とらドラ！Episode 25
Toradora! Ep. 25 (final episode)

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

A message from Taiga regarding Ryuuji has Yasuko racing over to her parent’s home. However, Ryuuji is fine and this was staged so that Yasuko could make up with her parents. Ryuuji has learned the truth about his father — his mother had never married and had left Yasuko after she became pregnant. Rather than abort the child, she wanted to protect her baby and now he’s all grown up. Ryuuji promises Yasuko that he won’t run away any more since that’s not the answer and that he’ll continue to grow in front of Yasuko, not someplace far away.

That night, Ryuuji finds that his and Taiga’s futons are placed together since they are planning to get married. Taiga has Ryuuji put out the lights and they look at the stars together. Ryuuji says that they should get married properly and discuss it with everyone including his grandparents and Taiga’s parents. Taiga wants a rehearsal and using a sheet to simulate a veil (looking more like a traditional Shinto wedding hood), she wants Ryuuji to say some vows. He flubs through but Taiga states her belief that vows or not, they’ll always be together — Dragon (Ryuu) and Tiger. She kids him about his eyes, funny breathing, and chapped lips but they kiss anyway. Taiga continues to ask for repeats.

After the three return home with Inko-chan, Ryuuji invites Taiga over for dinner. However, after Taiga takes a cell phone photo of a single star outside her window, she leaves and returns to her mother. The following day at school, Yuri-sensei announces Taiga’s withdrawal, causing the class to immediately text Taiga to see what’s wrong. In the commotion, Ryuuji leaves, as does Ami, Minori, and Yuusaku. Minori is upset and after she catches Ryuuji, she tells him to brace himself as he slaps her. Yuusaku comes to stop further violence, so Ryuuji explains that this was Taiga’s choice and though he’s not happy with the choice, he couldn’t stop her. Since Taiga believes in him, Ryuuji has no choice but to accept it.

That night, Ryuuji gets a text message from Taiga saying he never said he loved her. He then gets a single dark image with a tiny pinpoint of light. The next day at school, Minori apologized to Ryuuji for the slap. Everyone is talking about the single dark image that Taiga sent everyone but only Minori understands the meaning behind the message and that it is a picture of a star. Minori waxes poetically about the meaning with everyone and Ami comes up, saying she is touched. She teases Minori over the broken star moment from Christmas but says that she thinks Taiga would love a photo reply from everyone. So a search for Taiga’s Christmas star begins and Ami and Ryuuji have a talk where Ami explains how she and Taiga truly became friends. Once the star is found, Yuri-sensei takes a photo of the entire class (Ryuuji holding the star) to send to Taiga.

Time moves on and Ryuuji’s class graduates. As the class mingles outside, Ryuuji notices a something in the window of their old class and races back in. Finding nothing, he goes to a tall locker in the back and there is Taiga in her school’s seifuku. After a brief chat, Ryuuji says he loves Taiga, which catches her off guard. She gets embarrassed because she would have preferred to have been told this with a better setting/mood.

Thoughts/Review:

Again, the series took me places that I didn’t expect. After running away together, I thought that Taiga and Ryuuji might get talked out of eloping but I didn’t expect Taiga to return to her mother’s home to live and complete her senior year. Actually, it seems a weird thing to do since there’s only a short amount of time in the school year left (spring being the start-end time in Japan) and she was already a 3rd-year student. May as well graduate at your own school with maybe two months to go. Now, had they all been 2nd-year students, Taiga’s departure would have made more sense to me. I suppose this is one of those things where we aren’t supposed to worry about the mechanics too much and just accept that this is what happened and move along.

Another surprise in the anime was learning that Ryuuji’s father did not in fact die, but had run off with another woman and didn’t even marry Yasuko. After that revelation came to light, things made a bit more sense regarding Yasuko and the fact that she hadn’t been in touch with her parents for a great many years (likely not having seen them since Ryuuji’s birth). I can’t help but wonder how much material got cut from the light novels in order for the anime to end as the light novels did. With as rushed as things felt, I imagine there was a fair amount cut but I could always be wrong.

As to Taiga and Ryuuji being a couple, it almost felt weird for me to watch them repeatedly kiss. It didn’t feel weird to see them holding hands on the train. Unfortunately, the way things played out kind of killed the ultimate sense of romance for me. Once Taiga returned to her mother for a 2-month stint and things just fast-forwarded to the end, everything just seemed to wilt for me. As such, there was no emotional impact to their reunion because the audience hadn’t missed Taiga’s presence — she’d just been there, was gone, and now several weeks later she’s back in a new uniform but for the audience, it is only a few minutes max. It is poor pacing due to trying to compress ten volumes of light novel material into 25-anime episodes. For comparison, Full Metal Panic: The Second Raid took two volumes of light novel material (plus a little extra stuff to make it properly link with the previous titles) and that became a 13-episode series.

Ami. I still say she got the short end of the stick. Her chat with Ryuuji was nice, but she never vocalized her feelings for Ryuuji which is a disappointment. I would have enjoyed her coming clean along with everything else she said. Oh well.

I did see one little nice touch — Haruta shoving Noto close to Maya and them both becoming embarrassed by it while Nanako smiles over it. That makes me think that maybe Maya has noticed Noto in a romantic way and Nanako knows this.

I’ll write some final thoughts later. I understand that there are two light novel volumes of a spin-off called Toradora! Spin-off. So when someone asked about the possibility of a sequel anime series being created, at the time I thought “no” but I suppose anything is possible.