#i guess my general interpretation of this manga is that it's about the student council members trying to deal with their past at ohtori ?

[transmascutena]

okay well i dont know how to feel about literally any of what i just read but it was all worth it for this ending

[murasaki-murasame]

Thoughts on Fruits Basket 2019 2nd Season Ep12: “You Cried For Me”

It shouldn’t really be a surprise, since I always enjoyed this bit of the manga, and they fixed the weird pacing issues it had, but this was a pretty much perfect episode, lol.

Thoughts under the cut.

So this episode went back and adapted chapters 56 and 57, which in the manga happened near the beginning of the beach arc, but still more or less in the middle of it. I’ve said it before, but the pacing of that was super weird in the manga, and it didn’t flow well at all, so it really worked out nicely that they just moved this episode to the end of the summer vacation period, after the beach arc had wrapped up.

One of the main reasons why I’ve always liked this part of the manga is because it’s one of the big examples of an arc where the main trio aren’t involved at all, and the focus is just on supporting characters. There’s been lots of backstory episodes and whatnot that have shifted the focus away from the main characters, but usually they’re still at least somewhat involved in them. But this part is entirely about the adult generation of characters, and it’s nice to see the story branch out like this.

It’s also a follow-up to the whole Hatori backstory episode from early on, which was already another one of my favourite parts of the story, and this episode just takes it a step further and adds extra levels of complexity and nuance to all those events, as we see things from a perspective outside of Hatori and Kana’s relationship.

We also get to see even more examples of Shigure being manipulative and a bit of a creep, especially when he was a bit younger, which is always fun. You can definitely interpret his matchmaking with Mayu and Hatori as being about him still having some genuine feelings and sympathy for Mayu from when they were dating, but in the long run, him getting the two of them together is the sort of thing that helps advance his goals, so he’s still being kinda selfish about it.

This episode also really hammers in how depressing it is that Hatori’s basically conditioned to be so quiet and subservient to Akito, and how repressed he is in general. Which is why the big emotional climax of the episode was Mayu bursting into tears because of how bad she feels for him. Which was also a scene that hit way harder than I expected it to, mainly due to the voice acting, and the overall tone of how quiet and down to earth the episode had been up to then. Like Hatori says, the ability to openly express his emotions is something that he’s basically had to repress, as much as he wants to be able to. And just to further the point, we got that whole scene of the head maid lady chewing him out for not always being by Akito’s side, and her talking about how shameful it was for that one kid in the family estate to cry about something.

Even though this is pretty much the entirety we see of them in the manga from what I remember, I think that Hatori and Mayu are one of my favourite couples in the series, at least in terms of the ‘side ships’, so to say. It’s short, but I always appreciated this deep dive into their whole relationship, and I think it feels very natural that it plays out the way it does, and that they end up getting together afterward.

I think anime-only fans will also have fun going back to season 1 after this and seeing the handful of hints we’d already gotten about Mayu’s connection to Hatori. It’s one of the really neat bits of foreshadowing in the story.

I don’t think we really see her and Hatori together again in the manga, we should be getting the parent teacher conference part in a few episodes, so that’ll be fun, since i also really like Mayu and Shigure’s whole dynamic of being exes with a whole lot of tension between them.

Also, I wanna point out that the overall direction and tone of this episode was extremely good. There wasn’t a whole lot of fluid or dynamic animation or anything, but the backgrounds, shot composition, colour palettes, soundtrack, etc, were really good. But this series has always been really good at that sort of thing, lol. I just think they did a good job of making this really feel like an episode about adults dealing with adult problems, and the Shiraki bookstore in particular was depicted really well.

We also didn’t get an OP this week, which I think was a good idea since it gave them more time for the story, and honestly it would have been a bit jarring since it wouldn’t have fit the tone of the episode, and the main characters aren’t even really in this episode. We should be switching over to the new OP/ED in episode 14, so I wonder if we’ll see the OP again next week, or if they’ll skip it again.

And on that note we should be getting some kind of announcement about what the new OP and ED will be soon. Assuming that the second cour airs right after this one as planned, I guess. That’s still technically up in the air, but I’d be a bit surprised if the series just now started to see delays due to the pandemic. I guess if we get a delay, they’d also announce that soon.

Anyway, it looks like the next episode is going to at least adapt chapter 66, since that’s definitely Kakeru talking in the next episode title preview. I’m excited to see how the two new student council members are like in the anime [and I’m just excited to see Kakeru and Machi finally re-enter the story lol], but we’ll get to that next week.