There are always those moments in Fruits Basket.  The ones that make you shake your head and ask why it couldn’t just be like this all the time.  Furuba has always been a series capable of penetrating emotional accuracy, which means its highs are some of the highest around.  But by God, they’re bogged down with so much so often that doesn’t need to be there.  I can honestly say there have been few series in animanga that have frustrated me as much as Fruits Basket, and it’s been that way for twenty damn years.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call this a perfect episode, even by Fruits Basket standards.  There have been a few even better along the way.  I’m so tired of this incessant trend of characters apologizing for no reason to characters who should be apologizing to them – there’s way too much of it.  And the same could also be said of the the internal monologues, which have dominated the past three episodes to an excessive degree.  But in the big picture, it was the payoff for a lot of those frustrations accrued along the journey.  It was one of those big moments a series has to get right, and thankfully that’s exactly what happened.

I won’y say it’s necessarily a surprise that Kyou and Tohru finally got their act together in the end.  I mean, how big a gut punch would it have been if that hadn’t happened?  Still, this had to be cathartic and so it was.  You just want to bang their heads together and tell them to stop apologizing and start smooching already, but that’s totally in-character.  If there’s no Tohrou-Kyou there’s no story – not really.  They’re fine – both pretty clueless, but where the other is concerned they connect the dots in just the right way to make this work.

So why did the curse break?  It’s an important question, obviously – but, perhaps, not the one we should be asking right now.  I think even addressing the question of whether Takaya will explain this or not is a spoiler, first of all.  Instead, the focus should be on the back story – on how the curse began, not why it ended.  A lonely God atop a mountain, a humble stray cat who wanted only to be by his side.  And then, a gathering of friends which brought great joy to all of them, including the cat.

What needs to happen here – and in my view it does – is for us to feel the sense of loss of something which we’ve been led for 60 episodes to believe is a curse (in both senses).  It’s obvious why Akito would feel it, but it needs to go deeper than that.  Even given that we knew the bones of the origin story, fleshing it out makes all the difference in the world.  It’s done with dignity and restraint (never a given with Furuba), and it feels like a very natural bridge to the present.  What became a curse started out as a promise – one born of good intentions nevertheless misguided.  The truth is the one that stands out has always been the cat.  It’s been that way in every way all along, so how could it be any different in the beginning?

The cat, of course, was the wisest of them all by far.  He knew the truth, the irreplaceable value of knowing things end.  It all became distorted over time, of course, but even in the beginning misguided resentment started to poison what the God had intended as a gesture of love.  In the present, all of these people are literally free for the first time in their lives, and that’s a good thing.  Certainly for no one more than Kyou, who bore the brunt of that long-ago resentment more than anyone.  But it is a loss – because the Sohmas all retain a memory of why this bond was created in the first place.  What their ancestors had been unwilling to let go has now been taken from them as if by force.  I imagine anyone would feel a pang of loss in such a moment.

As uneven as the decades-long journey has been, I’m glad we got to see this chapter make it to the screen at last.  There’s more to come of course, but in truth for me this was effectively the ending – the untidy and bittersweet resolution for the essential elements of the story.  When one looks back on Fruits Basket and tries to focus on the triumphs rather than the missteps, it’s this sequence of events that they tend to focus on as much as any – and I do speak with some considerable experience about this.