Curses and True Forms: Reading Fruits Basket as a lesbian
As a lesbian, Fruits Basket was not written for me. Even so, the romance between Kyo and Tohru resonates deeply with my experience of queerness.
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The Transient Queerness of Fruits Basket
This show makes me laugh, it makes me cry, but more than anything, it makes me hope. It makes me hope that no matter how bad things get, there will always be a second chance waiting just around the corner. Even two decades after the original manga began publishing, it shines just as brightly. But I’m not here to talk about how much I love Fruits Basket. Today, I’m here to explore one of its most under-discussed problems: its portrayal of queerness.
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“A Man Who Can Experience His Feelings”: Fruits Basket, toxic masculinity, and mental health
Fruits Basket is a radical work regarding its treatment of mental health because it actively works to destigmatize mental illness, critiquing and dismantling ideas about toxic masculinity through its portrayal of mental health.
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Fruits Basket (2019) – Episode 1
The long-awaited re-adaptation is here at last.
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Fruits Basket’s Tohru Honda and her Path to Self-Acceptance
Selfless heroines are common in anime and manga, but Tohru is particularly noteworthy because her development throughout the series serves as an example of growing up, coming to terms with one’s feelings, and finding one’s voice. She navigates a very real, very familiar river, fraught with anxiety and self-doubt.
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Love, Sex, and Power in Fruits Basket
Experiencing abuse from a young age, lacking a healthy vision of how to love and be loved, can resonate through a victim’s life for years, even decades. This is explored thoughtfully and compassionately in the classic shoujo manga Fruits Basket.
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The Always Smiling Girl: How Tohru critiques toxic positivity
The narrative takes care to demonstrate that Tohru has her own issues, and highlights that her relentlessly positive attitude and her devotion to putting others before herself is not healthy. Ultimately, Fruits Basket explores and unpacks the harmful side of her relentless positivity as one of many healing stories across the series.
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Harmful Gimmick: The normalization of abuse in shoujo manga
I became interested in shoujo manga after reading Fruits Basket, and I have not stopped reading it since. The more shoujo I read, however, the more I’ve noticed a disturbing trend. While many manga I have read feature sweet, supportive romances, just as many normalize unhealthy, even abusive relationships and victim-blaming.
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JUNI TAISEN: ZODIAC WAR – Episode 1
Do you like guns? How about blood? How about murder poison and empowered bunny men in high heels? Then Grimdark Fruits Basket Royale is for you!
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Lum Through the Years: Urusei Yatsura’s gender roles, then and now
While Lum herself unquestionably remains an anime icon, looking to the different ways she’s depicted in the older anime versus the new can shed some light on changing attitudes to the genre and archetype she’s so nicely embodied over time.
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Chatty AF 184: 2023 Spring Mid-Season Check-In (WITH TRANSCRIPT)
Vrai, Toni, and Peter try and fail to keep their discussion of a packed-to-the-gills season to a reasonable duration!
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Revisiting the Popularity and Cultural Context of Vampire Knight
For better or for worse, there’s nothing quite like Vampire Knight out there. Revisiting the series today—about 15 years after its release—reveals not only a lot of its shortcomings, but a lot about the cultural context in which it was released.
