What has Fruits Basket (Tokyopop) got that Cheeky Angel (Viz) doesn’t? I found myself wondering that as I read the first volumes of each. Both are appealing sitcoms that mix shôjo and shônen elements, and each have attractive mainstream visuals. But Fruits Basket is a sales juggernaut, and Cheeky Angel… well… isn’t.
So I guess my real question is why aren’t you reading Cheeky Angel?
That isn’t to say that Fruits Basket is bad. Natsuka Takaya’s gentle fantasy has a lot going for it. Takaya has assembled a likeable cast, set them up with an interesting (if underdeveloped) premise, and strikes a nice enough balance between comedy and romance.
The first volume introduces readers to Tohru, a homeless orphan so cheerful and optimistic she makes Pollyanna look Goth. Inadvertently camping on their property, Tohru meets some members of the mysterious Sohma clan. The Sohmas are laboring under a curse linked to the Chinese Zodiac. When they’re hugged by the opposite sex, they turn into animals representing different zodiacal signs.
Yuki Sohma is one of Tohru’s classmates. He’s opted for public school as a means of escaping the isolation of the family curse, though he’s still standoffish. Cousin Kyo actually wants to break into the family circle, as he represents a zodiacal sign that didn’t make the cut (the Year of the Cat, tricked out of the running by the Rat that Yuki channels). Add water, and you’ve got a love triangle with Tohru drawn to both princely Yuki and hostile Kyo.
They’re pleasant enough company, but I’m more interested in the supporting cast. I’m especially taken with Sohma cousin Kagura, who’s hilariously bipolar. (Of course, her too-brief visit to the family does raise the unpleasant question of just how the Sohma family manages to keep from dying out. Since they can’t touch anyone of the opposite sex in an affectionate way – family aside – without turning into animals, how does the bloodline stay alive, short of bestiality or incest? Maybe that gets cleared up in later volumes.)
The first volume busies itself with setting up Tohru in the Sohma household. Since her living relatives are either hapless or awful, and the cursed clan is really taken with her and her mad housekeeping skills, it’s the best solution all around. And it puts her in the thick of the drama, putting the Sohma secret at risk and heightening family tensions even as Tohru gives them something in common. (I do have a production quibble: sometimes, the translators seem to have opted to run some of the word balloons and captions in an unflipped order, and sometimes they go in a western direction. It’s a little sloppy and it distracted me when it happened.)
It’s a promising foundation for Fruits Basket, if nothing particularly stunning.
Cheeky Angel has a bit more going for it, to my way of thinking. Its characters are more complex (but still likeable), and its premise is more personal and focused, which makes the comedy/romance balance more resonant.
As a child, protagonist Megumi meets a genie who grants him a wish. Megumi rashly asks to be made the “manliest man on Earth.” The genie gets the wish wrong, either accidentally or on purpose, and turns typical boy Megumi into a girl on track to become the “womanliest woman on Earth.” The genie has been fairly thorough, so that only Meg and close friend Miki remember that Meg was ever a boy.
By the time the girls reach high school, Meg is a stunner, the kind of girl who makes boys go stupid just by walking past them. And, Meg discovers to her horror, boys aren’t that far from stupid to begin with. While Meg isn’t exactly bemoaning her gender switch, she hasn’t exactly modulated her behavior to match her new body. She’s every bit the rambunctious ass-kicker she was as a boy, and the student body of her school provides a host of worthy victims.
Foremost among them is smug, aggressive Genzo, whose plan to establish himself as the school’s alpha male is thrown off track when he falls madly in love with Meg (right after she gives him a pounding for his rudeness and insensitivity). Meg is aghast, in part because she worries that Genzo is exactly the kind of boy she’d have been. Genzo forms an uneasy alliance with a number of Meg’s other admirers, all of whom are undeterred by the fact that the object of their desire is much more inclined to flip-kick them than blush and giggle at their advances.
Fortunately, Meg has Miki as a confidant and tour guide to the life of the high-school girl. Conventional Miki wishes Meg would try a bit harder to act like the girl she is. At the same time, she can’t resist teasing Meg when signs of femininity crop up. Miki is a great Ethel to Meg’s Lucy, smart, level-headed, supportive, and appropriately dubious of the whole scenario.
Creator Hiroyuki Nishimori makes the most of the conflicting emotions that arise from the premise. Issues of gender, identity, and adolescence make great fodder for smart, twisty, character-based comedy. It covers a lot of the same territory as the interesting (and seemingly vanished) Your and My Secret, but it does a better job of investing the material with thoughtful, smaller moments, softening some of the stereotypes in the process while playing up what those stereotypes might mean.
So why is amiable, average Fruits Basket topping the charts while ambitious, interesting Cheeky Angel rests somewhere in the middle? I wonder if part of it isn’t the level of anxiety inspired by the subject matter. It might be easier for some readers to identify with a boy who turns into an animal over one who turns into a girl. And since the boy doesn’t view turning into a girl as the worst thing that’s ever happened and immediately undertake a quest to reclaim his rightful plumbing, that effect may be compounded.
Of course, it may be as simple as packaging. Fruits Basket wears its cuddly fantasy elements on its sleeve, while Cheeky Angel takes a soapier approach to its trade dress.
But, really, you can’t read Fruits Basket all the time, can you? Surely there’s room for gender-bending battle-comedy-teen romance on your shelves, too?