Slightly Biased Manga

I never really know what to say about this series. I’ve put off talking about this volume for about two weeks, and really, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t get this out of the way.

I think my problem is that it’s never quite what I expect, except not in the way where everything that happens is a pleasant surprise. I’m always sort of mildly disappointed with things that are going on, I realize. I don’t really like Machi, so I’m not really liking where things are going concerning her. On the other hand, the fact that there’s now more of a romance for Tohru was something I’ve been looking for the entire time I’ve been reading the series. But Tohru’s sort of been shoved into the background for the time being, and she’s also very nearly made into a bad guy at one point, which didn’t agree with me.

I don’t like Machi, and I don’t like her relative, Yuki’s friend, either. I guess I just don’t like any of the student council characters. I did appreciate the focus on Yuki, but it was at the expense of Tohru and Kyo… I don’t know. I think there’s just way too much going on right now, and way too many characters. For instance, there was some focus on Machi’s relatine’s girlfriend, which ties into Tohru’s past. As nice a story as that is, why was she introduced? Why wasn’t the time that nonsequitor story took up spent on advancing the plot? It’ll be tricky to wrap things up in three volumes, but we’ll see.

I’m sort of being unfair. There’s a whole chapter of Tohru/Kyo at the beginning, and it’s very cute. Shigure reveals why it’s important to keep the cat imprisoned at the main house, and Tohru’s grandfather has a talk with Kyo about the way Tohru talks. I approve heartily. There’s also a chapter with Ayame, which I approve of in theory since I love Ayame, but it’s another case of a story telling Ayame’s backstory and… not really advancing the plot. Why go into these things this late in the game.

Bah. I’m just being unfair. It’s a fine series, and the digressions are what it’s been doing the whole time. It does them well. It’s just not my thing.

I read this a little over a month ago.  It’s been sitting on the floor with Enchanter, gathering dust.  I’m not sure why I’ve been putting off talking about it.

Things still haven’t moved back to Kyo and Tohru yet, which is kind of a bummer.  They are brought up at several points, but a lot of the volume focuses on Yuki, who has clearly split from the above pair.  Machi and Yuki seem to be drawing together.  Yuki and Kakeru seem to be the only two who have the patience to deal with Machi, which is a shame.  I kind of like her, even though I’m almost the exact opposite as far as neuroses are concerned.  We may also be rid of the Yuki fan club since the president is graduating.  Maybe not though… there will be members to replace her.

There is some creepy business with Rin.  She goes missing, and much of the volume is spent trying to figure out what happened to her and where she is.  Of course Akito is behind this, and Rin wound up taking some physical abuse and being thrown in solitary confinement after being tricked by Ren.  It hadn’t really occurred to me how horrible Kyo’s lifetime punishment would be until the results with Rin were shown.  It’s hard to watch the characters tearfully taking physical abuse from Akito and not really standing up for themselves, but the scenes with Rin were almost too much.  At least Haru finally did some standing up.

What else… there is much talk of breaking the curse, but I know there’s about five volumes left.  The curse isn’t going to break anytime soon, unfortunately.  Here’s hoping things will meander back to a more direct telling of Kyo and Tohru’s story next volume.  Actually… I don’t even know if that’s necessarily what I want.  I kind of like some of this family drama, but I still think there’s a bit too much going on and the story is a little too indirect.  I also think I’m in the minority with my opinions, so that shows how much I know.

I’m also behind on this series, which is amazing since it’s quarterly and I only have to read it once every three months or so.  I was even looking forward to this volume since I knew a huge bombshell was being dropped, but I think I just cannot get myself fired up about this series.  Even with all the plot development, I just feel like it moves so slowly, and we get so few scraps dropped to us as far as romantic development goes… and there’s a lot of story time spent on the huge cast of minor characters.

I complain, but there was more plot in this volume than in any other volume of Fruits Basket ever.  We basically find out all about Akito and how his life has been, and we find out Akito’s mother is alive and well and really likes to berate him, which is amazing.  Akito needs more characters that stand up and defy him.

We also get to hear a bit about Kureno and what his deal is… or is not, as the case may be.  He spills the truth about his relationship to Akito, and the possible relationship between he and Arisa is dealt with as well.  It is all very sad.

