[Fruits Basket] Shigure/Akito
title; Obsession
author; ivalice
pairing; Sohma Shigure/Sohma Akito
fandom; Fruits Basket
spoilers; Through manga chapter 101. The following chapters aren't covered here, however, since 101 was a big turning point and seemed like a good place to stop for a breather.
Takaya Natsuki’s Fruits Basket is a manga about a family that needs love, and a girl who stands up and gives it to them. That’s probably a terribly cheesy-sounding way of putting it, but it’s a story about relationships of all kinds - love, friendship, family - and how they work and don’t work, and how they break and can be fixed.
Shigure and Akito occupy a part of the story that’s a bit off to the side from the main focus (although Akito has come into the spotlight in the most recent chapters), but even early on, when their relationship is simply a shadowy thing that’s hinted at in the background, there’s something compelling about them. They remain mysterious for much of the story, with just enough revealed, bit by bit, to bring their history to light at just the right pace. In a story about broken relationships, Shigure and Akito’s is perhaps one of the most broken - but it’s one with so much potential, and between that and the mystery, it’s an intriguing path to follow from start to finish...wherever the end may lead.
To really understand any of the character dynamics in Fruits Basket, you need to start by understanding the curse that the plot is centered around, which is based on the Chinese zodiac.
According to legend, one day God invited all the animals to a banquet he was holding the next day, and warned them not to be late. The rat decided to play a trick on the cat, and told the cat that the banquet wasn’t until the day after tomorrow. Thus, the other twelve animals made it there on time, but the cat was left out - and ever since, has been trying to get even with the rat.
The spirits from that legend have haunted the Sohma family for generations - the twelve animals, the cat, and God. Those family members cursed by the animal spirits (known as the juunishi) transform into their animal whenever their bodies are weak, or if they are hugged by someone of the opposite sex. (The opposite sex rule only applies to those outside the curse; those affected by the curse don’t trigger the change in each other.)
There is also a strong bond between the juunishi and the head of the family - the one who fulfills the part of God. One character describes it in volume 12: "To the members of the Zodiac, [God] is special. A godlike being, a being to be feared and respected. Weak or strong, he affects them all the same. Words that from any other mouth would make them flinch...when said by [God], cause such pain in their hearts that it's as if their bodies are being torn apart. [God] and the juunishi exist in a world of their own that outsiders like us can never fully understand. A world that is theirs alone."
Because of this, the Sohmas have to be very careful about getting close to other people, for fear of their secret becoming known, and the effect it has had on their mental and emotional development is the basis for most of the plot.
Shigure, cursed by the spirit of the dog, is one of the most enigmatic of the juunishi. At first glance, he seems like a friendly, cheerful, lazy man with a mischievous streak a mile wide - but a good person, despite his faults.
As we eventually learn, this is rather off the mark.
He lives “outside,” away from the Sohma family’s main house, and is a published novelist, both of more serious works under his own name and smutty romances under an alias. He’s lazy, sleeping often and at odd hours - fitting, for the dog - and he’s playful, making a game of tormenting his editor by disappearing when she comes to check on his deadlines. He constantly jokes around and teases those living under his roof, but he does have a more serious side, and he’s very perceptive when it comes to the behavior of others. His advice is very good, when he chooses to be serious long enough to give it.
However, Shigure is a man with one goal, and he cares little about who is hurt in his pursuit of it. He can be friendly, warm, and cheerful - when it suits his purposes. He’s equally capable of being cruel, ruthless, and cold - when it suits his purposes. There are few characters who truly realize what he’s capable of, and few who even have any idea what he’s really thinking most of the time. He’s devious, manipulative, and as he himself cheerfully admits (to select people only), he is not a nice person at all.
Despite his cruelty, Shigure does have one other trait commonly associated with the dog - he is loyal, and in fact, it’s his loyalty that leads to some of his most destructive behavior. His loyalty has crossed the line, moving into the bounds of obsession, and resulting in a severe possessiveness that drives him to do some very nasty things.
Akito is the head of the Sohma family, fulfilling the role of God in the zodiac. All major decisions must be approved by Akito, and the lives of the juunishi may be dictated by Akito’s whim.
Akito is also a woman.
