#spoilers for fruits basket???

[seagreenstardust]

Been watching Fruits Basket with my cousin and when Tohru falls off the cliff and Kyo finds her, Tohru’s inner monologue is just “please let me reach you” while stretching out her hand to Kyo and

I am just saying

[soath]

one of the last barriers keeping jester from sending ludinus da'leth the most threatening four part save the date to her wedding has finally been removed. only the cage surrounding the moon still protects him.

[mellaithwen]

happy happy aisha, ryan & oliver 🥹 (via @911bts here)

[sunwhispers]

another week another shoujo manga. i read furuba through this week and just as my best friend speculated..........i'm insane about akito................... my princess with a disorder. she reminds me of my warrior cat oc.

[chodzacaparodia]

Another reason why Episode Nagi is a shoujo manga

One thing from Episode Nagi chapter 21 hit me hard. I mean the moment when Nagi was thinking about how Reo believed in him.

No one had ever placed hope in Nagi before. He himself has also never shown any initiative before. Nagi didn't seem like a person who would do something or be motivated to act because he believed in himself.

It wasn't until he realized that someone believed in him. Thanks to this faith, he began to act. And when there was no one around who believed in him, he was left with faith in himself.

However, Nagi would never believe in himself unless someone (Reo) believed in him first. Without it, he would still remain passive and do nothing with his life.

When I noticed this dependence, I immediately thought that a similar philosophy was presented in Fruits Basket (shoujo manga).

I'm specifically talking about story of Kisa, who had problems getting along with her classmates. She received a letter from a teacher who briefly advised her to like herself first so that others would like her.

However, Yuki did not agree with this.

When someone likes you, you will like yourself.

When someone believes in you, you will believe in yourself.

In both cases, the entire change depends on the other person. The character won't do much on their own because they need some motivator to influence them.

In Fruits Basket, this should not be surprising, because it is a shoujo manga that will focus on interpersonal relationships.

However, for example, in the main series of Blue Lock, where Isagi is the protagonist, the main character does not really need anyone's help for his development, because he is his own cause. Isagi does everything himself. Yes, he uses the help of others, but it is not perceived that way. He didn't need anyone else to believe in him to believe in himself. (Yes, this could be an example of his initial relationship with Bachira, when Meguru immediately began to have great hopes in Isagi. However, I don't see it as "Oh, Bachira believed in me, now I believe in myself! I wouldn't have gone this far, if it weren't for him.", because Isagi very quickly began to notice his own possibilities, which he was entitled to himself).

But Nagi is not like Isagi. He couldn't do anything on his own. He needed someone who would believe in him. If it weren't for Reo, his life would have come to a standstill. He would have no reason to believe in himself or work on himself.

Nagi is more like a shoujo protagonist who needs the presence of another person to initiate his development. He doesn't necessarily need this person all the time in order to continue to develop, but he certainly wouldn't be able to make any changes in his life without their constant presence in his mind.

And Episode Nagi (compared to Blue Lock) does not focus just on the independent development of the main character, but also devotes a lot of attention to his relationship with another person.

I'm not saying it doesn't exist in Blue Lock. It's just more emphasized in Episode Nagi, in a shoujo manga style.

[goldenharmony]

Oshi no Ko & Fruits Basket: Monologue Comparison

I noticed there were some similarities between the relationship-based monologues in Oshi no Ko (Aqua/Akane & Aqua/Kana) and Fruits Basket (Yuki/Tohru and Kyo/Tohru). One thing I like about them is how they are able to portray both relationships in the mangas as distinct while making it clear which pairing is the endgame one based on what is focused on.

Yuki/Tohru & Aqua/Akane: Emotional Support

Yuki's feelings about Tohru: "I was hopeless...but she appeared before the helpless me once again. To be with me, close to me. She even listened to what someone like me had to say. She wasn't disgusted and she didn't scold. Time after time. She accepted me time and again. She's beloved to me. Like how the sky feels so close, yet so far. Like a mother."

Aqua's feelings about Akane:

One thing I noted is that both Yuki's and Aqua's monologues focus on what the girls did for them. There was unconditional acceptance and both note that the girls got close to "someone like them". The relationships are not equal as both have that mother/son angle, where the girl is not receiving as much in return.

Kyo/Tohru & Aqua/Kana: The romantic endgame

Kyo's feelings about Tohru: "Finding joy in the smallest things. Being happy and smiling so cheerfully. Why? She should think of herself more. Why? Doesn't she think she's getting the short end of the stick? She thinks that she's stupid, or that there's nothing good about her. I love you. I love you so much...just as you are."

Aqua's feelings about Kana:

Like with Fruits Basket, when we see Aqua's POV on Kana, it focuses on what he specifically likes about Kana, mentioning her personality and how she acts in situations. Both guys also want the girls to not get the short end of the stick, and wish that the girls would think about themselves more - as both girls adopted a selfless attitude due to their childhood trauma. These points also make it clear to me on why these 2 ships are the romantic endgames of their respective series.

