[Toradora!] This is the worst anime I've watched
I genuinely cannot wrap my head around the praise Toradora gets.
My biggest issue is the Taiga herself. She isn't just a standard tsundere. She is physically violent, verbally abusive, and completely unrepentant for the vast majority of the show. If you swapped the genders and had Ryuji breaking into a girl's house to assault her with a wooden sword or calling her his dog, this show would not be classified as a romance. The narrative treats her violence as slapstick comedy, which completely undermines any attempt at serious drama later on.
Then you have Ryuji, who isn't really a romantic lead so much as an enabler with zero self-respect. His relationship with Taiga doesn't feel like love; it feels like pathological codependency. He cooks, cleans, and endures physical pain for her, acting more like a terrified parent than a partner. He stunts her growth by doing everything for her, and the show frames this unhealthy servitude as devotion.
It’s worse when you look at the side characters. Minori and Ami are infinitely more complex and emotionally mature, yet the narrative sacrifices them to prop up the main toxic duo.
My biggest issue is the Taiga herself. She isn't just a standard tsundere. She is physically violent, verbally abusive, and completely unrepentant for the vast majority of the show. If you swapped the genders and had Ryuji breaking into a girl's house to assault her with a wooden sword or calling her his dog, this show would not be classified as a romance. The narrative treats her violence as slapstick comedy, which completely undermines any attempt at serious drama later on.
Then you have Ryuji, who isn't really a romantic lead so much as an enabler with zero self-respect. His relationship with Taiga doesn't feel like love; it feels like pathological codependency. He cooks, cleans, and endures physical pain for her, acting more like a terrified parent than a partner. He stunts her growth by doing everything for her, and the show frames this unhealthy servitude as devotion.
It’s worse when you look at the side characters. Minori and Ami are infinitely more complex and emotionally mature, yet the narrative sacrifices them to prop up the main toxic duo.
Commentaires
I *loved* Toradora when I first watched it when I was a teenager. At 30, that last bit really bothered me.
[](#niatilt)
You don’t know what a twist is, clearly, so here is the definition
“A twist in film or TV (plot twist) is a radical, unexpected change in the narrative's direction or outcome that reframes the audience's understanding of preceding events.”
[](#taigasigh)
Edit: since they decided to block me so I couldn't reply to them to elaborate, for anyone else's sake:
> “Toradora” does not allude to anything at first glance
"Toradora" as a title referring to the main couple should be fairly apparent to the Japanese audience (tora translates to tiger which is transliterated as *Taiga*, dora is short for doragon which is the transliterated word dragon which translates to ryuu for *Ryuuji*). This is hammered in with the first two episode titles being *Tiger and Dragon* (Tora to Ryuu, 虎と竜) and then *Ryuuji and Taiga* (Ryuuji to Taiga, 竜児と大河). It's not a fault of the show if it's hard to parse for non-Japanese viewers.
> The whole point of the show is getting the other to help out with their “crush”?
If you think *that's* the point of the show then I guess them getting together in the end does seem like it's meant to be a twist, rather than that premise being the setup to have the main couple spend time with each other and get closer over the course of the series. If it's predictable that they'll get together from the start, congratulations you understood the assignment. Calling it a twist is trying to present it as more than it was aiming to be.
The whole point of the show is getting the other to help out with their “crush”? When it’s painfully obvious the “twist” is going to be that they are actually in love with each other, in the most unoriginal anime romance trope imaginable. Not sure why I need to explain this.
Toradora is a good show if you can relate to it. If you can’t, for any reason, it will look a stupid drama with most interesting topics put on a shelf.
By relate I mostly mean when a teenager has some similar problems as the characters. Same piss and shit on the head due to family issues or whatever.
>Same piss and shit on the head due to family issues or whatever
What??
I'm fond of that fact the story can kinda being seen as two people who come to like each other and learn they have to deal with their baggage. I don't see many series where the characters "break up" for a year to deal with their BS before officially going out.