Her mother was a bitter woman who raised Akito as a boy while heaping verbal abuse upon her, two things which combined to give Akito a burning hatred of all things female. She despises her own gender, despises her mother, despises the female juunishi.
She also quite firmly believes that as God, it is her choice to treat the juunishi as she wishes, and they are obligated to love her regardless. She wants to be at the center of all of their lives, she wants them to stay close, where she can more easily control them. She has a vision of a perfect, happy banquet, where they all come together - no one gets in, no one gets out.
Though she has sadistic tendencies and is quite manipulative and abusive of her juunishi, there’s a still a very lost girl somewhere under that, who doesn’t know how to handle it when things don’t go her way, and she’s prone to fits of rage and fits of tears. When Honda Tohru comes into the lives of the Sohmas and becomes a focus away from Akito, she sees it as a betrayal, as the juunishi leaving her.
Akito, more than anything, seems to be terrified of being abandoned.
The first serious hints at something happening between Shigure and Akito come in chapter 16. Shigure has a serious discussion with Hatori, in which his motives are called into question, and we learn that Shigure had a dream when he was young, which he is trying to preserve forever. We also learn that in pursuit of that goal, Shigure doesn’t care if he hurts anyone else - at least, he doesn’t care enough to let it stop him. Immediately following this revelation, Shigure goes in to see Akito, and when Akito seems surprised that Shigure has come, we get the line of dialogue: “Because you are most important, Akito-san.”
While it’s not stated outright at this point that Akito is somehow related to Shigure’s dream, the juxtaposition of the statements does make it hard to ignore, and the relationship between the two of them is quietly built in little moments here and there in the subsequent chapters. Shigure periodically visits Akito, and there is definitely some kind of tension between them, though the source isn’t revealed for a while. This builds up the further into the story we get; later on, we see Akito insisting that Shigure used to be “nicer,” and that he used to look at her and only her; she also has some important memory of him that she asks if he remembers, but he answers in his typical evasive manner.
Eventually, the dream is finally explained: the juunishi all had the same dream the night Akito was conceived, but Shigure seems to have been much more deeply affected by it than the others. Still later, we can piece together how Shigure plans to make the dream last - he wants to drive the others away from Akito, isolate her, so that he is the only one she has left.
Things come to a head in chapter 101, the definitive chapter for the relationship. Akito’s memory is revealed - when she was a child, she asked Shigure if he loved her, and he gave her a flower, a kiss, and the words “I think of you more than anyone else. That is a definite truth.”
A phone conversation between Shigure and Kureno reveals another piece of the puzzle - Kureno until this point has appeared to be Akito’s favorite, in a relationship with her, and Shigure readily confirms that he hates Kureno for it. However, Kureno’s curse has been broken - he was once the bird - and Akito has kept him close to her because she doesn’t want anyone else to find out. Kureno himself tells Shigure that he isn’t at Akito’s side because she loves him, and that Akito loves someone else - wants someone else at her side.
Although either Kureno does not finish the sentence or the reader simply isn’t given the last word, the context of the conversation and the content of the chapter rather clearly point to Shigure.
And finally, to finish the chapter there is a scene between Akito and Shigure, in which he comes to apologize for having ignored her in public - both were going out to dinner with other people, they saw each other by chance, and Shigure blew Akito off. Akito asks Shigure about the woman he was with (his editor), asks if he’s slept with her yet, and flippantly notes that she thought Shigure would sleep with anything female - after all, he did sleep with “that woman.”
When Shigure asks who she means, Akito explodes, and the final piece of the puzzle falls into place - Shigure slept with Akito’s own mother, Ren, and this is why he doesn’t live in the Sohma main house. Akito kicked him out. Shigure finally explains why he did it: he slept with Ren because Akito slept with Kureno. Akito flies into a rage, and Shigure nonchalantly suggests that he should leave. Akito stops him by kissing him, and one thing leads to another...
When we see him pulling on her tie as they appear to be falling towards the ground before the fade to black, and she’s got no clothes on after it, I think we can safely assume that yep, sex is canon.
What drew me to this pairing from the beginning is the sheer level of dysfunction. I have a bit of a weak spot for severely messed up relationships and characters, which is probably why I love Fruits Basket as a whole - the majority of the cast are socially dysfunctional one way or another, and the story revolves mostly around seeing them grow and change and move past their issues.
