Let’s Talk about Fruits Basket: The Final Season
CONTENT WARNING: This article will be talking about the final season of 2019’s Fruits Basket remake, which has a heavy focus on physical and emotional abuse caused by family members.
Back in 2019, 3000 years ago by today’s standards, I wrote my first article about the then-new Fruits Basket remake. In that article I mentioned that I was interested in the darker tone of the series, and excited to see exactly how far they would go in replicating the original work.
The Final Season has not just delivered that in spades, but also uses the change in medium from Manga to Anime to make some scenes far more harrowing than their Manga counterparts. It throws itself wholly into the themes of abuse, and spends much more of the narrative focusing on the viewpoint of Akito Sohma, the seemingly unhinged head of the Sohma family.
From this point on there will be spoilers for the show. If you have not seen it or the preceding manga and intend to, you can skip this section. I’ll mark when the spoilers stop.
First, a quick summary. The season begins with Tohru Honda learning two world-changing pieces of information: That Akito Sohma is a woman who has been living as a man due to complicated circumstances, and that Kureno Sohma, the Rooster of the Zodiac, has been freed from the Zodiac Curse for several years at this point, only staying by Akito’s side from a sense of Duty and Pity.
The next half of the season revolves around Tohru coming to grips with this information and trying to figure out what exactly they mean for her goal of freeing the Sohma’s from their curse. The series also spends a great deal of time while this is happening to focus on the romantic connections that Tohru’s generation begin grappling with; Yuki’s burgeoning love with Maki, a young woman dealing with depression and her own host of family issues, Momiji’s one-sided love of Tohru, as well as delving more deeply into the behind-the-scenes movements that Shigure is making in his long-term bid to be with Akito, and Kyo’s struggle to come to terms with his unexpected love for Tohru while also feeling responsible for the death of Tohru’s mother.
At the midway point of the season is when everything goes wrong for everyone. Tohru confesses to Kyo, only for him to berate her affection for him on the grounds that she could not possibly love her mother’s killer. She refutes this claim, only to have him to accuse her of not loving her mother enough if that were true. He then abandons her in front of their home and takes off into the distance.
Meanwhile, Akito is unravelling. The Curse that binds the Zodiac to her is breaking little by little, causing her worldview to fall apart as first Momiji, and then Hiro both have their Curse lifted. If she isn’t the All-Important God of the Zodiac, then what is she? During this existential crisis, she gets into an argument with Kureno that ends with her literally stabbing him in the back before running off, leaving him to slowly bleed out before a household servant rushes to get him medical attention. Knife in hand and desperation clouding her mind, she runs to the home where Tohru and the others have been living for years to find Tohru standing a short distance away, in a daze just after having been verbally accosted by Kyo and slowly walking in the direction he had run off to.
Akito launches into an enraged diatribe, screaming about the way Tohru has usurped her bonds with the Zodiac and threatening her with the knife. In her depressed state, Tohru explains to Akito that she understands the terror that comes with losing something you wanted to last forever and not knowing where to go with your life, which disarms Akito. Just as Akito reaches out to Tohru, convinced by their discussion that Tohru may be someone she could have a meaningful connection to outside of the stifling Zodiac Curse, the ground beneath Tohru gives way, and she crashes to the road.
After a terrified Akito manages to contact Shigure, Tohru is rushed to the hospital, where she spends the next several days. During this time, Akito gathers the Zodiac members, all of whom have had their curse broken, for one last banquet. There, she reveals herself to have been a woman, announces that she will be moving forward as a woman and the head of the Sohma house, but that the Zodiac members will be free to live as they wish. She attempts to apologize to everyone for the things she has said and done over the years, with mixed success, and everyone moves on with their lives. The rest of the season is devoted to resolving Tohru and Kyo’s love story, and the season ends in an unspecified future as their daughter tells their granddaughter that they have gone out on a walk and not to bother them during their alone time together.
From here, the Spoilers have ended, though there will of course be allusions to the events of the story.
While the last season still follows Tohru’s life and her perspective, it is very much focused on Akito. Not just because Akito is someone that Tohru eventually has to come to terms with, but because Akito’s trauma and pain is a vital part of the narrative that has to be explored for the rest of the story to work. The original anime, though it never reached this point in the narrative, would not have been able to tell this same story because of how much it avoided it’s darker aspects. Without Akito serving as a dark reflection of Tohru’s desire to connect with the Sohmas, without Akito’s malice and fear and desperation shown and explained, you end up with a weak, overdone Beauty and the Beast tale of a young girl saving a young boy from turning into a cat monster.
By focusing on Akito’s narrative during this season, the story gets to explore ideas of parental abuse and the vicious spiral of pain and trauma that can follow a family for generations. She is a deeply wounded woman trying desperately to hold on to control and dominance over her life to spite the mother that loathes and despises her. Even with the narrative asking viewers to understand Akito, it never tries to absolve her of her actions. Being abused is never shown as an excuse for being an abuser, and the ending of the story drives that point home. There are characters that will never accept that Akito is trying to change, and even the people who are willing to accept that will never be able to forget the horrors that they were subject to by her hand. And even though her son Shiki is a recurring character in the sequel Fruits Basket Another, it is made clear that Akito was still very much in the wrong and shows that she will have to live with the guilt of what she has done for the rest of her life.
The 2019 Fruits Basket remake is, without a doubt, the strongest of the current adaptations of the work. It is raw and visceral in a way that the manga couldn’t manage to portray, and isn’t afraid to shy away from the dark places of the story that the original anime chose to avoid. It’s an emotional look at the terrible things that happen in our lives and our families in a way that most shows, even outside of anime, tend to shy away from, and one that I feel like everyone should take some time to understand.
