A Follow-Up On Some Thoughts On Family Therapy

Hi all! It's been awhile, hasn't it? I just wanted to clear up one point that had been mentioned to me by a few reviewers concerning Tohru's role with the Sohma family curse. When I argued that Tohru was the "catalyst" that breaks the Sohma family curse, I actually did not mean that she directly broke the curse; rather, I meant that that she was able to set off, or at least accelerate, a chain of events that would lead to the curse at last being broken. In other words, I found that her presence and involvement with the Sohmas helped Akito, Kyou, Yuki and the others grow and change for the better, which in turn allowed them to directly break the curse themselves. In my opinion, if the Sohma family did not need Tohru to positively influence them so they could at last break free of the zodiac curse, then her character would ultimately have no purpose in the story and the author probably wouldn't have included her, or at the very least, made her the protagonist. Thus, I believe Tohru's purpose in the story is to get the characters to grow and learn about acceptance (in fact, I would argue that the major theme of Fruits Basket is acceptance, as indicated even by the title), and by doing so, she is not breaking the curse for them, but instead, unwittingly teaching them about how they themselves can break free of the curse by learning to accept themselves and one another. Of course, this is just my interpretation of the manga series, but I tend to look at things from a more literary/symbolic perspective as opposed to a literal one. In any event, I'm sorry if I wasn't original clear in my analysis about my position on this. Again, thanks for reading and for reviewing!

(Also, I wanted to apologize to whoever sent me a private message some time ago; I did get it, but I have no idea how to respond to it, and now I can't even find it, so again, I'm so sorry, but thank you so much for taking the time to read my story and give me such a detailed response!).