アニ・ノート

The 08 is the “battle”, with Ryuuji going to Ami’s villa if she wins… Was there ever any doubt in the outcome? Honestly! And then Taiga invited herself to the villa, of course.

I think I’m going to drop Toradora. However, it’s not because the plot is too predictable. My problem is that I latched onto a wrong character and that ruined everything. So this decision does not reflect on Toradora, it may still be the best show of the Autumn (N.B. we are yet to see the ending).

Dropping Toradora leaves me without anything current to follow. Which may be not a bad thing, I’m thinking about taking a little break.

OOPS, UPDATE. I was so distraught that I forgot to mention that Taiga has all but confessed in this episode… yet she continues to get flustered whenever Kitamura talks to her. The first love never dies! Thanks Omisyth for the reminder.

UPDATE: Zyl enjoys Ami for all she’s worth, and I applaud that. The problem is, she’s doomed.

Here’s a novel theory:

But I can’t help but remember how her cheerfulness may just a coping mechanism to deal with her weaknesses, her fears, her pain. The greater the latter, the more outlandish her genki behaviour. I haven’t seen the manga but Minori strikes me as someone who’s in a lot of pain.

That such thinking came about is not surprising. Of all characters in Toradora, Minori is the least explained, and so she has an appearance of unnnatural behaviour. Most likely though, it’s just the creators not giving everyone enough attention.

I should note that similar ideas were advanced about Tomo Takino, by fanfic writers. The imagination abhors the vacuum.

I have discovered yet another Lelangir’s blog (is this some kind of a game he’s playing with us?) (via saturnine on IRC). This one has a collection of reactions to Ami:

Xebek: [Ami is], definitely, from what I’ve seen, a fan favorite. Ami has actually really surprised me. When she was first introduced I disliked her, the whole lying about who she was kind of irked me. However these two episodes of the beach villa arc kind of made me change my mind.

I saw right through it in ep.7.

Kurogane: [ep.10] turned out to be more of an Ami episode than anything. I love how the director is intentionally making her real feelings being vague. It kinda evokes a certain amount of pathos in me towards her. Is she actually teasing Ryuuji just for the sake of teasing him? Or has she really fallen for him? The conversation with Ryuuji about being “equals” also was a masterful touch of almost touching her real feelings but not quite there yet. The use of metaphors in this series is seriously winning me over.

Indeed, Ami is a like Milch in that regard.

Minorin was my least favourite among the cast of Toradora (mind, I stopped before seeing Taiga’s father), but I cannot help noticing the fan comic posted by Nova (among others — I saw it on 4chan before). It is something like the dreams of fanboys everywhere. So cute. BTW, is this left to right or right to left? It reads both ways!

The tears, they just keep flowing.

I wish there was a remake of it with a better artwork. Coincidentially, Sixten is a fan. One can hope.

THEBIGN e-mails with:

I actually don’t like the premise of the strip. Partly because I don’t want to see Minorin sad (yay fanboyism), and partly because I feel like that idea’s been done to death (Can’t they think of any other way to show her pain?), and worry that the anime or the novels might take that route (it’s too obvious a way to go :P).

Well, no pain no gain. The point of the strip is, Minorin must be retarded not to take the denials of the main duo seriously and check if there’s an opening, while she still has time.

At first broadcast season’s end, Toradora, not to put too fine a point at it, is a consistently excellent show — at what it does. However, as it focuses like a laser on teenage love, its scope stays narrow, and thus it does not deliver what I would like.

If we look at, for example, original Nodame, for all the inevitable romcom it also was a compelling story of struggle and accomplishment: S-Oke, Mrs. Lutz’s school, R-stars, the competitions, and even Saiko’s mastery of moe rage. It may be my demographic. Maybe teenage love issue looms large for teens. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s not very interesting by itself, and so the Toradora’s excellency is wasted on me.

