Fruits Basket Episode 8

Fruits Basket Episode 8

See You When You Get Back

As some of you may know, I’m not a fan of English dubbed anime, or the whole English dub community in general (I’m sorry if that includes you). And, much of my dislike for the dub community comes from Twitter due to it constantly showing me tweets from English voice actors, who I don’t care about in the slightest.

Last week one of these English voice actors also tweeted out a spoiler for this week’s Fruits Basket episode, so that didn’t help either. In fact, it wasn’t even a spoiler that was revealed in this episode, so it’s not as if I would have known it had I watched the episode as soon as it aired.

I think half the fun of this series comes from trying to figure out which animal each of the Soumas are before it’s revealed. So for something like that to be spoiled by someone who “works on” the series pretty inexcusable.

Now, they only spoiled the zodiac animal tied to one character, but that’s still a pretty big deal when only six out of the 13 animals have been confirmed up to this point. But, don’t worry. I won’t spoil you. At least not yet.

In the final section of this review (before the conclusion) I’ll go over the spoiled character as well as some of my new predictions regarding the other Souma clan members. I really wish I could go through my new predictions completely blind, but I think at this point it’s just best to say that if you don’t want a minor spoiler, skip that final section.

New Year’s

It’s new years in the world of Fruits Basket, and as you might have guessed, that’s the most important holiday for the Souma clan. In fact, new years is a pretty big event in Japan for everyone. Why else do you think there’s a new years episode in just about every single slice of life anime?

But today I’m not here to write about the Japanese new years traditions, though we certainly see at least a few in this episode. No, instead I want to discuss how the celebration of new years effects the different characters in this series.

That said, since the new year is such an important event for the Souma clan, I’ll be going over how they celebrate it in a separate section.

Tooru Honda from the anime series Fruits Basket
Tooru Honda

This will be Tooru’s first new year without her mother, and her grandfather and his family decided to go on a trip to Hawaii without her. Sure, she might not have wanted to go with them anyway because they’re jerks, but she wasn’t really even given the option.

At least her friends, Uo and Hana, invited her to spend the new year with them and their families. And, after Tooru declines their invitations, they even offer to spend the new year with her by going on a camping trip together. Even still, Tooru declines and tells them to spend time with their respective families, something she can no longer do.

She even tells this to Yuki and Kyo, who initially don’t want to go to the main Souma household for the new year. However, after they realize that she wants them to spend time with their family before it’s too late, they accept defeat. Well, that is until they remember that she’s all alone and go back to Shigure’s house to spend time with her instead.

Souma Clan Banquet

So what do the Soumas do to celebrate the new year? Their celebration is actually two-fold: they have both a celebration with the entire family, and another celebration which only includes the 12 official zodiac members (so not Kyo).

We aren’t told exactly what goes on during the celebration for the entire family, but I think it’s safe to assume that it’s your standard new years stuff considering the majority of the family doesn’t know about the zodiac curse. Who knows, maybe they even have their own shrine they go to.

The important celebration is the one reserved solely for the zodiac members. Again, we don’t really know what they do during this event, but at the very least we know that there’s a banquet and at least one member performs some sort of dance (this year it’s Momiji).

Since 2019 is the year of the pig, you would expect Kagura to be the one performing this dance. But 1999 was the first new year of the original manga’s serialization, which was the year of the rabbit. I assume this is why Momiji is the one performing the dance.

Kagura, Akito, Hatori, Hatsuharu, and Shigure Souma from the anime series Fruits Basket
Kagura, Akito, Hatori, Hatsuharu, and Shigure Souma

This is also our first introduction to Hatsuharu Souma, though he’s not really introduced just yet. In fact, I had to look up what his actual name was because he’s only referred to as Haa-kun by Shigure, who likes to call Hatori Haa-san as well in order to confuse people. This is the character whose animal was spoiled for me.

We also learn that due to Yuki and Kyo’s decision to skip this year’s celebration in order to spend it with Tooru instead, there will be two Soumas who aren’t too happy. Obviously Kagura will be enraged because Kyo isn’t making an appearance, but we also learn that Akito will be mad due to Yuki no-showing.

It would make sense for Akito to be mad about Yuki simply because she seems to be a control freak and would want the entire zodiac gathered, but I don’t think that’s the main reason. It’s hinted that Yuki and Akito have some sort of more intimate relationship, so I think she might be his mother.

The Zodiac

Alright, now it’s time for some spoilers and some theorizing. I know some of you might want to read my theories without spoiling yourselves, but if you continue reading beyond this point after knowing that I’m going to include a spoiler, I can’t be held responsible.

So to get it out of the way, Hatsuharu is the ox of the zodiac. I honestly wouldn’t have guessed that from any content shown in the series or the OP/ED so far, but that’s just how it is. So now that we know that he’s the ox, that leaves six more animals unconfirmed.

These are the tiger, snake, horse, goat, monkey, and rooster. So, who do I think is who?

Let’s start with Akito. Originally I predicted that she would be the dragon, but that turned out to be Hatori instead. I then predicted that she would be the tiger due to the decorations in her room, but upon further inspection I believe this to be incorrect.

First of all, in the ED we’re shown the tiger and the goat together as two younger children, so I assume one of them must actually be the tiger, not Akito. But then what animal is Akito? My new guess is that she’s the snake, for a variety of reasons.

The main reason is that in the ED we see the boar chasing the cat, referencing Kagura chasing Kyo, and the snake chasing the rat. In this week’s episode we learned that there’s some sort of intimate relationship between Akito and Yuki, so if Yuki’s the rat then Akito must be the snake. Also, Akito seems to be the villain, and snakes are often seen as deceitful creatures.

So I’m guessing Akito is the snake, the girl depicted with the goat and tiger in the ED is the goat, and the boy depicted with the goat and tiger in the ED is the tiger. That just leaves the horse, monkey, and rooster, but we haven’t yet seen anything that hints towards which characters those might correspond to.

Conclusion

So what do you think of this week’s episode of Fruits Basket? Honestly I don’t think it was that exciting of an episode. We learned some new information regarding relationships within the Souma clan, but nothing else really happened. Also, have you already been spoiled on this series?

If you enjoyed this review, be sure to click the like button ❤ down below. And, give me a follow over on Twitter @DoubleSama so you don’t miss out on any future content. I promise to try not to spoil anything in my tweets.

Finally, I’d like to thank HeavyROMAN for supporting DoubleSama.com at the Heika tier this month. To learn more about how you too can become a supporter of this blog, check out Patreon.com/DoubleSama.

My review of the next episode is available here.

Leave a Comment