Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Heh. Who's going to be sad? Everyone is able to live thanks to me. They all hope I will be gone quickly. I was born in order to die. That's how it was decided.”
Akito Sohma Quotes
2 quotes from Fruits Basket, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“It would be nice to live in a kind world. Without fear, without any troubles, without hurting anybody, without ever being hurt. Only doing the right thing. I wish I could reach this world by the shortest path possible.”
The person saying this locked Yuki in a room as a child, half-blinded Hatori, and pushed Rin from a window, and the series has just finished explaining why: a girl raised as a boy so that the zodiac would have a god, taught by a dying father that the bond was the only love she would ever be allowed, and then abandoned by that bond one broken curse at a time. Wanting a kind world is a strange wish from its chief source of unkindness, and the writing knows the reader will bristle. The phrase to hold on to is the shortest path. Akito has always wanted the result without the work, which is what a child does, and the arc's argument is that the head of the family has been a frightened child in a robe for the whole story. Whether that excuses anything is the argument the fandom has been having since the reveal.
Read Akito Sohma's story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
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Akito was raised on a story: the god of the zodiac is born to hold the bond together and dies young for it, and the whole family owes their lives to that sacrifice. Tohru has just said it must have been painful to be told from birth that you would die, and this is the reply, with a laugh in front of it. The laugh is the tell. Akito is not describing a fate but a bargain, in which cruelty is the interest owed on a life the family is supposedly grateful for, and the middle sentence, about what the family privately wishes for, is the first time the head of the Sohmas admits knowing that the gratitude is fake. The 2001 anime ended on this scene and treated it as a truce. The manga treats it as the opening of a wound it takes another dozen volumes to close, because Tohru's next question is who decided.