Toradora went small where so much other anime might go big
The flourishes that make Toradora special are hard to pin down. Maybe over the last 15 or so years, the things that made the Japanese series special have just become ubiquitous and watered-down, like romcom homeopathy. It’s not outrageous, high-concept, risqué, knowing, wish-fulfilling, melodramatic, or anything else that might make it jump out if it were made today.
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The light novel turned manga and anime is about a mismatched couple that falls in love after trying to set each other up with their best friends. Taiga, the “palm-top tiger,” falls squarely in the tsunderearchetype. She beats people up with her wooden sword when crossed or made to feel vulnerable, hiding her bruised heart. In the anime, she’s even voiced by the “queen of tsundere” Rie Kugimiya. Taiga’s counterpart Ryuuji is perhaps less immediately identifiable as a trope, but he’s a soft neat-freak who’s thrown off his social axis by the beady eyes he got from his deadbeat yakuza father. Anyone who’s been misunderstood for some physical coincidence like that — which is to say anyone at all — can relate to that. Throw in some goodhearted friends and foils and you have the main cast. Even the story’s thematic spine — the artificial social selves that people construct to avoid vulnerability also limit human connection and love — is a mainstay of young adult fiction.
One would be forgiven for assuming that a light novel like Toradora, overwritten prose and multimedia adaptations and all, is a spin-the-wheel collection of romantic cliches, but being glib sells Toradora particularly short. Light novel author Yuyuko Takemiya and anime screenwriter Mari Okada freshen up canned ingredients. Both writers took on Toradora relatively early in their careers
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