Fruits Basket, ep. 01-26
Many thanks to cychi for providing it and hooking me in for countless hours of TV watching. I also discovered that I can indeed read subtitles and knit at the same time, which was something I did not know before.
Honda Tohru, quite possibly the nicest, cutest, most self-sacrificing person ever, comes to live with three members of the Sohma family. The Sohma family has been cursed to turn into various animals of the Chinese zodiac (except one?) when hugged by a person of the opposite sex. For a curse that sounds so remarkably silly, it generates a great deal of angst and emotional trauma, all completely believably too. I am almost annoyed at the too-good-to-be-true-ness of Tohru, particularly how it manifests itself in domestic goddess-hood and self-sacrifice. The saving grace is that Tohru really is just that nice, and for some reason, I can't even find her sickeningly perfect. Instead, I get perfectly how Shigure, Kyo and Yuki (the three Sohmas she lives with) attempt to fold her into their little family.
Also, it helps that the virtues of self-sacrifice and gentleness and kindness aren't just limited to the female sex -- pretty much everyone in the series wants to act like that or tries to.
And the animal forms are so completely adorable!! Especially Yuki's! Of course, anyone who knows me would probably have known I fell head over heels when the beautiful bishonen turned out to be a completely adorable rat! They're so funny and chibi!
I like how the series really concentrates on the little emotional moments between characters. I wasn't that much for the humor, particularly the overly apologetic relatives, but I really like how almost everyone is there trying to be kinder, trying to be better, despite their various emotional hurts.
Hatori and Momiji's stories particularly broke my heart. Somehow, under all the candy colors and sparkling eyes, the curse of the Sohmas is still there, and that dark thread is always there under all the fluffiness, which gives the series its depth.
And the final three episodes are wrenching, especially when compared against the pastel happiness of the previous episodes.
Spoilers for ending:
I'm not quite satisfied with the ending, and I don't think it's because it's a different sort of narrative convention. The anime does a pretty good job at not favoring Yuki or Kyo, but the climax of the story is Kyo's story, and while there have been scattered hints about Yuki's inner pain throughout the anime, I'm still rather disappointed that the anime never quite addresses it. I don't think that the anime had to tie everything up in a bow and solve the curse and make it a quest fantasy, but I do think that they were leading up to a sort of catharsis regarding Yuki the same way they had one on Kyo, but ran out of episodes or something.
It was a manga first, right? I guess maybe they just never got all the Yuki parts in because it wasn't in the manga storyline yet?
And on a completely unrelated topic, how do people find scanlations of manga?
Honda Tohru, quite possibly the nicest, cutest, most self-sacrificing person ever, comes to live with three members of the Sohma family. The Sohma family has been cursed to turn into various animals of the Chinese zodiac (except one?) when hugged by a person of the opposite sex. For a curse that sounds so remarkably silly, it generates a great deal of angst and emotional trauma, all completely believably too. I am almost annoyed at the too-good-to-be-true-ness of Tohru, particularly how it manifests itself in domestic goddess-hood and self-sacrifice. The saving grace is that Tohru really is just that nice, and for some reason, I can't even find her sickeningly perfect. Instead, I get perfectly how Shigure, Kyo and Yuki (the three Sohmas she lives with) attempt to fold her into their little family.
Also, it helps that the virtues of self-sacrifice and gentleness and kindness aren't just limited to the female sex -- pretty much everyone in the series wants to act like that or tries to.
And the animal forms are so completely adorable!! Especially Yuki's! Of course, anyone who knows me would probably have known I fell head over heels when the beautiful bishonen turned out to be a completely adorable rat! They're so funny and chibi!
I like how the series really concentrates on the little emotional moments between characters. I wasn't that much for the humor, particularly the overly apologetic relatives, but I really like how almost everyone is there trying to be kinder, trying to be better, despite their various emotional hurts.
Hatori and Momiji's stories particularly broke my heart. Somehow, under all the candy colors and sparkling eyes, the curse of the Sohmas is still there, and that dark thread is always there under all the fluffiness, which gives the series its depth.
And the final three episodes are wrenching, especially when compared against the pastel happiness of the previous episodes.
Spoilers for ending:
I'm not quite satisfied with the ending, and I don't think it's because it's a different sort of narrative convention. The anime does a pretty good job at not favoring Yuki or Kyo, but the climax of the story is Kyo's story, and while there have been scattered hints about Yuki's inner pain throughout the anime, I'm still rather disappointed that the anime never quite addresses it. I don't think that the anime had to tie everything up in a bow and solve the curse and make it a quest fantasy, but I do think that they were leading up to a sort of catharsis regarding Yuki the same way they had one on Kyo, but ran out of episodes or something.
It was a manga first, right? I guess maybe they just never got all the Yuki parts in because it wasn't in the manga storyline yet?
And on a completely unrelated topic, how do people find scanlations of manga?