Slightly Biased Manga

Man, I did this one back in May, but for some reason I didn’t put it here. Weird. Anyway, on with the show.

I want something IMPORTANT to happen, dammit! We keep getting hints, and I want something big to go down! I had a taste of big in volume 6, and now I want more.

Not that I still don’t like the series. I particularly liked the shift from Sohmas to Tohru’s friends, because they’re such interesting characters without having to be cursed and overly-dramatic like the Sohmas… as much as I love them too. Uotani in particular is probably one of my favorites, she has an interesting past and a great personality. I like Hana-chan too, but just because she’s always portrayed as so weird. Her backstory was okay… it didn’t strike me as great for some reason, but it was okay.

Something sort of significant happened toward the end, when Tohru’s red hat and the kid she admired came up again, and that was okay… if a little predictable. And we get more tidings of big things when Rin randomly shows up and talks to Shigure, but this series is terrible at promising and not delivering. Now I get the feeling Yuki has some sort of strange curse like Kyo, Shigure’s still plotting something, now Rin’s evil, the head of the Sohma house still hasn’t been explained (though I was rather unkindly spoiled as to how he turns out), and there are still all these little flashbacks that are NEVER EXPLAINED. Please, Fruits Basket, get around to it sometime within the next ten volumes.

Of course, as much as I bitch about nothing happening with this series, I DO lap it up, don’t I?

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a Fruits Basket review. It may have been that I still thought the series was just okay, that I liked reading it, but I didn’t think it was particularly good. Reflecting, I believe that’s still the case, but I’m so goddamn addicted it’s not even funny. It must be better than I think if I look forward to the next volume so hardcore.

We get to meet one new member of the Zodiac, Ritsu, who is the monkey and will eternally apologize for sins he may or may not have committed. Apologizing loudly, getting along with Shigure’s editor, and crossdressing make him okay in my book, though he apologizes maybe a tad too much for my liking. At least he’s not Hiro. Ugh. What a little son of a bitch.

There’s also some Rin at the end, who broke poor Haru’s heart and made him rampage and tear apart the classroom. I like Haru a lot too, his switchoff apathy and temper make him interesting, and he tells awesome stories. I think Fruits Basket’s strength lies in the characters, because there are many I like (not necessarily the main characters who strike me as a bit common, but people like Shigure, Ayame, Haru, Momiji, Uo-chan, and Hana-chan). However, it’s weakness may also lie in the characters, because now there’s about fifty million, still a couple to go, and I think Natsuki Takaya is running out of personalities, because the new characters lately have been annoying and over-the-top.

And the stories are saccarine-sweet as well. Just like Oh My Goddess. Aww. This volume has some of my favorite standalones in it.

I like Fruits Basket for the same reason I like Oh My Goddess in that they both give me that warm, fuzzy feeling after reading a volume, and no matter what happened that day, they can make me forget it because they have really high-quality sappy storytelling. They both suffer from the same problem, however, which is that they’re sort of episodic, and after awhile the shine will inevitably wear off unless there’s the tiniest bit of plot to keep me interested. Fruits Basket has that plot, and it keeps reminding me vaguely, but it’s been five volumes and it hasn’t really gotten around to it yet.

Don’t get me wrong though, the stories are still adorable. My favorite one in this volume is the first story about the Golden Week lakeside vacation, mainly because it involves Ayame, who is a great character. Plus you sort of get a lot of sappy sentiment all around, and while that’s in no short supply, I like that a large part of the focus is directed at Hatori as opposed to Tohru for once. I liked the introduction of Kisa, but all she managed to do in this volume is throw some more mystery on Yuki’s past. I hope she comes back, she’s quite adorable. I also liked the chapter where the Yuki fanclub was trying to bring down Uo-chan so they could strike Tohru, but again, this is because I like Uo-chan so much. Her seemingly strange grip on reality is quite amusing.

The volumes, as much as I like them, are beginning to get more and more formulaic. Some feelgood stories where everyone realizes how important Tohru is and what a good person she manages to be, some brooding and foreshadowing from Yuki and Kyo, cameos by already introduced members of the Sohma family, and an introduction to a new Sohma member. I’m really hoping some semblance of plot picks up soon though… foreshadowing is killing me, it’s a good series I want more of and the next volume just never quite does it for me, and it’s still running in Japan, which means it’s still going and doing either this or has actually delved into the plot. I have high hopes, but I hope my interest just doesn’t taper off as it did with Oh My Goddess.

I always associate Fruits Basket and D.N. Angel because they were both really popular unlicensed manga series for the longest time, plus Tokyopop publishes them both and they come out at the same time, so that doesn’t help either. This one however, unlike D.N. Angel, has managed to completely win me over.

I don’t even know what it is that I like about this series so much. I want to not like it, but I just do. The art’s really nothing special (even the color art is extremely plain), there’s handwritten segments that are really hard to read, there’s so much text and so little image, there’s about 500 characters to keep track of… but at its core, there’s this story about Shigure, Kyo, Yuki, and Tohru, and Tohru’s literally impossible to hate. Every time you think she does something that makes you mad, she gets this flashback of her dead mother and it reminds you that she works umpteen hours a week and cares for the Sohma family, then you just can’t hate her anymore. I think that’s the main attraction for me.

In this volume, we have the introduction of Yuki’s brother, Ayame, who is incredibly lecherous and is not really on speaking terms with Yuki. His actions towards Tohru don’t help, but Tohru tries her best to get the two talking to one another. The fact that Ayame is great friends with Shigure really makes a lot of sense after everything’s said and done, and Ayame’s simply a wonderful storyteller. We also get the first real interaction between the head of the Sohma family and Tohru, which is rather anticlimatic. Actually, if there’s one thing I hate about this volume (and the series in general, for that matter), it’s the obscene amount of vague blatant foreshadowing. A little foreshadowing is fine, but there’s waaaay to much crammed into every volume of this series, to the point where half of it is disjointed, cryptic remarks that you will read again in a later volume. But the fact that there’s that much foreshadowing in a series this good isn’t a bad thing… in fact, it makes me want so much more of it RIGHT NOW, which makes me hate the series even more. Curse you, Fruits Basket, for being so good.