I think that there’s really three stages of finishing an anime. The first stage is when the credits of the last episode roll and you’re left staring at your computer screen (hopefully in satisfaction) with the final scene seared into your mind. The second stage is shortly afterward, where your mind can’t help but replay what it can – the big moments, the emotional curveballs, the “what if” statements. And the final stage is a while afterward, after you’ve had time to reflect, think about the series retrospectively, maybe talk to some friends about it and really come up with your opinion about the show.
For me, most review writing occurs in either the second or the third stage. I rarely pick up the pen (er, keyboard) seconds after the final scene fades. However, I have noticed a strange correlation between my disposition toward the show and within what category the review falls. For shows that I dislike, I’ll frequently postpone the review writing until stage three, when I’ve had more time to think about what exactly transpired. For shows I like, or those that intrigued me and leave some open questions, I’ll turn sooner to my review desk so I can use the act of writing to flush out those issues in my own mind. The only exception is the really good shows that I can’t feel that I can review properly and thus will sit untouched to this day. However, this isn’t always consistent – some shows I don’t favor will get an earlier review as a sort of emotional catharsis, and some really good shows will be put off till later so I can properly vocalize exactly why I found them well-done.
For me, Toradora falls within the second category. I’m returning soon after the final episode with a mixed bag of emotions running through my mind. Unfortunately, not all of those emotions are positive, and are pointedly negative, in a frustrating opposition to my favorable disposition towards the first three-quarters of this anime’s runtime. I’m generally one to say that I’ll return to amend reviews, and I’ll repeat that refrain here. However, for now, I’ll say that Toradora provided one of the most infuriating falls from grace that I’ve experienced so far.
What do I mean by this? I’ll illustrate using some examples. Some shows I know I’m going to dislike right from the beginning. Rideback is a pretty typical instance of this. Right from the first few episodes I was disappointed by the lackluster plot, side-character development, and pacing, and this initial disposition remained the same throughout the entire show. On the other hand, Hyouka amazed me with the excellent music, characterization, and compelling story-telling from the early episodes to the end. I can sum this up pretty well using MAL ratings – I knew Rideback was going to be sub-average right from the get-go and that Hyouka would be very good from the opening episode alone. My opinions about the shows, although greatly expanded with new knowledge about plot, characters, and setting, ultimately did not alter in their final judgement. Toradora, on the other hand, started in the Classic Lit clubroom and ended on a mecha motorcycle – my opinion about the show fell dramatically as the series drew to a close.
Enough waffling around. As usual, I’ll look to my typical categories of music, art, and characters. Starting with the former, I don’t see how anyone can’t be anything but impressed. Both openings, beyond being very nostalgic for me (listening to anything years before even knowing what it’s from will do that to you) are really good songs in their own right, and best of all are performed by Horie Yui, whom I’ve already praised in reviews for other shows. They’re very lighthearted, energetic, and very well summarize the majority of the show’s romantic-comedy nature. The only time I skipped the OPs were when I was hanging too far over the cliff – and that’s generally a good sign that they’re doing it for me. Both endings, although particularly the first one, are also really good. I can’t quite say the same for the insert song, but otherwise, the show’s soundtrack was solid, albeit not particularly outstanding. However, in this case I don’t think it needed to be – incredibly standout soundtracks are more fitting for shows with action and reflective scenes, and as much of Toradora is dialogue-based I think a really notable soundtrack may have been intrusive. Overall, I have almost nothing but good things to say about the show’s music, and I really think it did nothing but contribute to the show.
The art, as it tends to be, was more of a mixed bag. Some people really love it, and there’s definetely some scenes where I can see why. It’s hard for me to describe, but I think the best term I can use is “pastel.” This isn’t a Takemoto show where vibrancy is everywhere and tells a story of its own. The colors are a little more muted and a little more subtle, details are a little less explicit and the animation is slightly less exhaustive. It’s not bad, but it’s generally not exactly eye-candy in the way that some other shows are. Again, it’s hard to describe, but it’s also hard for me to explain, because there’s no particularly spot in the show that I can cite exemplifying a unique shortcoming. I think the purpose of this art is to step back a bit and let the characters do the talking, and if that’s true, I feel it achieves this purpose adequately. Not blown away, but can’t complain either.