Akito and Shigure, however, are possibly the most twisted pair of individuals in the entire story. Most of the Sohma family, for all their issues, are good people at heart and don’t really want to hurt others. Shigure, however, readily admits that he doesn’t care who he hurts in order to reach his goal, and clearly states that he’s not a nice guy. Akito has spent her whole life trying to crush her juunishi and make them miserable, because she doesn’t know how else to deal with her own pain. Any relationship between the two of them is not going to be hearts and sunshine; they’re both very flawed individuals who are going to have a difficult time building a positive, functional relationship with anyone. And yet despite all that, there’s this underlying feeling throughout their interactions that they can make it work somehow, that maybe if you put two twisted people together they’ll manage to straighten each other out. They’ve come a long way and hurt many people to get where they are, and perhaps when they finally come together, they can move past all that and simply live.
The mystery is also part of what attracted me - the way nothing about their relationship is clearly spelled out from the beginning. Although I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every page of Fruits Basket, the number one attraction to me has been the Shigure/Akito subplot. First I was intrigued by the hints of what was there, and then I couldn’t stop reading to try and find out what was going on between them, and once those mysteries were solved, I’ve kept reading because I want to know if things will ever work out for them. Takaya has done a masterful job of building their subplot, and the more of them I see the further I’m drawn in. It’s a complex, engaging story between them, and after all I’ve seen, I simply can’t stop without seeing it through.
links;
altar_of_akito - Akito-centric community; Shigure/Akito works often appear here, although other pairings involving Akito do as well, of course. There are a decent number of Shigure/Akito fics sorted into the community memories.
Dysfunction - an excellent Shigure/Akito fanmix, put together by the awesomeness that is flamika.
Flamika's fanfics - and speaking of flamika, I was going to give fic recs and then I realized that I was just going to end up linking everything Shigure/Akito she ever wrote, so I might as well just save the time and give you her site. (And really, I recommend everything, not just the Shigure/Akito. ♥)
Possession - the Shigure/Akito fanlisting.
author; ivalice
pairing; Sohma Shigure/Sohma Akito
fandom; Fruits Basket
spoilers; Through manga chapter 101. The following chapters aren't covered here, however, since 101 was a big turning point and seemed like a good place to stop for a breather.
Takaya Natsuki’s Fruits Basket is a manga about a family that needs love, and a girl who stands up and gives it to them. That’s probably a terribly cheesy-sounding way of putting it, but it’s a story about relationships of all kinds - love, friendship, family - and how they work and don’t work, and how they break and can be fixed.
Shigure and Akito occupy a part of the story that’s a bit off to the side from the main focus (although Akito has come into the spotlight in the most recent chapters), but even early on, when their relationship is simply a shadowy thing that’s hinted at in the background, there’s something compelling about them. They remain mysterious for much of the story, with just enough revealed, bit by bit, to bring their history to light at just the right pace. In a story about broken relationships, Shigure and Akito’s is perhaps one of the most broken - but it’s one with so much potential, and between that and the mystery, it’s an intriguing path to follow from start to finish...wherever the end may lead.
To really understand any of the character dynamics in Fruits Basket, you need to start by understanding the curse that the plot is centered around, which is based on the Chinese zodiac.
According to legend, one day God invited all the animals to a banquet he was holding the next day, and warned them not to be late. The rat decided to play a trick on the cat, and told the cat that the banquet wasn’t until the day after tomorrow. Thus, the other twelve animals made it there on time, but the cat was left out - and ever since, has been trying to get even with the rat.
The spirits from that legend have haunted the Sohma family for generations - the twelve animals, the cat, and God. Those family members cursed by the animal spirits (known as the juunishi) transform into their animal whenever their bodies are weak, or if they are hugged by someone of the opposite sex. (The opposite sex rule only applies to those outside the curse; those affected by the curse don’t trigger the change in each other.)
