WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Fruits Basket: The Final Season Episode 6, "It Was So Foolish," now streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation.
Throughout Fruits Basket, Tohru Honda has always been there to help her friends face their traumas, but she's always been reticent to seek help and open up about her own issues. As the anime's final season approaches its midpoint, Tohru makes a major breakthrough, revealing to Kyo the ways her polite and helpful nature masks her deepest insecurities. "It Was So Foolish" is an episode of great healing for Tohru -- but that's all but overshadowed by the horror of its last two minutes.
It's the second anniversary of Kyoko Honda's death in Episode 6. Kyo, who knew Tohru's mom before he ever formally met Tohru, goes by himself to visit her grave and runs into Tohru's grandfather. Kyo points out that the grandpa repeatedly refers to his granddaughter by his daughter's name, to which the old man replies it's his way of keeping his daughter alive in a sense.
It turns out Tohru has her own ways of trying to hold onto the memories of dead family members. As her grandfather explains, Tohru's formal way of speaking started as a child to imitate her father Katsuya, who died of pneumonia when she was young, as a way to make it so he wouldn't truly be gone from Kyoko's life. Katsuya's problematic manga backstory has been cut from the anime, and while some might miss the extra character background, there's something that makes a lot of sense in experiencing the character through the same half-forgotten memories that Tohru still has of him.
When they're together later, Kyo asks Tohru about her dad himself, and that's when the waterworks truly start. Tohru has struggled with so much grief that she's tried to keep private for so long, but with Kyo, she can finally voice her sadness, her feelings of being a fraud, her desperation to hold onto her dead parents and her confusion over her growing feelings for Kyo himself. When Tohru and Kyo hug in this episode, not even the zodiac curse can make it any less beautiful and cathartic.
It's great that Kyo is able to help Tohru with so much, but Episode 6's cliffhanger ending serves as startling evidence that Kyo is still in need of plenty of help himself. When he sees his old baseball cap in Tohru's room, buried memories are unlocked in Kyo's head: traumatizing visions of Kyoko's bloody death by his feet, saying the words "I will never forgive you."
There was more space between the hug and the memory trigger in the manga. To fit the rest of the story into a shorter timeframe (13 episodes as opposed to the first two seasons' 25), Fruits Basket: The Final Season has been moving at a faster pace than the previous seasons, reordering some scenes and cutting others. Some changes play more naturally than others, but the combination of scenes at the end of Episode 6 is Fruits Basket at its most intense.
New episodes of Fruits Basket: The Final Season premiere Mondays, subbed on Crunchyroll and dubbed on Funimation.
