Toradora! 25 (finale)

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

SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

Toradora! 25A 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.

Toradora! 25That 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.

Toradora! 25After 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.

Toradora! 25That 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 Toradora! 25teases 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.

Toradora! 25Time 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:

Toradora! 25Again, 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.

Toradora! 25Another 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.

Toradora! 25As 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 Toradora! 25— 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.

Toradora! 25Ami. 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 Toradora! 25has 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.

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12 Responses to “Toradora! 25 (finale)”

  1. Garik says:

    Actually, Taiga was a second year. She was gone for more than a year.

  2. AstroNerdBoy says:

    I thought I had to be missing something and I didn’t have time to try to skim through early episodes to see. I thought that (1) with Yuusaku being student council president and (2) Yuri-sensei wanting them to fill out their career path and (3) their final class trip being the ski trip that this meant they were in their 3rd year.

  3. mastermack0 says:

    Yea it did seem rushed towards the end, but not this episode. According to those who read the novels, they cut ALOT out. Well, blame JC Staff for not doing it better. This last episode was very strange and fairly boring for some reason. Perhaps the hecticness of the last episodes caused this. Whatever, it was a nice touch.

  4. Anonymous says:

    There is a lot cut out of the anime. I wish the anime would have just made more episodes than 25 and properly told all of the story from the books.

  5. Hugh Roe says:

    Yeah amigo, at least 2 seasons could have been made from the books, if not a third.

  6. Chris says:

    Dude, where the hell did you get the idea they were already in the third year? They’ve said it numerous times he’s in his second year and the previous episodes were all about him planning for his third year, remember? Taiga was gone until graduation, he’d been separated from her for well over a year.

  7. ANB mentions earlier why he thought they were in their 3rd year and not their second year. 😉

  8. Sparkys Tech Corner says:

    Looking at all the comments I have to say. A Lot of you are wrong, you have to understand the Japanese School year it runs from April to March, if you watch the last part of ep 25 it’s their talking about class 2-C graduating along from the others also this class of 2-C was made at the begening of the show last April, their graduating from 2nd year to 3rd year, Tiaga left in the middle of February most likley the 16 or 17 that year and came back at graduation that year in March of the show, if you read the light novel she actuly comes back at the start of the 3rd year as a surprise so she as only been gone a max of 2 maby 3 months if your watching the show 2 months or reading the book 3 months, Yuusaku is going to America his 3rd year, and they reference last years Athletic club and cultural festival that 2-C did, yea it was last year, between the Christmas and sky trip saga was jan 1, those did happen last year, it’s honstly easy messing up the time line because they didn’t give enough details in the show, but the light novel dose fill in a lot of pieces

    • AstroNerdBoy says:

      I’ve got the first three volumes of the light novel, but haven’t read them yet. I have been reading the manga adaptation. How does that compare to the light novel, if you know?

      • Sparkys Tech Corner says:

        Ok, only the first 3 vol of the light novel have been official translated, I found a site that has a non official translation of all 10 vol, only major difrinces from the show I can find is vol 10 compared to ep 24 and 25, it’s completely different, most likely because when ep 24 came out only vol 9 was out, the beginning of ep 24 is the ending of vol 9, the bridge scene the grand parants home scene, the graduation scene, comptley diffrint because it’s in vol 10, as far as the manga I haven’t read it yet, but I am going to, only other thing I will say, is that the novel has more details that the anime left out,… I’m hopeing because the manga is still being made in Japan, that they will hopefully expand the story more,…. only time can tell

        • AstroNerdBoy says:

          Thanks for the info! I recently rewatched Toradora! and found that the flow of the manga is actually superior to the anime in some areas.

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