I think I can finally phrase it: I dislike it when anime tries to teach me what's normal, accepted and approved. I'm sick of anime telling me what a teenager is supposed to be like. Most of all, I hate it when such teenagers are presented as something special while they're completely not.
'Toradora' seems to have been everyone's favourite for a long time. Perfect romance, they said. True representation of youth, they said. And what does it turn out to be? Another collection of cliches which aren't distilled by even a portion of originality in a very, extremely typical shounen harem. What we have is
- a tsundere who is deep inside all vulnerable and lonely, but becomes all brave and straightforward when she needs to express her true feelings
- a girl who pretends to be mature but is actually all vulnerable and lonely
- a cheerful mood-maker girl who looks like she's all optimistic and carefree but is in fact all vulnerable and lonely
- a nice boy who lets the girls love him
We also have
- a nice and clever four-eyed honour student friend of the nice boy who's actually all vulnerable and lonely
- side love interests to create more drama
- some other unimportant characters
What's socially accepted of them is
- getting entangled in love polygons
- claiming that they understand someone's feelings better than everybody else
- participating in school festivals with a reason completely different from wanting to have fun and win a contest
- shouting whatever important thing they were previously hesitant to say
- claiming they feel much better when they were rejected after finding courage to shout out that important thing, especially confession
- physically injuring each other when they need to have it out with somebody
- performing the role designated to them to the end, which means, the nice boy is always nice, the mature girl becomes even more mature, and the honour student must become a school council president only because he can't betray the expectations of other students
And yes, you will hear it not once: 'stop, don't pull them apart let them fight it's their way of having a heart to heart talk'. No matter that they get reprimanded or suspended, everybody around still encourages such fighting.
While the honour student is a role model of a role model, all others are role models as well: of a tsundere, of a mood-maker, even of a lonely teacher in her late 20s. Not a single living person among them.
What a boring youth that must be, despite it being filled with all kind of events.
Voice acting was something I didn't care about. Music was nonexistent. Art was very typical for the genre. And the parrot shown every now and then in close-ups was ugly.
You want something really unique about troubled adolescence - you watch Onizuka-sensei.
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