Toradora! (the title is excited) is the
story of two high school students, Taiga Aisaka and Ryuuji Takasu,
who encounter each other and learn that they each have an unrequited
(for the time being at least) crush: Taiga on Ryuuji’s best friend
Yuusaky Kitamura and Ryuuji on Taiga’s best friend Minori (“Minorin”)
Kushieda. The two agree to attempt to play mutual matchmaker, but
end up getting closer with and falling for each other in the process.
That really doesn’t sound like it would
fill 25 episodes, does it? Mercifully, though, the slow-burn romance
actually manages to work, and stay engaging for the show’s run. How
does Toradora! do it?
I personally feel that the biggest
element to Toradora!’s success is its treatment of the secondary
characters. Kitamura, Minorin, and latecomer third wheel Ami
Kawashima are the sorts of characters that would usually be flat, and
a romantic comedy could even afford to leave flat. It would be safe
to have the first two simply be idealized objects of affection for
the leads to start out with. Before coming to understand that
something real can be worth more than an idle daydream. It could
also be tempting to make them… less than great people, so that the
turnaround from matchmaking to matchmakers falling in love is easy;
have the initial pair ruled by flaws and simple to discard once you
know them better.
Instead, Toroadora! chooses to display
these characters as… people. Mostly good people, but people. You
get to know Kitamura and especially Minorin almost as much as Taiga
and Ryuuji. We see why Taiga and Ryuuji might like Kitamura and
Minorin, and even though the two lead characters ultimately turn each
others’ way, it’s nice to be able to follow along with what they feel
and think before that time. Minorin is kind, devoted, energetic, and
more than a little bit quirky. Kitamura is refined, and also low-key
passionate, caring a lot about the things and people he cares about,
running cooler as opposed to how Minorin runs hot.
In the mean time, the development of
Taiga and Ryuuji’s relationship is interestingly imperfect. They
become close long before they become romantic, bonding not just over
their shared project (mostly the direction of trying to get Taiga
able to hook up with Kitamura) but over feelings that are natural and
genuine and we ultimately (after we’ve been seeing them for a while)
come to understand stem from who they are as people and their life
experiences up to this point. Ryuuji, for instance, is extremely
nurturing and domestic: he has a resting death glare that strikes
terror into most who know of him, and he ends up seeing in Taiga
(though this is never spelled out) someone in need of some care and
nurturing, and goes the extra mile for her because that’s the kind of
person he is. For her part, Taiga seems to have some deep-seated
issues about reliability and abandonment (perhaps related to her
father, who shows up in the show only to not show up when he
promises), and ends up clinging to Ryuuji even during the early phase
where she declares him her dog rather than anything like a friend.
Ami Kawashima is another part of the
recipe. I called her a third wheel earlier, and in terms of the
romance, that’s being generous. She’s a friend of Kitamura, an Idol
on sabbatical from her business for reasons of stalker, but she never
expresses any interest in Kitamura. She might develop some interest
in Ryuuji, but if she does she does so from a position where she
knows she can’t ‘win’. She has her own arc, dealing with the fact
that she feels the need to present a double face: a sweet and vapid
idol persona, and a cruel and intelligent persona that’s… closer to
the real her, but also born from overreaction to having to play idol
day in and day out. As the show develops and she comes into her own
with a group of friends (well, kinda) she can be her actual self
with, Ami acts oddly like a Greek chorus. When it comes to the
development of Taiga and Ryuuji’s relationship, Ami says what the
audience, or at least the more cynical subset of the audience, might
be thinking. She notes how Ryuuji is “playing house” with Taiga,
and that both of them will have to grow up if anything is going to
change from the awkward phase where they’re still trying to matchmake
each other on paper but have started to move past that at heart.
It’s odd, but I actually very much like her scenes, and find her to
be one of the stronger and more unique parts of the show for how she
throws focus onto the real and legitimate problems.
