(Part of a 12-day series fondly remembering some of the best moments in anime this year. Participants include: lolikitsune, lelangir, FuyuMaiden, Zeroblade, Nazarielle, ghostlightning, TheBigN, ETERNAL, Mike, A Day Without Me, digitalboy, Josh, otou-san, Culchann and Pontifus, IcyStorm, Cokematic,
koneko-chan, and miz, and you’re welcome to join too!)

You may think Toradora is like every other shonen comedy-romance-slice-of-life-slash-some-other-genres featuring a flat-chested tsundere voiced by Rie Kugimiya … but you’d be wrong.

Toradora is, in fact, much better than most shonen comedies-romances-slices-of-lives-slash-some-other-genres featuring flat-chested tsunderes voiced by Rie Kugimiya, or for that matter, most shonen romances in general.

This is, in fact, not actually due to any chance in the ‘flat-chested tsundere voiced by Rie Kugimiya’ factor, although subjectively speaking I would prefer Taiga over Louise, Shana, and maybe Yuuhi.

But rather, I admire Toradora for its great aspirations.

You see, most people probably write Toradora off as yet another shonen-comedy-like substance. As you recall, this genre plays host to such renowned fan favorites as To-Love-Ru, Rosario to Vampire, Kanokon, and so forth.

In short, on a good day, decent fluff watches, on a bad day, decent fap watches. Not horrible but certainly not the kind of thing that leaves you hanging from day to day.

Toradora knows this, and it tries to shake its genres’ bounds. It knows that most shonen comedy-like anime are slow, rather flat, and predictable.

It aims to change that.

You wouldn’t see it from the first episode. Perhaps a wide people were turned off by the pilot, fairly generic material, laced with more tsundere-trumps-servant boy-whipping than there was really a need for.

Luckily, I give pretty much everything at least 2 episodes. (and luckily, lolikitsune yelled at me to watch the second episode)

Luckily, Toradora loaded a golden bullet in its second chamber.

12 Moments of Anime 2008
#07: Toradora! – 2

What really strikes me the most about Toradora is the characters. Aside from having quite strong bases – the hyperbolically hyper Minorin, bright yet airheaded Kitamura, infurating yet infatuating Ami, etc etc – they are all exceptionally developed.

It’s not just that Minori’s an awesomely hyper enthusiastic energy machine; she’s an awesomely hyper enthusiastic energy machine with feelings. Fears. Hopes. Funny beliefs in ghosts.

Same with Ami. Ami’s a grade-A annoyance, yes, sometimes even bordering on the edge of trollworthy when she toys with Ryuuji. But you can never quite peek – or can you? – behind that mask of hers that she so often puts on, even after she loses her false ’spacey girl’ personality.

Is she just messing with Ryuuji for kicks? Is she really trying to get him to like her – or for that matter, has she fallen for him? Is she just doing this to annoy mortal rival Taiga? Maybe Kitamura features into this somehow? It’s truly a mystery.

And Kitamura’s just a wild card. He’s so rarely serious, that you can’t tell his true feelings. He liked Taiga – obsessively almost – but then … got over it? Ami’s his childhood friend. Minori’s equally airheaded. Does he have any feelings at all, or just a sharp wit?

Sadly such issues are not quite touched upon by the second episode – to do so would either require much story compression, a lot of viewer confusion, or the blessings of the anime-scripting gods. So at this point, Minori and Kitamura are just wildly entertaining as opposed to intriguing and entertaining.

This leaves it to Ryuuji and Taiga to carry the show, or at least, to kick it into gear (since all this awesome characterization stuff does happen by episode 10) … and to my surprise, Poor Man’s Seiji Sawamura and KugimiyaDere Mach 394 shed their stereotypes, kicked ass (or pole) and took names.

What probably knocked my socks off the most is that so much stuff happened in episode two, not just to develop Taiga and Ryuuji to an extent, but also to move the plot forward, two things mostly unheard of in this genre.

I’m not expecting the plot to be riding the H2O bullet train all the way to Mindscrew Station or anything, but Toradora’s decided ability to Put Gears in Motion is very excellently demonstrated by this episode. It’s definitely a refreshing change from previous SCRSOLSSOGFAFCTVBRK (see top of post for reference), in that things happen nearly every episode, keeping relationships and personalities evolving.

And Toradora hasn’t resorted to retconning any confessions yet. Hell, you know what really kicks ass about Toradora?

They have confessions. IN EPISODE TWO.

That, undoubtedly is one of my greatest weak points. For as much as I love the romance in a show, whether it be the all-out war of a harem, the slow burn of a slice-of-life, or the aching pangs (alternatively, the mad blushing and sparkling) or a shoujo, I love it even more when Things Actually Happen, and the confession is the epitome of that. The emotional climax of all those feelings.

And quite often, it’s the point of no return, where character relationships and dynamics get tested, and this makes it exceedingly interesting (when we don’t get retcon / fake / blocked confessions, anyway).

Perhaps I just value them because they are that special, given how rarely they happen, both in anime and real life; doubly so in anime, because they always tend to be annoyingly placed.

Think of the last anime you watched which involved a confession.
Think of where that confession was placed, relative to that anime.
Did you think of ‘near, if not at, the very end of that anime’?

Yes you did. Stop lying. Or Chun-Ami will beat you up.

Really, more and more often in anime like these, there is a lot of focus on the ‘before’ than the ‘after’ in romance. Probably at least 75% of visual-novel conversions, the confession comes at the end, as almost an afterthought.

Or in a genre like this. A confession? What’s that? Why have that, when we could build up hopes and crash them down over and over, and have the actual confession be way anticlimatic?

(Or maybe we’ll just ignore the confession as a whole, cut the manga short, and start a completely random spinoff with ‘Z’ appended to the end of the title. Well, I’m not as bitter as other fans – I actually kind of like SRZ)

For me, the mark that an anime has ambition, is some attempt to address this issue. To go beyond ‘oh no I have a crush on somebody must blush for 30 episodes before trying anything’.

So the fact that we don’t just get very solid Taiga character development (the pole scene) in this episode, but actually a full attack on Kitamura’s heart with a blunt confession, is quite remarkable.

Granted … not much came of it. In the end, Kitamura is as unshakable as a mountain when it comes to emotional things, and he quite soundly trumped Taiga by informing her of what might be (ok, fine, IS) her budding feelings towards Ryuuji. But Taiga stomps onward in her Kitamura Quest, rather unfazed (although she continues to be unseasonably deredere towards Ryuuji).

It may not seem like a lot, but the point is revisited in later episodes, when Ryuuji and Kitamura have a little guy talk about Taiga. And most importantly to me, you really get the feeling Toradora isn’t going to hold back.

It isn’t confined by normal shonen romance standards. It’s willing to push itself beyond, to push its characters and how they interact with each other beyond. Maybe this moment isn’t the best example of it in Toradora, but it was definitely my tipping point towards proving that this series is truly awesome and … uh … Toradorable.

Yeah. I was waiting the whole post to make that pun.

-CCY who is not a Minorinist, damn it, please, no, she’s got no chance, it’s too cruel …