Fruits Basket

[snarp]

Is there, like, fic explaining why Akito's behavior later on is not basically a retcon of Akito's decisions in volume one?

Comments

[mikkeneko]

Frankly everything past the "ZOMG FEMALE" reveal made me throw up my hands in exasperation, particularly the 11th hour pairing off of EVERYONE with their heterosexual soulmate, including Ayame.

[chomiji]

At least Mine was there the whole time! I was fed up with the 11th-hour introduction of Machi and Meat Angel because I hoped Yuki was going to end up with Kakeru. It seemed like a perfect match, really.

[mikkeneko]

....Who was Kakeru, again?

[mikkeneko]

Oh, yes, the student council boy. I remember now.

In hindsight, I think the ending of Fruits Basket (in particular) and the whole latter storyline (in general) are an example of a peculiar and rarely seen problem -- good writing being used to cover up for some fundamentally poor story decisions. A sort of good-tactics bad-strategy example. The story was well told, but for the love of God, why that story? Some of it I'll allow for values dissonance -- like both of Tohru's friends pairing off with men old enough to at least be their fathers, or Kyoko's romance with her teacher -- but that can't explain all of it.

Just, for example, the final climactic moment where Akito releases the remaining Zodiac from their curse. Not gonna lie, I cried like a baby, and I am almost never moved to tears by anything I watch or read. But from a larger perspective it's rather headscratchy. Given that the entire story has revolved around the various characters growing and evolving in their relationships enough that they can let go of Akito, it's just rather puzzling that she decided to just dump 3/4s of those arcs in progress and go "Meh, we're done here."

And the example of Machi is another one -- given that this is fundamentally a love story and Yuki was one of the most central characters, the decision to pair him off with a 3rd string character who wasn't even introduced until three-fifths of the way through the story is rather frustrating. I did end up sort of liking Machi or at least feeling bad for her and wanting something better for her, but she was so palpably designed as a match to Yuki's personality -- and more importantly, as a broken bird whom HE was able to play healing-hearts with rather than vice versa -- it felt rather shallow.

And then we have the "suddenly het lifemates" phenomenon, which was well built up for some characters but not others. Of the entire, extremely large and varied cast, only TWO characters do not end the story in a het soulmate pairing -- Kagura, whom we already know to be straight due to her attachment to Kyo, and Momiji, whose exception also seems rather puzzling. We know the objection isn't that he's too young, since for God's sake Kisa and Hiro are still in grade school. It might not have been so frustrating had the author not played up hints of same-sex Ship Tease so heavily earlier in the manga -- Hatsuharu's adulation of Yuki, Ayame just in general -- but the fact that she did, then dropped a "but of course I was kidding about that, nobody can really be gay, true love is heterosexual!" is rather annoying.

And that's not even getting into Akito's "she's just insecure and bitter because she can never be the man her father was!" story arc. Or the incredibly soap opera-y "Kyo was present at Tohru's mother's death and feels guilty about it" throw-in, or the exasperating shell game played with the hat. ("It was Kyo's! No, it was Yuki's! No, it was Kyo's but Yuki had it for some utterly arbitrary reason! You know what, never mind, the hat is irrelevant to this romance.")

Any of these taken in isolation wouldn't really be so jarring, but it all adds up to make you really wondering how much of this was all thrown together at the last minute because the author didn't plan her story arc very well. You will never convince me that the reveal of Akito's gender was planned in advance. We see that character quite clearly in the episode where they come to Yuki's school and that could never pass as a female silhouette no matter how much binding you do.

[kaigou]

To answer the main question: no, I've never heard of anyone tackling the retcon-aspect, and that's the kind of thing I'd expect my flist to mention. So, dunno.

To answer (or just underscore) Mikke's points: I can't figure out whether it was the author who chickened out, or possibly her editors, seeing how Japan makes Marvel/DC look like positive hands-off macromanagers when it comes to story production. As I understand it, manga editors have massive amounts of control, and given the story's premise -- and its slowly but carefully developed darker and darker aspects and implications -- it does seem like someone got cold feet. Or that the author thought she could carry the story to its logical conclusions but got pulled back (and judging from some of the latter parts, pulled back hard) from taking those to the end. It's one thing if Akito were a girl all along, and that's enough of an annoyance (the justification for his/her choices, that is), but if you carry through the implications were Akito a boy, the story would've had to have gone to a much darker place, in order to resolve things.

There are just too many things done right, in the story's opening volumes, to believe that the same author would then do so much not just wrong, but wrong in a way that completely negates her earlier right. Author brains just don't work like that, at least IME, and not an author's brain that could come up with a premise and darkness like what early Furuba hinted at. The introduction of characters like Machi, late in the game, felt more like external pressure -- either from fans who presented themselves as a serious buying power (or were perceived as such by the publisher) or from the editors -- someone -- who said, "you can't just let this guy be all alone!" Fan love, and all that, can twist a story, but moreso if the editors are putting muscle into some twisting, as well.

Given that the entire story has revolved around the various characters growing and evolving in their relationships enough that they can let go of Akito, it's just rather puzzling that she decided to just dump 3/4s of those arcs in progress and go "Meh, we're done here."

This is one of the reasons I don't think it was the author's choice, to be honest. I might be more forgiving or more benevolent in that thinking, but... it just seems to me, that if one had invested that much time in a story with intentions of questioning so many things -- not just relationships between parents and children, and abuse, and obsession, and self-destruction, and ostracization of the Other, and even sexuality, love, abandonment, and loss -- that one could just up and say, oh, whatever. The story had way too much heart to make me ever believe the author didn't genuinely care. It felt more like to me -- and the various late-game changes reinforce that conclusion -- that the author was getting possibly huge amounts of pressure to just, y'know, don't go that road, because this is shoujo and it should have a happy ending. (Define happy.) And, between not wanting to burn bridges professionally, and not wanting to completely undo her story, she just wrapped it up as quickly as she could.

In a way, it feels like it's not just the story that suddenly did a u-turn and collapsed into heteronormavity; it feels like the author got shoved in that direction, may've felt she wasn't in a position to refuse, and we got dragged along with her. She wrote too much else, so well, to make me believe she'd planned any of that, and the broken places in the story are to me the signs of someone else trying to bend her deviant storylines into a proper Shoujo Happy Ending.

[mikkeneko]

That is definitely an angle of looking at it that would make sense, it would certainly explain the "good writing, bad choices" dynamic I thought I felt. The author, being the most visible one, tends to be the only one I think of.