Now we come to the point in Fruits Basket where it becomes very difficult for me to write about it without spoiling.  Because so much of what I feel about this series comes down to literally that – what it makes me feel.  An episode like this one is full of moments that are triggers to me – emotional explosions from the past long forgotten, suddenly remembered.  The problem is that it’s not so much what happened in the episode, but the future events that were brought to mind.  And I obviously can’t talk about those.

Living where I do, I of course hear a lot about Kobe Beef, and how farmers will massage the cows (sometimes with rice wine) to make sure they’re stress-free and mellow (not BS – actually a thing).  And that’s what I think of with Furuba and its audience when it gives you cute and funny moments (especially where a certain half-Doitsujin character is concerned).  To the cattle, I’m sure those massages feel really relaxing and nice.  But massages or not, we all know where they end up.

Honestly, we’re just getting started here.  Still, the meat (no pun intended) of the story is starting to unspool, and I was actually pretty encouraged by this episode.  The humorous side of this version has lagged well behind the dramatic (and the 2001) so far, but this ep mostly got that part right, I think.  It was an interesting remix of manga elements, and I find that semi-encouraging too – even if it’s (mostly) just moving stuff around, it’s nice to know the anime has at least license to do that much.  Momiji’s earlier appearance was actually shifted from this point in the manga, and the sleepover and culture festival moments are pretty jangled up (and there were some significant changes to how something else played out, too).

The friendship of Hana and Uo with Tohru is easy to overlook, but it’s by no means unimportant to the story here.  Initially their overprotectiveness bugged me, but I pretty quickly came to see that it came from a reasonable place – when you consider what Honda-san means to them and what she’s been through, it’s quite natural that those two would cross the line on occasion. I also appreciated the fact that they weren’t blinded by their instincts – they’re able to recognize the difference between a genuine threat to their friend, and a positive force in her life.  The whole “waves” thing is overplayed to death (it’s not a bad time to remember that about 97% of what we remember as overplayed examples of this trope came after Hana and FB) but the core message is solid.

Are there parallels between Tohru’s relationship with the top two girls and boys in her life?  Absolutely – we see her again and again drawn to outsiders, obviously in large part because she was one herself as a child.  What sets her apart (and not to overhype this because you’ll get plenty of it, but it’s important) is her ability to focus on the positives in others and in life situations.  She is, as is noted this week, someone who can appreciate what she has rather than lust after what she doesn’t.  And just as important, she can appreciate what she has that others do not.  Characters as fundamentally good as Honda-san can be hard to like, but she manages to avoid this trap for me.  That may in large part be because of who played her in the 2001 series, but that performance established who the character is in my mind, and I doubt it will ever change.

As to the festival, it does indeed see the return of Momiji – Han Megumi speaking German and all – as well as the Sohma looking after him, Hatori (Okitsu Kazuyuki, a very good and versatile seiyuu).  Momiji’s natural impishness – and love of hugs – almost causes disaster, but Yuki (in his finest hour) sucks it up and uses his forced cross-dressing to good advantage to save the day.  Hatori is a doctor, and reveals (much to Yuki’s annoyance) to Tohru that Yuki has bronchial problems.  He also manages to sneak a candid snap of the boys (kudos to the translator for pulling “macaroni and cheese” out of their… hat to express that pun).  And Uo and Hana invite themselves over to Casa Sohma, after Tohru lets it slip that she lives there.

There’s a lot of import happening in this last part of the episode, including the exposition of the hat story (though not all the details).  All seems well enough but this Fruits Basket does love its cliffhanger phone call, and Honda is invited (though “ordered” would be more accurate) to the Sohma estate and a possible meeting with Akito (listening to Sakamoto Maaya is pure anime ecstasy).  After Yuki’s warning about Akito and memory-erasing this is ominous, to say the least – no less so after we saw Shigure’s brief meeting with Akito where Shigeru matter-of-factly declared “she’s a much better person than you”.  I’ll just note here that I did much prefer the way the first series handled this chain of events – which was ironically much closer to how the manga did – but that’s water under the bridge, because things really start to hot up now…