Kureno actually tells all of these things straight out to Tohru (about both himself and Akito), and in the aftermath of this conversation, Tohru is devastated and has to spend the night at Hanajima’s house feeling sorry for everyone.

In case this wasn’t enough plot for you, we also find out the nature of the relationship between Shigure and Akito, and why Shigure has been a jerk all this time.  I actually quite liked this bit of explanation.

Amidst all these explanations, Yuki and Kyo are buried, their story continued in later volumes.  Kyo barely appears at all.  I was pleased to see the explanation for Shigure though, who is not a minor character.  The minor/side character stories needed to be told in order for the plot to make sense… but I think that’s one of the other reasons I lose patience with this series, too many minor characters.  But I’m faulting it for something that’s in its nature, it handles this huge number of characters better than any other series I’ve read.  I just hate having to constantly switch between them all.

I was kind of surprised at this volume… I thought we’d get to hear about Akito, but instead we get insight into Tohru’s parents relationship through a flashback of Kyo’s.  How bizarre.

Tohru’s mom was certainly much more self-destructive than I would have thought.  It’s actually kind of hard to believe… the Tohru and her mom are absolute polar opposites, and  Tohru got almost no personality traits from her mom, who seemed to be rather outgoing and joking even as a refined adult.  The death of Tohru’s father was sad, as Takaya said, even though you know it’s coming.  Her dad’s kind of an eccentric character too.  It’s a shame he didn’t get to stick around longer.

I want there to be romance in this series SO BAD at this point.  Don’t just talk about it Kyo, DO IT.  Hm, that could be construed as a spoiler, but it’s not like we didn’t know that Yuki and Kyo were going to develop, or had all along, feelings for Tohru.  They’re beginning to talk about it a bit more, but they still haven’t acted on them yet.

We get some main house action at the end, with a savage beating administered to Yuki from Akito.  Yuki seems ambivalent though.  The important thing about that scene was that earlier, Aaya was in it, and really, that’s all I care about.

I still feel like this series needs to totally blow me away like it should, though.  I think it’s just that I’m not invested enough in the ten thousand characters that we’re supposed to care about.  Oh well.  There are better things to do with my time than ponder why I don’t like Fruits Basket.

So this volume scratched many of my itches as far as stuff I’d like to see from this series goes.  We finally find out a lot more about Yuki’s past, though it is of the dark and depressing variety of course, and we also finally find out about the hat incident.  Maybe I need to reread the first half of the series or something, but it didn’t quite match up to what I remembered of Tohru’s side of the story.  I’m sure it’s just me, though.  We also got to see Tohru’s mom again!  Hooray!

The school play was a little bit better than I’d hope, but that’s mostly because we got huge romance drama towards the end, the type of thing I’ve been craving.  Unfortunately, these two characters still need to address this situation, but it was good.  “Sorta Cinderella” was a good way to approach that, and it allowed the character personalities to display themselves without making too much a mess of the actual day.  But I don’t know, I still hate school plays.

We also got a lengthy diatribe from the third boy involved about exactly how he felt about the other two.  A confrontation between Kyo and Yuki also occurrs, and it is good.

The ENTIRE first half of the volume is depressing, though.  It was also information that I could either infer or guess based on the previous tragic tales of the Sohmas, but at least it was Yuki’s past.

Oh man.  Of course this volume starts off with Rin, who’s a major downer.  We have to listen to Rin’s story for most of the first half of the volume, and of course it’s depressing.  Of course her parents abandoned her when she got sick.  Of course she’s not as mean as she makes everyone think she is.  Ugh.

Also, the quiet student council member threw a bit of a fit.  I really hated to see her and the vice president get a lot of time in this volume, because I don’t think this series really needs more characters for us to remember.  But maybe something good will happen… I do kind of like the vice president, despite my extreme annoyance with him early on.

Ugh again for the school play.  I know every high school manga over ten volumes has to include this at some point, though.  It’s like the hot springs episode in every single goddamn anime.

Hats off to some romantic development.  FINALLY.  I guess I just needed to complain some.  Granted, we don’t get a lot of it, but we finally get Tohru questioning how she acts around Kyo.  Why she can’t say certain things around him and why she blushes sometimes may have nothing to do with romance here, but I sure hope it does.  We also seem to be getting a lot more focus on Yuki recently (Kyo hasn’t been a major player for the past couple volumes), and he’s been acting fondly towards Tohru too.  Not any more than usual, mind you, but with less Kyo, it seems like perhaps Yuki may be coming to terms with… perhaps romance.  I don’t know.  I vote Yuki, personally.

