Toradora: The Worst Ending Ever?

THAT WAS THE WORST ENDING EVER.

Now that we’ve come all this way through the emotional ups and downs of the most popular show of the Fall/Winter season, I can finally finish off my thoughts on what was one of the best romcom anime I had ever seen. I say “was” because not only was the ending of Toradora completely retarded, but in retrospect it highlighted just how bad the series was as a whole.

For instance, take the lip-rape kissing scene between Taiga and Ryuuji. ghostlightning claimed that Toraodora was a show for the whole family but he couldn’t be farther from the truth. All you had to do was shove in some softcore porn music, stretch it out to 80 minutes and you’d have a 18+ only feature film ready to be sold for £1 out of some cheap back alley porn shop. Even at that price it would probably mean J.C Staff were making a fortune since the animation for the series became little more than idiots scribbling lines indiscriminately, colouring it in and calling it a face.

Not to say that that scene was the lowest the series would go. After getting a stupid, contrived sub-plot about the 2-dimensional character Yasuko  and her estranged parents shoved in and resolved within the space of 6 minutes, we get Taiga spouting about how she’s lonely the night after she’s just finished… getting it on with Ryuuji. Because I definitely signed up for contradictory statements and meaningless symbolism about stars and everyone shining as much as they can to find each othe or whatever the hell the MASS TEXTING moment was about. Are we all then expected to by the bullshit that the teacher of this idiotic class (who’s been busy having a mid-life crisis for the ENTIRETY OF THE SHOW) can suddenly impart wisdom on those who she can barely teach?

And then we have a class picture showing how everyone’s moved on, become better people, matured throughout the series.. except for the fact that Ryuuji’s had is face pinched into a forced smile by the two girls who should hate him the most, the man boy himself is holding a Christmas star for no apparent reason and Kitamura’s trying to dog-pile on the lot of them for his hot, sweaty ERO-KAWAII escapades. If that’s not enough, the ending jarringly cuts in at the most innoportune time imaginable and then we have Taiga showing up out of nowhere which brings up the point of why she even left in the first place. And of course everything comes “full circle” with the Toradorable pair narrating more symbolic bullshit. The f*cking end.

As I said before, the awful  ending only serves to highlight how awful the series was in general. It’s like every scene in the last episode represents the problems in the series. Symbolism with as much subtley as a 10 Ton Cluebat, music introduced at the most horrible times, dialogue coming from 16 year olds that would fit better in a work by Plato, awful animation and a resolution that had as much a point as trying to wash a car in the rain.

That’s not even getting onto how the ending destroyed the characters. It just left me with a feeling of “WTF, that’s it?” Ami was just a two-faced bitch? Minori was just a two-faced genki/angst-filled dumbass? Kitamura was just completely pointless in every way imaginable? Ryuuji and Taiga go from no open relationship to running away and getting married in the space of a single episode? Did I just waste over 500 minutes of my life on this crap?

I don’t think that there has ever been, or ever will be, a show that screws everything up with an ending as much as this show has. Those of you who still like it after this are ignorant fools. Crawl into a deep hole, wallow in your blind love for this travesty and never show your faces again.