I think I see a trend. I dismissed Marimite pretty much for the same reason: its characters live in a made-up world of irrelevant emo. In other instance, when Nick twittered “Toradora 16: yeah, the characters are loud, but I’m finding it a more interesting romance Anime than ef”, I immediately registered a disagreement of taste: what made ef interesting for me is Chihiro’s struggle to complete the novel (as mentioned previously).

I really need another Rocket Girls.

P.S. The above bodes ill for Kimikiss.

UPDATE: Mike of Animediet probably meant to link to this entry, not the end-post, when he placed Toradora below H&C. I should note that although he refers to the above, I do not mean to agree with him on the place of Toradora in the pantheon: he is seeking “poignance and power”, not struggle and accomplishment.

To follow-up on my previous comment, here’s a beautiful example of how the faithful perceive the proceedings:

If there is one common vein in the connections between characters in Toradora, it is that the characters were fixed in a direction and they continue in that direction no matter the results. Taiga chases Kitamura. Ryuji chases Minori. Kitamura had already set his eyes on someone other than Taiga. Minori altruistically attempts to ignore her feelings for Taiga’s sake. Ami, for her part, seems to want a rescue. From what? Her, adult life, more than likely.

The way we feel, the thoughts and emotions that bubble up from events in our lives are often out of our control. Emotion is to reason, as Chaos is to mathematics. They are seemingly random and fierce, but there is a type of order and beauty to them. Yet, they have a butterfly effect of their own. Why is it that the smallest things sometimes stir the greatest of passions. It’s just a bit odd.

You’d think it was an adaptation of Dostoyevsky.

The one and only voice acting astronaut is assigned to fly on STS-131, tentatively scheduled for February 2010. This is an old news, NASA announced the assignments back in November, but I wasn’t following closely enough. In fact, I have wrote her off already.

Tangentially, Sumire’s career plan seems way off to me. Naoko went to an elite high school, then received BE and MsE from ToDai, which is expected in light of the way Japanese education is stratified. I suspect that Sumire will have a harder time clawing back from America. She’s not aiming to become a business executive, but an astronaut. So, she’s likely to bet wrong, unless she’s nurturing an unconventional plan, like moving to America permanently. Then, she may aim to repeat the steps of Kalpana Chawla (an emigrant astronaut who died in Columbia disaster). If she’s adventurous, she may become a pilot for Virgin Galactic or XCOR — but it takes a huge leap of faith to give her enough credit to know what NewSpace is.

Historically, all except one of Japanese Shuttle astronauts are educated in Japan. Here’s a list:

Takao Doi: ToDai (he’s got PhD from Rice after becoming an astronaut)
Satoshi Furukawa: ToDai
Akihiko Hoshide: Keio U.
Mamoru Mohri: Hokkaido U. and Flinders of Australia
Soichi Noguchi: ToDai
Koichi Wataka: Kyushu U.
Naoko Yamazaki: ToDai

There’s also a possibility of Sumire just blowing smoke or not having a plan. In any case she’s not taking cues from Naoko.

UPDATE: David Mankins e-mails that Sumire not only aims at, but eventually gets into MIT (there’s a hard evidence downstream). The strange Japanese fascination with MIT is not limited to underage teachers, but it’s a topic for another post. No, I’m not a bitter Stanford graduate, why?

UPDATE UPDATE: David also sent a link to MIT anime club’s page that documents the occurencies and notes:

Given the fictional science focus of many anime titles, it should come as no surprise that MIT is occasionally mentioned in anime. Of course, MIT usually is used to fill the role of “generic non-Japanese source of advanced technology”, or “hangout for smart people who didn’t manage to get into Tokyo University”. But it is rare for any other American college to be mentioned in anime, while MIT’s appearances are frequent and widespread.

(since the publication of this post, MIT people included the screencap of Taiga’s postcard)

He says that one cannot compare Toradora and Honey and Clover, because… wait for it… they target different demographics.

Here’s my explanation why comparing the above is valid (any two shows in fact). I don’t care what demographics are targeted, I only care about what I like. So, I watch show A, then I watch show B, and then I find that I like B more than A because of so and so. And don’t tell me I cannot do it, because I totally can. Demographics are entirely beside the point!