If toradora is the worst anime you’ve watched I can only assume you’ve watched maybe like 3 anime.
People weren't as touchy about these topics back then and this type of humour was completely normal and all over the place at the time Toradora was released.
It's also from the era where Kugimiya Rie's tsundere loli characters were everywhere and a lot of other voice actors and anime without her were trying to emulate her specific type of a tsundere character. The times have changed a lot and in general most character archetypes have become more fleshed out, but back 20 years ago Taiga was like peak tsundere.
On top, humour in Japan was in general very violent back then. It still kinda is, but they've calmed down a little for the most part as they've matured their character archetypes and stories over time. You can even look at some very serious shows like Clannad which have very well made characters and you'll find there's silly, over the top violence used as a gag even though the show isn't in any way a comedy.
I still love Toradora myself, but you can definitely feel the age of the show quite clearly these days. It's the same with almost all types of media. If you go look at what other types of anime were like back in the 2000's you'll feel the same way about a lot of it, and this also applies to things like games, western TV shows, internet memes and just general social behaviour.
You can take almost any more recent anime that has become a controversial topic, push the release date back by 20 years and that anime would very likely not have any controversy surrounding it. I am 100% sure people would not have complained about something like Mushoku Tensei at all if it released in 2001, and yet these days if anyone brings it up it's almost guaranteed to become a debate/argument.
That all being said, you saying Toradora is the worst anime you've watched only really shows that you must not have watched a whole lot of anime. Toradora is extremely mild with all these "issues" compared to A LOT of other anime from back then.
It didn't help that the anime didn't go a great job on the ending. Granted the source material wasn't complete yet; so they kind of just had to wing it.
Like the infrastructure of anime is built on character archetypes. This isn't supposed to be taken seriously, this is supposed to be funny. Of course it'd be creepy in Toradora if you swapped genders, a guy breaking into a girl's house attacking her with a wooden sword and calling her his dog- yeah. That sounds bad. But you're ignoring how archetypes and how this style of comedy evolved in the past. The show isn't some grandstanding moral lesson about how women should be abusive, the show is about a stupid girl who doesn't understand her feelings. You're not supposed to go "That's disgusting and horrible", you're supposed to go "Wow, this girl is a wreck. It's hilarious."
A tiny, explosive, emotionally stunted girl hitting a dude twice her size plays into cartoon logic and long-standing slapstick tradition. A guy doing the same thing hits entirely different cultural alarms. That doesn’t mean one is “secretly okay and the other isn’t", it means stories operate on shared shorthand, not moral spreadsheets.
You can like what you like, and you can find it uncomfortable, but the argument you make assumes the show was made in a vacuum only yesterday.
Oh man, I agree so much. It's fine, if unrealistic, to have the opinion that gender doesn't matter, but if you accept this premise (which some may find outdated) that, at least for the story, men and women are different, then the whole gender swap argument is nonsensical.
And I don't really think this is so difficult in Toradora. Like you said, she's small and emotional, he's big and more stoic. They are obviously not just swappable. Just accept the framework of the story man..
Maybe not with the same audience or demographic. It would feel different because as you said it be a completely different set of archetypes. But a version of that story probably does exist right now.
After I cringed my way through the series and finally got to the Christmas episode, it wasn't even a good payoff... like... it was just a normal Christmas episode, but I think people got Stockholmed so hard by the series that bread crust was peak to them because they were so used to crumbs.
Truly, modern anime audiences are tonedeaf. Slapstick doesn't hurt characters, but when a confrontation in Toradora is serious, you see that in how scenes are framed. Also, watch the nighttime scene in episode 2 again. If you don't see the chemistry, I don't know what to tell you.
As an aside, one of my favorite iyashikei has a guy in his 20s sending a 6 year-old girl flying out of his house. Guess what? It's framed as slapstick. You're not meant to read it as a grown man literally hurting children. You're meant to read it as an over the top representation of him being a stuck-up person who doesn't want to let others into his life.