If there’s one arche­type peo­ple fall back far too eas­ily into, it’s the tsun­dere. But really, this per­son­al­ity attribute is nei­ther that sim­ple nor cheap…

[Sora]

Since my post on explain­ing the real life psy­chol­ogy of yan­deres, I’ve been on the hunt for a rec­og­nized psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­or­der that would clas­sify the tsun­dere. Unfor­tu­nately, no such con­ve­nience seems to exist, and while the tsun­dere may be the most overused anime char­ac­ter arche­type of recent years, it is also com­plex enough that few series have truly done it jus­tice. Read the rest of this entry »

Toradora is the sec­ond series in my win­ter catch-up blitz, and it left me speech­less. There is no excuse why I did not pick this show up, even if it aired was dur­ing my the­sis semes­ter. And I call myself a romance-drama fan? *rage@self*

The show sucked me in as early as episode 2 (if I had only watched 1 more ep back then!). By episode 19 (Christ­mas Eve Fes­ti­val), it was already com­pet­ing for my top spot for anime in both the romance (Clan­nad, ef) and drama gen­res (Kanon, DC2SS). Two episodes later when Taiga uncon­sciously voiced her love, it crushed its com­peti­tors and moved onto con­sol­i­dat­ing its posi­tion. By the time the epi­logue rolled, I was left a com­plete emo­tional wreck: happy and rejoic­ing for the cou­ple, but also utterly drained. I had long lost track of how many times tears were brought to my eyes or how many min­utes I was left sob­bing loudly before the pro­jec­tor screen.

[ Shit shit SHIT, I don’t know what hap­pened but some­how I hit the pub­lish but­ton while work­ing on the draft right before going to sleep. That was not sup­pose to hap­pen. I hur­ried to fin­ish and re-published this, will add pic­tars once I get back. This is a dis­as­ter >_< ]

Kita­mura gets my Most Valu­able Char­ac­ter award

Look­ing back to com­pile my thoughts, I was left won­der­ing just why Toradora! destroyed my other beloved romance/drama series so hand­ily, from Kimi­nozo to Shuf­fle! to Clan­nad . It only took me a minute to real­ize that the oth­ers were almost all Visual Novel adap­ta­tions (do Japan­ese guys love cry­ing more than girls or some­thing?). It took me much longer to pin­point just what aspects of the stan­dard Visual Novel sto­ry­board­ing rou­tine caused it to be so out­classed by a light novel series.

Read the rest of this entry »