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

[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.