[novelist-becca]

Somebody hug me, Kyo and Tohru from Fruits Basket are making me bawl

[iammissingautumn]

Okay but canonically out of all the elder zodiac members (fruba spoilers ahead) . Kureno, Shigure, Hatori, Ayame, and Ritsu. Ritsu is the only one who doesn’t know about the family head’s gender. Ritsu is basically a complete parallel to Akito in a lot of ways. Akito is uncomfortable dressing as a man but does it anyways out of needing to present powerful. Ritsu on the other hand loves dressing as a woman. To her it is bracing her femininity. For Akito it is filling in a dead man’s shoes with a bitter mother’s heart. Akito claims to never be at the wrong for anything and Ritsu apologizes for everything. Explodes.

[yukinohoshikuzu]

his little fangs I just can’t-

[lifesfibers]

To them, we’re still kids.

[runawaycarouselhorse]

People who don't bother to watch Fruits Basket or don't understand the psychology behind the character: Tohru is too perfect, she's unrealistic--

Yeah, that's the point, it's a fake persona she built up as a trauma response. She's taking on the caretaker role, compulsively taking care of others, being who they need her to be, trying to ignore her own pain, deny the reality of her mother's death by talking to the photograph, and bottle up her suffering.

She's a contrast to Akito, as the final season shows, too, as both are desperately afraid of losing love. The story about why she speaks so formally, because her father spoke that way, and she was scared her mother would follow him in death, so she hated him in a childish way, so she spoke the way he did in the hopes of securing her mother's love... they're similar in terms of their abandonment issues, they just present it very differently.

One can certainly argue we saw too little of it as viewers because of just how much she's become the mask and how she bottles everything up, but Tohru is as broken and human as everyone else in Fruits Basket, she's just also a very genuinely kind and trusting person, even if part of her motivations are born of "selfishness" (read: a natural desire to be loved, complicated by a fear of abandonment).

[allhailnarusama]

Not me comparing atla and fruits basket as i suffer with hay fever and not sleeping and realizing i have a ship type.

If you like zutara as I do, please watch Fruits Basket or read the manga I beg.

[marimeeko]

Now that Bakugou takes every opportunity(official artwork) to just stand to the side and silently look at Izuku with the new softness he has for him, the more he looks like Kyo Sohma from Fruits Basket and I think that is so funny because I have ALWAYS thought that a soft Bakugou who develops/accepts feelings for Izuku would look and feel just like Kyo Sohma

Kyo Sohma is the male love interest of a popular Shojo series Fruits Basket by the way, and coincidentally, his beloved(Tohru Honda) is also SELFLESS TO A FAULT who doesn't think of herself and Kyo worries about her all the time and wants to protect her....

Just pointing that one out 🙂

[weeb-polls-with-pip]

Autistic Anime Girls Group 3 Round 2 Match 6

SUBMISSION PROPAGANDA:

Saki -

"Goth weirdgirl rights. This post also talks about Tohru (my last submission), but it's got a section on Saki too. https://www.tumblr.com/melokaji/719332406389276672/autistic-coding-in-fruits-basket?source=share "

*note: there are a few submissions where people linked posts-- I will reblog these posts separately.

Richeh -

"her life's purpose is to live her life according to her own rules, regardless of society's rules that don't make sense to her. and she does that by wholeheartedly embracing her special interests of making delicate magic of crystally stuff and shiny ribbons! she's also prone to making lil puns with her name and the names of the other witches in her atelier, and nobody really gets them aside from the people in her found family <3

also (CONTAINS SPOILERS) her brother once told her that he loved her magic just as it was and that he hoped she never stopped making it and being herself (paraphrased cuz i don't remember the actual quote!) and she took that literally to mean that she shouldn't make magic that wasn't the kind of magic that was hers- i.e. shiny, small, ornate, and detailed magic. Being forced to change how she made her magic in order to "do things the proper way" during her original apprenticeship caused her intense distress, and she'd often refuse to do so and would instead think up her own magic to solve problems instead of doing things by the book. Doing that subjected her to harassment and abuse from her original professor, leading to her eventually needing to leave her 'traditional' witch apprenticeship and get her apprenticeship done at Qifrey's atelier, a place far removed from the main witch cities that accommodates her and allows her to grow the way she wants to."

[peggingeddiediaz]

Eddie finally comes out (9-1-1 7x06 sneak peek)

[animefeminist]

The Transient Queerness of Fruits Basket

Content Warning: transphobia, queerphobia, gender essentialism

Spoilers for all of Fruits Basket

Fruits Basket is one of my favorite anime of all time. I adore its exploration of how people who’ve suffered incredible trauma can put themselves back together. I adore its portrayal of the radical healing power of kindness as an active choice in a world full of misery. I adore how it showcases the complexities of love and how it can be your greatest salvation if you work to nurture and cultivate it. This show makes me laugh, it makes me cry, but more than anything, it makes me hope. It makes me hope that no matter how bad things get, there will always be a second chance waiting just around the corner. Even two decades after the original manga began publishing, it shines just as brightly.

But I’m not here to talk about how much I love Fruits Basket. Today, I’m here to explore one of its most under-discussed problems: its portrayal of queerness.

Read it at Anime Feminist!