I’m using the occasion of 12 Days to finally get to the 3rd edition of Revisiting Dropped Anime. This effort goes back to a show that aired back in a time when we wondered how much the world had changed because a new president had been elected, to now watching it in a world where we wondered if they world had really changed because a new president was elected. So let’s get to it, the entire 2nd half of Toradora!
How Was It Selected
It finished 2nd in the initial poll. I was more optimistic after the initial poll though.
Why Was It Dropped?
After 8 years, it was hard to tell why exactly I did drop it, so I had to go back and watch it all over again. The best I can tell is that I did not particularly appreciate how characters were willing to just not do anything at all unless they were forced to. No one is happy because they want everyone else to be happy. I guess I couldn’t put up with it anymore.
What Did I Think?
Unfortunately, the 2nd half of Toradora! is very much the same as the first half. Ryuuji, Taiga, Minori, Yuusaku all just only acting when it’s way too late just because far too tedious. Thankfully, Ami was there to basically lead people in the right direction since she basically ran out of fucks halfway through the series.
So let’s take a trip down the salt mines:
- Episode 14: Ami tells Ryuuji to man up, Yuusaku cries because his love is moving away
- Episode 15: Yuusaku dies his hair because he can’t emote, runs away like a coward and doesn’t really learn his lesson
- Episode 16: Yuusaku mans up because he is forced to by the girl who turned him down, the student council president and Taiga fight in a terrible waste of a sakuga scene.
- Episodes 17-19: The Christmas season is bad and should be completely eliminated from existence.
- Episodes 20-21: Let’s try to force that Ryuuji/Minori ship that is never going to sail and oh yeah, we find out the feelings of the main pair are mutual.
- Episodes 22-24: Ryuuji enters the same “I don’t know what I’m going to do with my life so fuck it” stage as every other character in this show before fucking off to the countryside to live with relatives and Taiga.
- Episode 25: Fuck this show.
Toradora! took me so many months to finish because I was just frustrated with it. I actually managed to get through 22 episodes pretty quickly because I had nothing else to do while I was on a business trip. Those last 3 episodes, oh boy, I was not wanting to do those unless I really had to. Episodes 23 and 24 were thanks to the ol’ Crunchyroll dice. While the last one came when I was very ill and figured that nothing could make me feel any worse. Actually it didn’t make me feel any worse. The left field decision made by one of the characters left me feeling nothing.
This isn’t to say Toradora! does nothing write. On a technical level, this is a very accomplished series. The character designs are distinctive while still being aesthetically positive. The voice actors and actresses put in really good performances that just can’t overcome the writing. I’d even go so far as to say that it was well directed too, and those key animators definitely earned their salaries over the course of the series. I’m not enough of an expert to point out which scenes were done by which person, I would just leave that to those who know better. Hell, even the first OP was worth watching each episode, I don’t know why they changed it.
All in all, I still have a hard time recommending this show to anyone. I think I was probably right to drop it to begin with and I wish I had sat and enjoyed Aria. Thanks people of Twitter for doing this to me instead.
