It’s funny how all-or-nothing Fruits Basket is with me.  Maybe more so than any series I’ve ever covered in fact.  After some consideration over the years, I think the explanation is pretty simple – I care about some characters a lot, and others not at all.  For example:

• Care: Kyou, Tohru, Momiji, Shigure, Hiro, Kisa, Akito (remember I said care about, not for), Kazuma
• Don’t care: Yuki, Rin, Ayame, Kureno, student council subset, Tohru’s friends
• Sorta care: Haru, Hatori
• Can’t stand: Kagura, Yuki’s harem

And I can pretty much guarantee whether an episode will work for me depending on which characters are in-focus.  And because the cast of Furuba is so oversized, that leads to a pretty high miss rate.  I suppose the outlier there is Yuki, who’s inarguably one of the three main characters of the series.  And a lot of his episodes overlap with the characters I care about, so he’s part of the deal.  But Yuki himself?  I find his incessant self-obsessed whinging to be unutterably tiresome.  He’s every annoying shoujo male lead cliche rolled into one annoying shoujo male lead.  But with Fruits Basket, he’s a necessary evil (though not literally evil, annoying as he is).

When I look at this week’s episode through that lens, the fact that it was a rare semi-hit/semi-miss makes perfect sense.  Haru was a major focus, part of the episode was Yuki but much of the B-part was Tohru and Kyou.  Haru is a nice kid and all, but I often find his act wears thin quickly.  He doesn’t play anything remotely like a real person to me, though he’s not annoying or anything.  As for the Yuki stuff, it was pretty much typical navel-gazing and self-pity.

I liked the bit with Tohru and her grandfather though.  Sometimes Takaya can lay it on pretty thick with the Honda family’s tragic existence, but her lot does seem to be a genuinely sad one.  In a sense Tohru kind of abandoned her grandfather – she seems to be the only one in the family who really cared about him – and I sometimes think she feels guilty about that.  He’s got it tough in that house without her around, even when he’s not bedridden with a bad back.  But it’s not the lot of adolescents to bear such responsibilities, and he surely wouldn’t want her to sacrifice her happiness to keep him company.

As for Kyou, he just always seems to be the one to pick Tohru up when she literally or symbolically stumbles.  I sense a growing realization in Yuki, a sense that something isn’t quite right here.  He’s starting to see that a different bond exists between Tohru and Kyou than the one he has with her, and a growing panic about that is bubbling up inside him.  I wish I could say I feel sorry for him but I guess I’m just not a good enough person – it gives me pleasure to see.  That’s true of the new ED too – it’s lovely both visually and musically.  Fruits Basket has certainly kept a very high standard with its OP/ED themes.