Well, here we are. It’s been a long ride, but we are now at the final season of this series. I’ve got a post on my initial views of the entire story coming up later this week. I want to save most of my words for that, but I wanted to get out some quick thoughts on the third and final season before that. So let’s take a quick look into Fruits Basket; The Final.
- The Final works when it does what Fruits Basket has always been good at: focusing on the secondary characters. In many ways this third season becomes the anthology series it probably always should have been.
- Because honestly? I can’t give a fuck about Tohru and Kyo or their relationship. I like the central theme of Fruits Basket being about ‘moving on’ and ‘change’, but there is very little that I could grab onto with these characters. It’s probably because for vast swaths of story, Kyo is just absent, and Tohru seems to be only there for the other characters to have a sounding board.
- Hell, I was more invested in Kureno and Arisa’s relationship than pretty much anything else. That felt like it had real sparks and chemistry.
- Still, Tohru’s confrontation with Akito is well done, and her kindness and compassion, the ‘no-strings attached’ love she shows her is pretty much in line with her character.
- Seeing Yuki step up to the plate and be a guiding force for Machi is a good way to end his character. I’ve been on record saying that Yuki takes up too much of the story, but now that his journey more or less finished by the time The Final begins, it’s nice to see how much he’s changed.
- “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened’ is pretty much THE quote you can use to sum up the entire main plot of Fruits Basket. Not everything can last forever, staying locked into one state of being is not healthy, and as much as it might hurt, moving on into the unknown is the right thing to do. There will be good days and bad, but at least you are alive.
- And yeah, those final moments of the series are damn good. Say what you will about the entire series (which I will), Fruits Basket absolutely sticks its landing where it needs to.
Shallow Dives in Anime 