As I promised in the check-in post, I’ll be covering the episodes of Fruits Basket that matter. And this was certainly one that mattered. Last week was a total washout for all the usual reasons, but we got right into the thick of things here. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that there wasn’t a single attempt at comedy for this entire episode, and it was the best of the season so far. There also wasn’t any Tohru or Kyou either and precious little Yuki, but that doesn’t have the same sort of causal effect.
Starting out with Hiro and Kisa is always a step in the right direction, and they get their first oxygen as a pairing this season. These two are among Furuba’s strongest characters, especially Hiro, all the more so now that they’ve shed a bit of their cherubic cuteness. Hiro is an interesting one. He’s one of the few Sohmas that really lucked out in the mommy department, but he’s incessantly hard on himself. In my view Hiro is actually a very sweet kid who’s a bit too clever for his own good – he takes in more than he can fully process at his age, and it causes him to blame himself for the things that don’t make sense. Which in this family is basically all of them.
Kisa and Haru certainly don’t blame Hiro for the things he blames himself for, not that it makes it any easier for him. I always rooted for Hiro and Kisa right from the beginning – they’re people who deserve to have good things happen to them. Both have had the misfortune of tending to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, and Hiro’s experience was a big catalyst in driving the Haru-IsuzuRin story forward here. He finally comes clean and tells Haru the truth of how Rin was injured, and Haru reacts exactly as you’d expect any decent person to.
Akito is Akito. I don’t think there’s any sugarcoating it at this point no matter what Takaya tries to peddle on the subject. She’s a true horror, and her mother isn’t much better. This time around Akito locks Rin in the cat’s storehouse after she tries (at Ren’s behest) to “steal” Akira. This was supposedly in return for information about freeing Haru from the curse, information Ren never had in the first place. Akito’s plan was apparently to let Isuzu starve herself to death and be done with it, but Kureno gets involved (much to the irritation of the loyal staff).
Kureno really grates on me, I have to say. He’s fully complicit in Akira’s crimes as far as I’m concerned, and his staying by her side is a choice. You can rationalize it away all you want, but it’s his decision to stay where he is. And the occasional act of decency as we saw here only highlights his culpability for enabling Akito to be Akito. If there’s any upside it’s that events are conspiring to make it harder and harder for Kureno to ignore that.
This is definitely the headline here – Akito’s free ride is starting to come to an end. Fear is the weapon she uses to subjugate the Zodiacs to her will, and the more they show the willingness to resist, to stand up to her, the more tenuous her grip becomes. We still have a long, long way to go – the grip is still tight, and the major storylines haven’t really even been touched on so far this season. But a little betrayal by Kureno, a confrontation with Haru, things like these are small cracks in the wall.