And here we go, back to my favorite part – the characters. I’ll start by saying that this show has a fairly average-sized cast. There’s five main characters, with about the same number of supporting characters, and a few others that appear shortly to disappear afterward. I will say this right off the bat – I am impressed, very impressed even, with the amount of work that the writers put into developing a truly unique dynamic between each combination of the main five. I feel like too many shows, particularly those in the slice-of-life and romcom genres, generalize interactions between the main cast, where one character will treat most of the others in exactly the same way, perhaps treating only one differently. Perhaps this would be most easily illustrated using an example. A male lead responds to every comment made to him, regardless of from who, with a sarcastic response. In doing so, we can easily characterize this lead as being “sarcastic,” and we pay special attention when he responds to someone without using sarcasm. While this is a helpful category, I really find it more interesting where the unique personality of each character influences the way they interact with each other, rather than each interaction being formulaic. Toradora absolutely does this, and I’d say does it quite well, thanks to its solid characterization and time spent building each of the leads.
OK, time for some specifics. I normally have a hard time deciding who to talk about first, so I’m just going to go off the deep end and start with Taiga. I’ll be honest – when I started the show I wasn’t the biggest fan. I don’t know if “abrasive” is the right word to describe her personality, as she can be positively endearing to her actual friends, but I think a good descriptor would be pretty close. She’s basically described as scary, and short of using the titular analogy here, a pretty typical tsundere. However, as the show progressed, I really began to appreciate her character more and more. She’s quite negative toward Ryuuji, particularly as the show starts, frequently calling him names and accusing him of things he doesn’t deserve. This, however, is tempered throughout the show as their relationship grows and I began to realize that her behavior actually stems from a rather unique upbringing, beyond her stereotypical tsundere qualities. I will say that I did like her determination and will to keep fighting, although this proved increasingly confounding as the show drew to a close – more on that later.
With her out of the way, let’s turn to her male counterpart. Years ago, when I saw the OP animation for the first time, my primary question was “who is the dude with the evil-looking eyes and why is he scrubbing a window-frame with such intensity?” I too, even as a kid, was unknowingly sucked into the common misconception of his delinquency. So it was much to my delight when I learned that he was such a homely, kind person who really seemed to value other people’s well-being above his own, and generally treated everyone with genuine respect. I’ve ranted on this before, but I feel that too many male MCs are flat and lifeless, with maybe one defining character quality that isn’t particularly instructive or redemptive. I’m not saying that Ryuuji is a model character, or that his penchant to cook and clean makes him a saint, but he’s certainly pleasant to watch and is a person I’d love to be around in real life. Building off of this, although the show primarily focuses on his interactions with Taiga, I was also really struck with how he communicates and respects the other three leads. However, his characterization isn’t without its flaws, which again, I’ll get to later.
I’ll turn now to the other male MC, Yuusaku. He’s a bit more of a mixed bag and a confusing one at that. I also think his characterization is one of the weaker ones, as he begins as a sort of generic respectable student council member who happens to be Ryuuji’s best friend, with little other defining features of his own besides being the love interest of the Tiger herself. However, I do feel that he has his defining moments, particularly with the introduction of Ami and during his own sub-arc. He just comes across as being kind of a convenient character, serving multiple roles that could have been picked up by side or extra characters, which confuses his characterization in my mind. Out of the four I can definetely say that he changes the most in the shortest amount of time, at the expense of deeper character development throughout the entire course of the show – kind of too bad.
