Almost exactly a year ago, right after Akira Toriyama passed away, I wrote about Dragon Ball and how formative my introduction to manga was. Since then, I’ve mostly held off on rereading the series so I could do it during a time that I was capable of properly feeling joy (rather than just ignoring the pain I was in for all of last year), but I have spent a lot of time, on and off, thinking back to my childhood library and my introduction to the series. And comics (specifically the ones that didn’t appear in the “funny pages” of the newspaper my parents got) as a whole, since those were all sorted together. Surprisingly, out of basically no where, some of those memories became relevant again. You see, in the early days of my local library putting comics out in a place that kids like me could easily see them, there was one other manga series available for people to borrow. I avoided it at all costs because, even then, I was aware of the expectations placed on me by my parents that I avoid anything that might be construed as “girly” or “soft” and the image of a young woman and two young men on the cover screamed “romance” to me in a way I absolutely couldn’t have verbalized as a child. So, rather than invest in my emotional intelligence (which, coincidentally, was something my parents wanted me to develop despite them often signaling that it wasn’t a masculine trait like all the others they tried to cultivate in me), I invested in my creative intelligence and passed over the inexplicably named “Fruits Basket” manga in favor of the action-y one that was filled with fighting and whatnot.

Now, decades later, I’m still not reading the manga (a fact I might try to rectify some day), but I am watching the recent production of the anime with my two online friend-family folks. I was complaining about not having anything to do other than play Final Fantasy 14 and the conversation wound around topics for a bit before my friend asked if I’ve ever watched the show and was aghast when she found out that I hadn’t. I admitted to being only vaguely aware of it, so she launched into a brief explanation of the premise that revealed just how shockingly little I knew about it, despite having encountered it pretty much constantly as a pre-teen, teen, and manga-buying college student (it was right by the Fullmetal Alchemist books, after all). Since I’m pretty much always game for something new and was feeling incredibly tired of all the shows I’d already been watching, I said sure and we launched right into it without further ado. We started slowly, a few episodes at a time as we navigated our busy schedules, conflicting time zones, and our desire to play lot of Final Fantasy 14, but I learned a lot about the history of the comics, of the original show (somehow I knew that Laura Bailey had starred in the English Voice Cast of the original anime, but not that there was a family of people who transformed into animals when hugged by a member of a different sex with a couple exceptions so far), and the recent remake as we talked about it before and after our little watch sessions. It was a very rewarding experience.

I’ve only watched the first season so far (my two friends are on a weeks-long vacation to Japan for their honeymoon, so we had to not start the second season after finishing the first), but so far I love the way the show handles depictions of family trauma. I originally wrote that I “enjoyed” it, but that’s false. There’s nothing fun about it, just cathartic. It is frustrating, sometimes, how neatly everything wraps up, but that’s kind of the point of a show like this and so far the only stuff that has neatly wrapped up has been small stuff that could have conceivably done so. There’s a lot more going on that hasn’t been fully addressed yet or hasn’t been “solved,” so I remain hopeful that this depiction of trauma will continue to be true to the actual experience of it: namely that it never really goes away, you just get good at dealing with the emotions it stirs up in a healthy, constructive manner while also doing away with all the unhealthy behaviors surviving said trauma fostered in you. I mean, I absolutely wasn’t expecting the best depiction I’ve seen of trauma and the difficulty of healing to arrive under the guise of a romance anime, but here we are and here I am.

The only frustrating, unpleasant part of the show has been my own emotional response to it. I obviously didn’t have a childhood like the ones shown in Fruits Basket, but mostly just because I wouldn’t transform into some other creature. Everything else holds pretty true for my siblings and I, with some rearrangement of the specifics, except for the fact that the characters in this show all had adults at least trying to help. For my younger siblings and I, it was just me. Which is a very difficult emotional reality I’m still (clearly) unpacking, so a bit of jealousy isn’t entirely unexpected. I’m not letting it render the show unpleasant to watch or anything, but it’s difficult not to think about how much better my own life would have been if I hadn’t been the only person I could rely on to do something about the abuse, neglect, and mistreatment present in my home growing up. It’s not the show’s fault this is true, but it’s difficult to avoid the emotional association between my resentment that no adults in my life could ever be counted on to help me and the show I’m watching where the adults are at least trying, if not always very successfully. Especially with the complicating factor that my parents aren’t even trying to be better and I’m still unsure about giving any of my other relatives the opportunity to try being better. It hits me close to home in a rather tender spot. Still, it’s more cathartic and pleasant than it is painful, so I’m going to keep watching it. Just maybe not in big chunks. Small chunks, once my friends return, once or twice a week, and plenty of therapy to go along with it.