito’s a girl and glossing over the, like, five lines of dialogue thus far that even use he/him pronouns toward her, lmao.

One way or another, Akito being a girl has always been the biggest non-twist of the entire series, and the fact that it’s so obvious and that the only reaction new fans have to it is pretty much just ‘oh ok I didn’t really think it was meant to be some kind of shocking surprise or anything’ really just spells out how it’s not even meaningful or interesting as a twist anyway, and that knowing about it from the start does absolutely nothing to hinder anyone’s enjoyment of the series. It’s honestly hard to even tell for new fans that we’re even meant to feel convinced that Akito’s a man, with how little effort the series ever puts into ‘hiding’ her true gender.

I probably sound angrier about this than I am, but mostly I’m just baffled that even though the manga’s been over for like 15 years, people still don’t realize how incredibly lame and shallow this whole plot point is. Like seriously, y’all, what could the reboot have even DONE to actually lead to it not being super obvious that Akito’s a woman? Unless they outright changed her character design to be a lot more masculine, the only thing they could have done would have been to give her a male voice actor, which was almost certainly never going to happen for obvious reasons. I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not like it’s the reboot’s fault that things turned out this way. There’s only so much they reasonably could have done. And even though I haven’t heard much of Akito’s new dub voice, I think Maaya Sakamoto actually does a very good job at sounding androgynous/masculine, and in general her voice work in this episode was really effective and disturbing. I think she’s one of the most masculine-sounding female VAs they could have gone for [aside from maybe someone like Romi Park or Megumi Ogata, but I don’t know if they would have fit Akito very well]. I guess it mostly just bugs me that people are blaming the reboot for something that’s 90% just them following the manga.

Anyway, in spite of my gripes [which are more about the fandom and the series as a whole], this episode was still super good in and of itself, and had some of the most effective voice acting and music that the entire reboot’s had thus far. It’s very obvious why new fans in particular would really really like this one, and for the most part, I do too.

Also, Haru t-posing when he sees Yuki and running over to tug on his shirt is still the most Iconic [tm] thing ever, don’t @ me.

[bugcatchermark-blog]

Before deciding to play every Pokemon game through, I had played the Gen 1 games through on a number of occasions, as well as all of the Gen 7 games.  I always play with the same team of Pokemon - namely all the bugs from that generation.  In attempting the gen 1 living pokedex, I had played through Red with my team (plus Scyther) and did the MissingNo glitch to over-level them with Rare Candy.  Then I played Blue all the way through with the same party (plus Pinsir) but this time I didn’t over-level.  My party level was about 50.  This meant I was 15 levels underneath Blue’s Charizard.  Using some Sleep Powder/Spore tactics, I managed to scrape through with the victory.  

But I wanted to play Pokemon Yellow to get a Farfetch’d and a Lickitung for my living dex, and the idea of playing Gen 1 again for essentially the fourth time in a row (having also just finished Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee) was not appealing.  So I thought, how to make it more interesting.  I thought, could I get through all of the game using just a Butterfree?  

Surely they would be strong enough by the end, having fought every battle themselves.  Butterfree is not physically offensive, so Bug and Flying types are out.  Fortunately, they learn the entire Psychic line, which is Super Effective to a large portion of these games.  With Sleep Powder to put to sleep Pokes that resist, as well as the next strongest special move Butterfree can learn (Mega Drain), I set about my challenge.

And it changed everything.  It was so much fun.  I immediately started thinking about what Pokemon I would use to do a solo run in Gen 2, and Gen 3, etc.  All of a sudden, the prospect of having to play the same game through maybe 3 times a generation had a new layer of depth and excitement.  

Overall I managed to play through the entire game with only one death.  Sabrina, who I knew would be tricky resisting my Psybeams, was gonna come down to hitting Sleep Powders.  But, 75% accuracy, they should be dead from Mega Drains by the time they wake up, surely I can survive at least one hit if I miss.  I did not know that Sabrina’s first Pokemon, Abra, only knew Flash.  So when I missed my first Sleep Powder, then got flashed, it was all over.  After reloading and starting again, I hit my sleep powder, and it was a breeze.  

I managed to play the game through without much issue.  Butterfree learns Confusion, Psybeam, and Sleep Powder naturally.  I got through Sabrina’s gym by adding Mega Drain (TM from defeating Erika).  Before the Elite Four I added Psychic.  I used all of the game’s PP Ups on Psybeam and Mega Drain to have enough Power Points to get through all of the dungeons.  Butterfree was on level 84 by the time I made it through Victory Road.  Having found 8 Rare Candies playing through the game, I used them all and got to level 92.  Beat the Elite Four easily, and was level 94 by the end.  

As I have said, this was super enjoyable.  I wonder if I could play through a more complex Pokemon game using only a Butterfree?  A different question for a different day.  

Note: I obviously had to use other Pokemon for HM moves, but they never saw battle, and were always taken out of the party before big battles, so there was never an opportunity to have them be switched in.  Makes me wonder how double battles go in future generations if you only have one Pokemon in the party?