Fruits Basket Love Post, part 4
I was thinking about Tohru the other day, and wondered if she could be characterized as a strong person. After a while I had to admit that it was irrelevant: none of the characters in Fruits Basket are strong all the time. Spoilers.
Tohru seems like a very strong person to begin with. She's lost her mother, who she loved and was extremely close to, but refuses to let that get her down, and she insists on caring about others rather than worry about her own problems. If you're a nasty person, you could say that she's superficial, ditzy and shallow (okay, I'll give you ditzy).
It's a brittle strength. More than anything, Tohru is afraid of being abandoned, and for that reason she keeps acting like nothing is wrong. It's not that she's in denial - she knows that her mother is dead - she just won't let it affect her. As the story progresses, there are people who try to get her to share her worries (most notably Kyo and Rin). As she starts to fall in love, she begins to worry that this means that she is abandoning her mother, because she can no longer automatically say that her mother is the most important person to her.
Let's take another character, the very manipulative Akito. Akito rules the Zodiac's hearts with an iron fist, twisting their minds and abusing them. This is because Akito is in fact also very twisted, and mortally afraid of being left alone.
Kyo. Kyo blames Yuki for everything that has gone wrong in his life, because he's too scared to admit his own fault. (It doesn't help that he takes the blame for things he had no fault in, either.)
Yuki seems like this strong and aloof person - he's actually scared to reach out to people.
And so on and so forth. They all have some trauma, and they're all weak in some way. However, this is not a bad thing, because only by admitting weakness can they begin to overcome it.
Tohru seems like a very strong person to begin with. She's lost her mother, who she loved and was extremely close to, but refuses to let that get her down, and she insists on caring about others rather than worry about her own problems. If you're a nasty person, you could say that she's superficial, ditzy and shallow (okay, I'll give you ditzy).
It's a brittle strength. More than anything, Tohru is afraid of being abandoned, and for that reason she keeps acting like nothing is wrong. It's not that she's in denial - she knows that her mother is dead - she just won't let it affect her. As the story progresses, there are people who try to get her to share her worries (most notably Kyo and Rin). As she starts to fall in love, she begins to worry that this means that she is abandoning her mother, because she can no longer automatically say that her mother is the most important person to her.
Let's take another character, the very manipulative Akito. Akito rules the Zodiac's hearts with an iron fist, twisting their minds and abusing them. This is because Akito is in fact also very twisted, and mortally afraid of being left alone.
Kyo. Kyo blames Yuki for everything that has gone wrong in his life, because he's too scared to admit his own fault. (It doesn't help that he takes the blame for things he had no fault in, either.)
Yuki seems like this strong and aloof person - he's actually scared to reach out to people.
And so on and so forth. They all have some trauma, and they're all weak in some way. However, this is not a bad thing, because only by admitting weakness can they begin to overcome it.