There is also a strong bond between the juunishi and the head of the family - the one who fulfills the part of God. One character describes it in volume 12: "To the members of the Zodiac, [God] is special. A godlike being, a being to be feared and respected. Weak or strong, he affects them all the same. Words that from any other mouth would make them flinch...when said by [God], cause such pain in their hearts that it's as if their bodies are being torn apart. [God] and the juunishi exist in a world of their own that outsiders like us can never fully understand. A world that is theirs alone."
Because of this, the Sohmas have to be very careful about getting close to other people, for fear of their secret becoming known, and the effect it has had on their mental and emotional development is the basis for most of the plot.
Shigure, cursed by the spirit of the dog, is one of the most enigmatic of the juunishi. At first glance, he seems like a friendly, cheerful, lazy man with a mischievous streak a mile wide - but a good person, despite his faults.
As we eventually learn, this is rather off the mark.
He lives “outside,” away from the Sohma family’s main house, and is a published novelist, both of more serious works under his own name and smutty romances under an alias. He’s lazy, sleeping often and at odd hours - fitting, for the dog - and he’s playful, making a game of tormenting his editor by disappearing when she comes to check on his deadlines. He constantly jokes around and teases those living under his roof, but he does have a more serious side, and he’s very perceptive when it comes to the behavior of others. His advice is very good, when he chooses to be serious long enough to give it.
However, Shigure is a man with one goal, and he cares little about who is hurt in his pursuit of it. He can be friendly, warm, and cheerful - when it suits his purposes. He’s equally capable of being cruel, ruthless, and cold - when it suits his purposes. There are few characters who truly realize what he’s capable of, and few who even have any idea what he’s really thinking most of the time. He’s devious, manipulative, and as he himself cheerfully admits (to select people only), he is not a nice person at all.
Despite his cruelty, Shigure does have one other trait commonly associated with the dog - he is loyal, and in fact, it’s his loyalty that leads to some of his most destructive behavior. His loyalty has crossed the line, moving into the bounds of obsession, and resulting in a severe possessiveness that drives him to do some very nasty things.
Akito is the head of the Sohma family, fulfilling the role of God in the zodiac. All major decisions must be approved by Akito, and the lives of the juunishi may be dictated by Akito’s whim.
Akito is also a woman.
Her mother was a bitter woman who raised Akito as a boy while heaping verbal abuse upon her, two things which combined to give Akito a burning hatred of all things female. She despises her own gender, despises her mother, despises the female juunishi.
She also quite firmly believes that as God, it is her choice to treat the juunishi as she wishes, and they are obligated to love her regardless. She wants to be at the center of all of their lives, she wants them to stay close, where she can more easily control them. She has a vision of a perfect, happy banquet, where they all come together - no one gets in, no one gets out.
Though she has sadistic tendencies and is quite manipulative and abusive of her juunishi, there’s a still a very lost girl somewhere under that, who doesn’t know how to handle it when things don’t go her way, and she’s prone to fits of rage and fits of tears. When Honda Tohru comes into the lives of the Sohmas and becomes a focus away from Akito, she sees it as a betrayal, as the juunishi leaving her.
Akito, more than anything, seems to be terrified of being abandoned.
The first serious hints at something happening between Shigure and Akito come in chapter 16. Shigure has a serious discussion with Hatori, in which his motives are called into question, and we learn that Shigure had a dream when he was young, which he is trying to preserve forever. We also learn that in pursuit of that goal, Shigure doesn’t care if he hurts anyone else - at least, he doesn’t care enough to let it stop him. Immediately following this revelation, Shigure goes in to see Akito, and when Akito seems surprised that Shigure has come, we get the line of dialogue: “Because you are most important, Akito-san.”
While it’s not stated outright at this point that Akito is somehow related to Shigure’s dream, the juxtaposition of the statements does make it hard to ignore, and the relationship between the two of them is quietly built in little moments here and there in the subsequent chapters. Shigure periodically visits Akito, and there is definitely some kind of tension between them, though the source isn’t revealed for a while. This builds up the further into the story we get; later on, we see Akito insisting that Shigure used to be “nicer,” and that he used to look at her and only her; she also has some important memory of him that she asks if he remembers, but he answers in his typical evasive manner.
Eventually, the dream is finally explained: the juunishi all had the same dream the night Akito was conceived, but Shigure seems to have been much more deeply affected by it than the others. Still later, we can piece together how Shigure plans to make the dream last - he wants to drive the others away from Akito, isolate her, so that he is the only one she has left.
