We’re now done with the summer vacation arc, as our heroes are heading back to school. But, although we’re returning to a familiar setting, things between them all are no longer the same. This is what I mean when I say character drives action drives character: how will the changes in them affect the choices they make and how will those choices affect those around them? This isn’t to say that everything is suddenly altogether different; the shifts are more subtle than that. And some things, as we saw at the end of the last episode, have stayed the same. Or have they?

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I’ll be honest: going into this episode, I wasn’t sure I would be able to get much out of it to write about due to the fact that most of it is rather comedically oriented. Fortunately, though, I wound up with plenty of stuff to talk about (not a huge surprise), especially since it seems like Nagai really liked the ghost/UFO stuff—his direction with the scene last episode and at the end of this episode has been inspired stuff.

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With the cast fully assembled now, we’re fully prepared for rom-com shenanigans (which are quite funny this episode, if I do say so myself), revealing character moments, and maybe even a little bit of drama. It’s pretty impressive that, at this point in the show, a lot of things are pretty darn obvious. Ami’s cryptic and shades a lot of her words with her ditzy act, but she’s not all that hard to read. Ryuuji’s steady and consistent, as he’s been thus far. Taiga’s the easiest to read out all of them, even in the midst of her emotional confusion. Kitamura and Minori are the real wildcards at this point, which is actually somewhat odd given how early they were introduced—as I’ve said elsewhere: I remember the end game, but how exactly we get there is a mystery to me.

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Fun fact: of all the notes I’ve taken on this show thus far (12.5 pages thus far), these were by far my most neatly written ones. That might seem kind of random and trivial, but it’s pretty surprising how particular episodes or particular shows can inspire me to write differently, whether that be in my prose or my handwriting. This episode is one such episode—nuanced and subtle when it needs to be, painfully obvious when the time comes for it to be so. At this point, I pretty much feel like Taiga’s real feelings are crystal clear to the audience, even if she hasn’t figured them out herself.

(I’m a really big fan of the camera work for these three cuts out of the OP, so I thought I’d feature them here before the OP changes in just a few episodes.) Continue reading →

And I’ve come to the final episode on the first disc of NISA’s original release of Toradora! As I mentioned yesterday, I didn’t really remember well what happened in this episode, so a lot of it felt new all over again to me, which is a treasured experience to be able to have again with a beloved show you’ve already seen. A lot of great visuals again in this episode: I might end up having to learn how to make gifs or webm’s before I finish the show so I can capture the neat like bits of animation that I keep seeing.

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So, all the key players have been set. Now’s the time where you start letting character drive the action of the story, and that’s exactly what happens here. It’s also really interesting in the overall structure of the story that the last two episodes have essentially been a mini-arc for Ami spinning directly out of her character introduction. By the end of this episode, she’s already in a very different place personally than she was at the beginning of episode 5. The real her is out and so now we just watch how that spins everything else in new directions.

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Time for the last of the character introduction episodes—we get the final member of our main cast, Ami Kawashima. I know Ami is pretty well-beloved of the Toradora! fandom in general, but overall I wasn’t totally enamored with her character after my first watch. That being said, I think she’s pretty darn fascinating, both as a character in her own right and as a subversion of the dojikko trope. Sometimes, I even think that Ami might be a more tragic character than anyone else in this show…

As if I could have used any other picture as the header for this episode.

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So, if the last episode was about Minori and Ryuuji’s crush on her, this episode is about Kitamura and Taiga’s crush on him. Really, though, we got a lot less information about Kitamura this episode than we did about Minori last. It’s not really that much of a surprise given how open Minori seems to be, but in comparision, Kitamura is something of an enigma. I think he’s the type of person I’d like, but always feel nervous around. This episode also had kind of a lot of nice visual details, so you’ll see more of those cropping up here than in past write-ups.

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