Since she was referenced in the above paragraph, I’ll swap over to Ami now. She, of everyone, positively infuriated me throughout the show, albeit for different reasons. At first, this was pretty obvious – her two-faced character and incredibly irritating façade frustrated me to no end, although I eagerly looked forward to how this would influence the plot of the show and her own characterization as a whole. As the series bore on, however, I started to become frustrated for a new reason, specifically being that her defining character trait – the fascia itself – seemed to have very little bearing on the plot, and she showed very limited signs of getting past it, although being the very thing that Yuusaku wished for right from the start. Moreover, Ami became infuriating due to just how many times her feigned niceties became downright small cruelties – my worst memory is her pressing a button on the vending machine right as Ryuuji is about to make a different selection. It exposed nothing more about her background and upbringing other than sweeping away any growing respect I had for her, and that, too, is a shame. Again, more on that later.
What’s left is Minori, who is definetely the best-voiced character and by far the most confusing. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, as she’s certainly portrayed as eccentric, and that eccentricity is a defining part of both her own character and her interaction with others. I also like how that character trait adds to the comedic elements of the rom-com, although I found it becoming strangely less funny and more positively confounding as the show progressed. I want to think this is just her growing involvement in the drama becoming explicit in her mannerisms, but I have a suspicion that the writers simply didn’t know how she should react to more intense situations. I don’t dislike her character, as I do appreciate her desire to work hard and always chase her goals, but I do dislike how little about her is discovered throughout the entire show, and even then in the final few episodes. I feel like her interactions with the males in general and Ryuuji specifically were also among the weakest of the five leads.
Okay, the music has been heard, the art scrutinized, the characters thought-through, what we are left with is the plot. I will say this – I was, in more ways than one – really amazed and impressed with the unique angle that the love triangle/rhombus/polygon took right from the get-go. Most of the time, these romantic comedies have an extremely obvious couple right from the start, and the entire series focuses around their growing relationship culminating in a confession at the end. Toradora has the extremely obvious couple, but the confessions occur much earlier – and not even to each other! Specifically, I thought that the relationship between Taiga and Yuusaku, with the former rejecting the latter, the latter finding a new love interest, and then the latter rejecting the former, formed a much more interesting story. I always dance carefully around using the word “realistic” in anime but somehow the surreptitious route of Taiga’s interest in Yuusaku always appealed to me, and honestly started the show on a very high note. Ryuuji and Minori was a bit weaker, as it’s a pretty common anime trope for someone to become friends with their crush’s bestie, but I did like how it pitted the kindhearted guy with the eccentric girl. Of course, Ryuuji and Taiga teaming up to pair each other with their respective best friends was itself a really entertaining premise, and I found myself becoming surprisingly invested in both characters’ relationships.
Then Ami happened. Beyond my gripes with her character that I bemoaned above, I actually found myself not minding her introduction so much, despite her apparent antagonism towards almost everything that Taiga attempted to accomplish. Specifically, I thought that her quick resolution of the stalker episode would cause a cracking in her untenable façade, but that didn’t prove as effective as I imagined. Instead, I quickly ascribed her odd interest in Ryuuji, and her frustratingly-possessive behavior towards his person (which honestly bordered on creepy), to completely dash her remaining front of niceness when she realized that he saw right through her. I just couldn’t understand how she remained antagonistic to absolutely everyone – Yuusaku, Ryuuji, Taiga and Minori alike – even as it became increasingly obvious that she wasn’t going to gain his interest.
I do think that Yuusaku’s arc remains the strongest in the show, with his interest in the school’s president coming to light and really helping to clarify his rejection of Taiga at the show’s very beginning. It’s in this arc that I feel that all of the characters are at their strongest, with both Ryuuji and Taiga taking different actions (and working together!) to stand up for their friend and do what they think is for the best. I also found that Yuusaku’s experience of extremely high expectations, physical abuse from his family, and mental turmoil regarding commitment to someone that ultimately left him, was highly compelling to me. And that’s even without considering this revelation for the romantic plot, which ultimately marked Taiga’s regained ability to interact with him without being nervous.
