Going Down The List: Toradora!

(MAL LINK)

Had I not been behind on blog post writing schedule again, I could have written about this show on Valentine’s Day. Not only would it have been appropriate considering the story, but it would also have been symbolic for me, because for a long time Toradora was the romance anime for me. The fact that I watched it pretty early on in my ongoing experience with anime probably helped, especially considering it was probably the first actually good romance show I watched, now that I think about it.

Or, rather, that’s how I saw it for a long time, but reading through some of the episode summaries on Wikipedia and remembering how some of the character interactions actually happened, it’s maybe not as much of a masterpiece as I originally thought. It has lots of elements in common with “lesser” LN adaptations, and even some VNs, and while I’d say that Toradora is above average in its genre, the bar for that is not very high. It’s messy, and not always in entertaining ways.

The characters had a lot of staying power though, because there have been many a discussion held about the characters of Toradora. Ami Kawashima in particular is still very popular, and for good reason (I, and many others, would argue that she is the most complex of the main characters), at least in my opinion. All of this said, however, I think Toradora is one of the few shows I’ve seen lose a lot of popularity among anime audiences in general. When I watched it the show was already 5 years old, but I heard lots of people talking about it in many different contexts and situations. Now, 4 years later, barely anyone mentions it outside of the Christmas episode and discussions about the complexity of Ami Kawashima. I don’t know if this is because people have new favourite romance shows or if it fell out of popularity for some other reason, but this is something I noticed recently. I don’t think it’ll ever be forgotten (at least not for a long time), and I don’t think it should be forgotten, but it’s definitely not the phenomenon it once was.