Of course, problems or not, the main charm point of the show is seeing the relationship between the leads grow and develop. Toradora! is a romantic comedy, and like the other romantic comedies I’ve reviewed lately such as Quintessential Quintuplets and Kaguya-sama: Love is War there’s not enough focus on the ‘story’ to really justify going through it episode by episode or movement by movement and doing a summary. It’s essentially slice of life.
What I would like to talk about is the
ending, and how it handles moving these characters that have spent
the majority of the show locked into at least the illusion of the
status quo to a satisfying conclusion. They give it a long time –
eight episodes from the arc where Taiga finally comes to understand
her own feelings until the end, which is an eternity in anime time.
Despite Toradora being a romantic comedy at heart, there are some
dynamite dramatic scenes through the arc, in a case of
miscommunication and mistaken intentions that’s been a staple of the
romantic comedy since Shakespeare at least, and probably since there
were words.
These moments are difficult ones to get
right, at least in part because when poorly handled they can reek of
artificiality. And while I won’t say that that every moment is
entirely natural (there’s at least a little contrived coincidence in
Minorin just happening to be in earshot of a broken, sobbing Taiga
calling for Ryuuji on Christmas Eve or with a semiconscious Taiga
mistaking Ryuuji for Kitamura and confessing where her true feelings
lie), the places where there’s more dramatic convenience also have
strong showings from all the characters, and deliver some of the
show’s more effective scenes in exchange for that contrivance.
At the end of all that though, the
confrontation and confession between the two is a big moment. It
brings things, that had been hurting for a while, back around to the
funny (even with a bit of physical comedy as Taiga tackles Ryuuji
into a stream with her response), and pays off the fact that there is
so much time spent building up to it – it couldn’t just be a low
key moment. However, confession is not where the show stops, as it
has one more curveball to throw at us. Facing the possibility of
Taiga being taken away by her mother, and Ryuuji’s mother running
away, Ryuuji and Taiga go so far as to elope.
You’d think this would be call for a
round of zany hijinx, which the show has had no shortage of up to
this point, but instead it’s handled as a slice of bittersweet
reality.
They “elope” to the home of
Ryuuji’s grandparents, who he had not before met thanks to her mother
being estranged from them, with a means of introduction that his
mother left when she vanished. There, they get some time to think
and work out their issues in a calm and surprisingly welcoming
setting, while also pulling Ryuuji’s mother in so she can make up
with her parents the way that Taiga may have to make up with her
mother. At the end, Taiga has to transfer out, but she keeps her
connection with her friends (and especially Ryuuji) and the final
scene is a year later where the two of them meet again immediately
after Ryuuji’s graduation.
If Kaguya-sama leverages its overall
comedic composition to provide surprising drama, Toradora! leverages
its overall comedic composition to be, in the end, surprisingly
earnest. Even at their most earnest, the characters in Kaguya-sama
are at least a little larger than life. As much as I knew people like
that, they represent how you would know them from more of a distance.
Toradora!, on the other hand, presents its characters as very human.
As melodramatic as Taiga especially can be, everyone here feels like
an actual person and their struggles, as big as they can feel in the
moment, belong very much to the real world. Neither approach is the
one right (or wrong) approach, they’re just different strategies, and
which you would like best depends on what you value more in media.
For myself, I’d have a hard time
picking, but when it comes to rating the shows as a whole I’ll give
Toradora! an A-. Why A-? Because Toradora!, as well as it uses its
24 episode time, feels like it has fat. I was never bored watching,
and the duration working with the essentially slice-of-life episodes
is leveraged to build depth in the characters and a connection with
the audience, but the really great scenes are fairly far apart,
particularly in the first act. Toradora! does a lot right, and at
the time I thought it was pretty astounding that it got me to like a
romantic comedy, but in retrospect while it’s extremely good, it’s
not without flaws and its highest peaks don’t reach as high as some
others. All the same, I’d very much recommend it.