Now, the trick here is how meaningful the comparison is, how interesting the overlap is. I compared Sekirei with Strike Witches (two times), Chobits, Fata/stay Night, and that’s only somewhat meaningful comparisons (the Azumanga one went out pear shaped). I wish I knew anything about Pokemon and Angelic Layer.

And if I ever finish that confusing runner-up to the best anime of 2005 (or so they say), you bet I’m pitting it against Toradora. If any of the same people were involved into production, it’s only a plus. Critics look for elements of Shinbo between Hidamari and ef for crying out loud. These two are made to be compared.

P.S. What’s up with “I’m not reading other blogs, but they sure suck”… Wah’s blog is on the last place in my feedlist (had 6 unread today), but don’t rush to announce it in a post’s lead-in.

FRIDGE UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Evirus was on the case a few days ago (he gave H&C the upper hand, BTW).

I JUST NOTICED that Omo fingered me with the following (I lost access to logs due to blog migration from mitsuki to noe):

I mean comparing Toradora to H&C really is an apples-to-oranges comparison, but comparing it with RahXephon, hey, at least they ARE trying to do the same things with the human relationships detailed within.

I thought RahXephon was about Ayato murdering all his women one after another (some even gruesomly, like Asahina). Is it what Ryuuji is doing in later Toradora? Or Omo wishing for him to do?

That was a joke, by the way. Really forcefully shoved in. Can’t you tell?

If we only tell jokes, how do we know what is real?

I had to direct Lelangir on Twitter to the wikipedic entry on pronouns on Bugfox/fun. I thought everyone followed Jonathan, but apparently the way he mixes up anime with the hollywoodism repulses people. It’s understandable, I myself basically gave up on Mark to be surprised when he suddenly reviewed Trigun (first half). But Jonathan was not quite there, I thought.

The subject is unfortunately complex. For example, Jonathan writes that calling oneself in 3rd voice is “childish”, which is generally true… except when it’s not. When Aoi Sakuraba says “Aoi ni mo…” it’s a different pattern.

The Lelangir’s “kono ore da” is far from the worst. At least its meaning is reasonably clear. In Toradora 16, Kitamura proclaims: “Watashi wa… iya, ore wa… [dramatic announcement follows]“. And the subtext here is…? Was he trying to underscore that he’s not speaking in his capacity as a [formal candidate for an] official of the student government? I suspect that if so, it’s only a part of the message.

But at first blush, Jonathan’s cheat sheet is what we have.

I cannot help enjoying the smackdown (mind, both shows come from J.C.Staff).

This [abovequoted] hate on Index (which I am actually still enjoying, for the many good points that it does have) and its source contrasts with the fact that its fellow award-winning light novel and J.C.Staff project Toradora does not suffer from these problems.

Also:

Sankaku Complex suspects a deliberate coordination between J.C.Staff and the Toradora author Yuyuko Takemiya. This consumes the source material at a quick rate that never allows the story to stagnate. Toradora is covering 10 novels in 24-26 episodes, while Index has been taking 3 to 6 episodes per novel and will probably only cover six novels. And, more importantly, Toradora will end cleanly and with finality.

One can only hope. It’s a major plus to Itakiss for me too.

FRIDGE UPDATE:

Ami-chan and Minorin fans, did you really think it was going to end any other way?

Sixten misses one thing: there’s no problem for Ami fans if Ami gets a good end, and the good end does not need to involve beating Taiga. I, for one, am not convinced that Ryuji is the ultimate prize, and besides, it’s too early for her to decide on a life partner anyway. We know that they do it differently in anime, but since the show made such a big deal of Ami’s membership in the world of adults, well, it comes with the territory. She just needs to make peace with simple facts, e.g. remember how she laments that “if someone keeps a picture of me, it’s just a job.” And so it is. Becoming an adult is to realize that you cannot climb back into the womb. It’s completely up to Ami to decide if to take it in stride. Ryuji is small potatoes on that background.