Things come to a head in chapter 101, the definitive chapter for the relationship. Akito’s memory is revealed - when she was a child, she asked Shigure if he loved her, and he gave her a flower, a kiss, and the words “I think of you more than anyone else. That is a definite truth.”
A phone conversation between Shigure and Kureno reveals another piece of the puzzle - Kureno until this point has appeared to be Akito’s favorite, in a relationship with her, and Shigure readily confirms that he hates Kureno for it. However, Kureno’s curse has been broken - he was once the bird - and Akito has kept him close to her because she doesn’t want anyone else to find out. Kureno himself tells Shigure that he isn’t at Akito’s side because she loves him, and that Akito loves someone else - wants someone else at her side.
Although either Kureno does not finish the sentence or the reader simply isn’t given the last word, the context of the conversation and the content of the chapter rather clearly point to Shigure.
And finally, to finish the chapter there is a scene between Akito and Shigure, in which he comes to apologize for having ignored her in public - both were going out to dinner with other people, they saw each other by chance, and Shigure blew Akito off. Akito asks Shigure about the woman he was with (his editor), asks if he’s slept with her yet, and flippantly notes that she thought Shigure would sleep with anything female - after all, he did sleep with “that woman.”
When Shigure asks who she means, Akito explodes, and the final piece of the puzzle falls into place - Shigure slept with Akito’s own mother, Ren, and this is why he doesn’t live in the Sohma main house. Akito kicked him out. Shigure finally explains why he did it: he slept with Ren because Akito slept with Kureno. Akito flies into a rage, and Shigure nonchalantly suggests that he should leave. Akito stops him by kissing him, and one thing leads to another...
When we see him pulling on her tie as they appear to be falling towards the ground before the fade to black, and she’s got no clothes on after it, I think we can safely assume that yep, sex is canon.
What drew me to this pairing from the beginning is the sheer level of dysfunction. I have a bit of a weak spot for severely messed up relationships and characters, which is probably why I love Fruits Basket as a whole - the majority of the cast are socially dysfunctional one way or another, and the story revolves mostly around seeing them grow and change and move past their issues.
Akito and Shigure, however, are possibly the most twisted pair of individuals in the entire story. Most of the Sohma family, for all their issues, are good people at heart and don’t really want to hurt others. Shigure, however, readily admits that he doesn’t care who he hurts in order to reach his goal, and clearly states that he’s not a nice guy. Akito has spent her whole life trying to crush her juunishi and make them miserable, because she doesn’t know how else to deal with her own pain. Any relationship between the two of them is not going to be hearts and sunshine; they’re both very flawed individuals who are going to have a difficult time building a positive, functional relationship with anyone. And yet despite all that, there’s this underlying feeling throughout their interactions that they can make it work somehow, that maybe if you put two twisted people together they’ll manage to straighten each other out. They’ve come a long way and hurt many people to get where they are, and perhaps when they finally come together, they can move past all that and simply live.
The mystery is also part of what attracted me - the way nothing about their relationship is clearly spelled out from the beginning. Although I’ve thoroughly enjoyed every page of Fruits Basket, the number one attraction to me has been the Shigure/Akito subplot. First I was intrigued by the hints of what was there, and then I couldn’t stop reading to try and find out what was going on between them, and once those mysteries were solved, I’ve kept reading because I want to know if things will ever work out for them. Takaya has done a masterful job of building their subplot, and the more of them I see the further I’m drawn in. It’s a complex, engaging story between them, and after all I’ve seen, I simply can’t stop without seeing it through.
links;
altar_of_akito - Akito-centric community; Shigure/Akito works often appear here, although other pairings involving Akito do as well, of course. There are a decent number of Shigure/Akito fics sorted into the community memories.
Dysfunction - an excellent Shigure/Akito fanmix, put together by the awesomeness that is flamika.
Flamika's fanfics - and speaking of flamika, I was going to give fic recs and then I realized that I was just going to end up linking everything Shigure/Akito she ever wrote, so I might as well just save the time and give you her site. (And really, I recommend everything, not just the Shigure/Akito. ♥)
Possession - the Shigure/Akito fanlisting.