There's treasure everywhere

yifu asked me to talk about Honda Tohru, who's the main character/one of the three main characters in Fruits Basket. Yay, I get to use one of my favorite icons in context!

[Note that a) I can't speak to the Japanese fandom in the slightest, and b) I haven't been in touch with the North American fandom in any real sense in a few years now.]

Tohru gets a lot of flack in the western fandom sometimes. She's painfully polite, she's incredibly compassionate and understanding, and she always puts everyone else first. When we first meet her, she's living all alone in a tent for a few months while her grandfather (also her guardian, as Tohru is an orphan) is having his house renovated. Why is she alone? Because the relatives her grandfather is staying with have a pretty full house, while one of her best friends lives in a household of five people and the other lives in a tiny apartment with her dad. Tohru is unable to bring herself to impose on any of them, to the point of hiding where she is staying from everyone to keep them from worrying.

Some fans of the series dismiss Tohru as boring or a doormat because this is how she thinks. Some of her defenders point out that some of the things the detractors are complaining about are idealized Japanese feminine traits, perhaps exaggerated a bit. And to the best of my understanding, that's accurate. But the extreme to which Tohru takes it is...well. "Not healthy" doesn't really begin to cover it.

Tohru is a genuinely sweet, kind, gracious person. She has a tremendous capacity for love, which gets pushed hard over the course of the series, because Fruits Basket is about how she gets enmeshed in the lives of a huge, wealthy family with generations' worth of institutionalized emotional abuse and a fair bit of corresponding physical abuse, and about enough of them coming to love and/or trust her that they start finding the will to let go of that and begin actively striving to become the people they want to be.

Those things are true. Tohru is also relentlessly cheerful and irrepressible, except that she's easily overwhelmed with guilt over even small things, and except that her desire to not inconvenience anyone reaches neurotic levels. Some readers don't like her because she's too perfect, too happy, too bland and carefully inoffensive, and because no one is really like that, right?

Well, sure. Except that Tohru has a lot of those traits because she's a mess. Because she's petrified of being abandoned. Because she knows the trauma of complete rejection, and that's a lot of where her ability to reach out comes from. She knows, and even though she's trying desperately to look self-sufficient, her sincere, innate kindness makes her incapable of leaving anyone else to suffer alone.

I'm trying hard to avoid spoilers here, which is why I'm mostly skipping over the parts of Tohru's childhood that shaped her into who she is. Let's just say that it's largely due to her parents, and also that her parents were awesome, and there's no contradiction there.

Also without going into detail, here's one of the countless things I love about Fruits Basket. It begins with Tohru meeting various members of the Sohma family and becoming a support and a friend to most of the Sohmas she meets. (To anyone who's only seen the anime version, that's as far as it gets.) But it doesn't stop there, because the story is about healing and letting go and learning to both grapple with your own hurt and look outside of it. And one by one, quite a few of the characters Tohru reaches out to get to the point where they have the emotional resources to start really seeing her, to start figuring out how and why she's hurting so badly, and to start trying to return the selfless friendship she's given them. It's a slow, organic process, and it's beautifully done.

(Interestingly, two of the Sohmas who respond to Tohru antagonistically [for very different reasons] are also two of the first to take a clear look at her and say, "Holy crap, this girl is a wreck." But if I get into that, this post is going to be huge, and I'm trying hard to keep it a reasonable length, so I'll stop here.)

So, Tohru! She's not my favorite character in the series, but I adore her. ^_^ And I think she more than earns that.

[I'm picking away at these topics slowly, but am still willing to take more here (or here on LJ).]