I’ve got a few volumes of this on hold, hoping that perhaps reading several volumes back to back would raise my opinion of the series.  Certainly one of the three volumes would have substantial plot in it.

Every volume does have something to offer in terms of plot, but usually it has to do with character relationships and less with where everything’s going to end up.  Here, the main focus is that Tohru is sneaking into the main Sohma house to try and talk to Kureno so he will speak to Uotani again.  On the way, she runs into Momo, then Momiji, and has to work things out and listen to a sad story about Momo and Momiji.

While we do learn more about Momo and Momiji, a bit about Kureno, and we get a more solid relationship for Uotani, none of this adds up to what Tohru is doing for the Sohmas and how she’s going to break the curse.  Yuki still sulks around like a spoiled child, and it’s hard getting through chapter after chapter of depressing stories about characters who appear to be living quite contented lives.  And not even depressing stories about the main characters, there’s like 50 characters now who have sad pasts that we have to keep hearing story after story about.  Plus, we still don’t get any sort of romance hints between Tohru and either Yuki or Kyo.  There are  TWO GUYS there.  There should be some sort of romantic triangle and drama, especially after so much story elapsed, but there’s not.  Of course, the last thing this series needs is more drama, but romance hints wouldn’t be too much to ask from the top-selling shoujo manga, would it?

Okay.  So far, I’m still a little tired of what’s been going on.  Let’s see if it will redeem itself over the next two volumes.

I took so long to read this because I kept hearing it was a really boring followup to the last volume that was very student-council oriented. If this series has a flaw, it’s thinking that people would rather hear about the student council than the Sohma family. With so many characters involved with the family, it’s actually poor to introduce a bunch more who don’t get much screen time and whose names I will never remember.

The back of the volume didn’t even talk about some of the spicier bits in the volume that made me like it. There’s a rather touching scene between Tohru and Shishou, another good scene with Rin, but the clincher was really the moment between Kyo and Kagura. Many questions still remain about the series and about the Sohma family, and it’s still getting around to answering some of them, but it finally cleared the air about the relationship between those two, and I quite liked it… though it was a bit dramatic.

Another thing that constantly bothers me about the series is how everyone keeps mentioning what a bad guy Shigure is. He’s actually one of my favorite characters, and when it shows him talking cryptically, I always assume he’s working on behalf of Tohru/Yuki/Kyo et al and against Akito. Much is said to the contrary here. Please don’t let Shigure be a bad guy.

And just when I was about to give up, they give me an Akito volume.

Akito is actually what has kept me coming back to the series. All these dark little hints the characters keep dropping are quite tantalzing. But it was starting to piss me off a bit, because he only ever says one or two cryptic lines, and they rarely ever even show his face. But God, the waiting paid off. Oh yes it did.

Akito COMES TO VISIT. He torments people. He EXPLAINS THINGS. He talks to Tohru, and he talks to Kyo. I didn’t really like the part where he talked to Kyo, mainly because they are cruel. But, for whatever reason, I loved the parts where he talked to Tohru. Yes. Loved. God Akito, you are amazing. Fucking amazing, turning this good series around and making it interesting again. Thank you.

Fucking Amazing Akito Sohma.

Hm. Since I didn’t actually read the latest two volumes of Hot Gimmick yet, and I already did TenTen, that leaves Tramps Like Us 6, Fruits Basket 11, and Cheeky Angel 5.

I love Fruits Basket, and I’m not really sure why. It’s sort of lukewarm and just sort of wishy-washy, but the chapters that tell little side stories about the characters are so good, and occasionally it will throw me a tasty little tidbit that keeps me wanting more. But really, all I usually wind up doing is begging for these tidbits, and for some reason I keep coming back. Volume ten was one of those little reminders as to why I keep coming back.

Not spoiling myself on this series is really paying off, because the end of this volume was TO DIE FOR. The beginning didn’t start off that great as it was more just sort of wishy-washy character interaction, but man, the end was WORTH IT. And that’s all I’m going to say about this one, because I read this and eleven back to back, and damn if eleven isn’t the one I want to talk about.