I fear it may be time for me to take a blogging hiatus with Fruits Basket.  I don’t want to, especially, but I’m in a repetitive cycle because the series is – and worse, it’s a negative cycle and those are never fun to write through.  I’m just so fucking tired of Yuki’s unending rhapsodizing about himself, I can’t tell you.  He just never shuts up and not one patch of his dialogue is remotely believable, really.  The worst part is that this version of the anime seems to be stretching every Yuki interlude out interminably while trying to pretend Kyou doesn’t exist.  It’s as if Takaya is taking her revenge for every change (almost all for the better) Akitarou made in the first version.

I won’t claim to be unbiased about that subject, because I’m not.  I’ve always felt that the 2001 anime was an improvement on the manga, and never tried to hide that fact.  Wading through eyes-deep Yuki soliloquies this time around the reasons why come into focus all the more, among them the realization that Takaya writes Yuki very much the way Suetsugu-sensei writes Arata in Chihayafuru (though they’re very different characters – in some ways).  Arata is easier to take because he’s nowhere near as screentime dominant as Yuki, but that doesn’t help me with Furuba.

It’s Takaya’s story, it’s her choice.  It would help if there was some real advancement in Yuki’s character, and you’d think there might be with his preposterously self-aware opus about how he sees Tohru as a mother figure, but- well, I guess it’s better not to go there because you can’t without talking about the manga and besides, it all comes down to personal opinion anyway.

I probably had the right idea with Fruits Basket before the pandemic scrambled everything, where I’d decided to cover this (and future) seasons on a case-by-case basis.  It just whiffs with me too often to stay with it every week, and having time to spare for it doesn’t change that fact.  There’s a ton of good stuff still to come with this series – though it is alarming how this version seems to be short-shrifting it in favor of weaker material – and it’s surely best if I just save myself for the moments when it comes around.