While many people regard the final five or six episodes as the highest point of the show, it’s not until here that my disposition toward the series began to shift. I felt that the resolution of the Christmas arc – ending the episode before with Ryuuji feeling effectively rejected by his love interest, would form the apex of the action. Minori’s increasing eccentricity, particularly surrounding her desire to avoid the Christmas party despite her friends’ wishes, made me believe that we would finally get her full story after the fact. I was actually highly disappointed when the twist – Taiga effectively avoiding Ryuuji to increase the two’s interactions – led to nothing significant on Minori’s character despite some cryptic statements on UFOs and ghosts. The ski trip arc was perhaps the most infuriating for me, with surprisingly little true character development besides some bizarre fighting among side-characters, a fruitless Minori-Ryuuji conversation, and a lot of physical violence erupting with the now purely-antagonistic Ami. Taiga’s unconscious confession, although what I now know to be the true climax of the show, left me intrigued but confused, feeling that Minori’s arc had been slammed aside in favor of the two lovebirds.
And after that, everything unravels. In the final four episodes, an odd sub-arc regarding Ryuuji and Taiga’s college and future plans suddenly appears from nowhere, distracting from the parallel plot. Both characters’ nuclear families, and drama surrounding their apparent dysfunctionalities, pop to the forefront, literally in the middle of the true confession episode. This episode itself combines the last meaningful words we hear from all three of Yuusaku, Ami and Minori, who seem to suddenly and instantly resolve their interpersonal problems by gifting the now-eloping-and-escaping couple their valuables. We get a bizarre and extremely rushed resolution to the question of Ryuuji’s biological father and his mother’s relationship with her own parents, immediately resolving a problem that was only hinted at in earlier episodes. The anime ends with Taiga, despite her apparent commitment to Ryuuji, running away a second time to resolve some perceived issues in her own nuclear family, except this resolution seems to take at least an entire year.
This ending frustrates me both with topics involved and how earlier plot points are tossed aside, seemingly at random. Issues within the nuclear family are truly meaningful and should be given proper time to resolve. In Taiga’s case, the arc with her father coming to resolution much earlier makes me feel that the anime has already dealt with the topic, just to uncover it again during critical moments right at the end. In Ryuuji’s case, the question of his own father, his relationship with his grandparents, and his own mother comes across once or twice in earlier episodes, but is literally both brought to the absolutely forefront and totally resolved within about one, right at the very end. The odd sub-arc about Ryuuji’s college plans, his mother’s commitment to fund them, and his future in general is introduced but also left frustratingly unresolved. Taiga’s future is also left completely up in the air, with her literally disappearing again at the end of the show leaving only cryptic text messages, a full-year time skip, and a weird anticlimactic reunion between the two mains. Meanwhile, other meaningful plot topics are abandoned. Yuusau goes to study in the United States – did he resolve his relationship with the president or is that irrelevant now? Minori’s true feelings, yelled out across the school hallways a few episodes prior, are pretty much lost to the wind. Ami, as far as I can tell, remains just as meanspirited beneath her cheery exterior as ever.
Looping back around to my earlier assertion about my disposition toward this anime changing as it got closer to the end, I can safely say that I was considering giving this show an 8 about ¾ of the way through, only to have the score drop all the way to a 6 by the time it ended. I just can’t accept an ending that throws aside so many nuanced character relationships for the sake of bringing up side-topics that were apparently resolved earlier in the anime or otherwise merely hinted at. Taiga and Ryuuji’s relationships with their immediately families are super important in their own rights, but should have been given proper time to work themselves out, rather than being slammed in together at the end, basically forcing out any resolution for the remaining three leads. In my mind, cut out the horror-cave episodes to put Taiga’s family resolution within the arc concerning her father, and leave Ryuuji ample time to work out his own pain points with his mother and relatives.
Wow, somehow this review, along with ballooning to over 3500 words, has become more of a complaint and criticism about how it should have ended, typically something that I dislike and try to avoid. Maybe it’s this close proximity to having just finished the show itself, but somehow, I feel the need to put this series down for a while. Disappointment in a show isn’t something I’m unfamiliar with, but generally this disappointment is something I can expect from the early episodes. Toradora is something not that I wanted to love, but something that I actually loved, throughout so much of it, just to have my expectations dashed in what I can only describe as an unsatisfactory end. As always, your mileage may vary, but I have warned you in the only way I know how.
