Toradora! 16: G-G-G-GAR?!

Now this is exactly what I was talking about </sarcasm>

I’ve probably lost all but a smidgen (smidgen) respect for Kitamura by this point. It’s interesting, at first he seems to be the charcter who’s the most collected and confident of all, yet during this episode he needed to get psychologically and physically shoved forward to get over the president. I can understand that it may have taken him longer to recuperate after Taiga’s rejection, but I thought he’d be someone who wouldn’t need telling multiple times to walk forward. He was still putting on that facade of being “okay” right until the scene in the auditorium (which I though was stupid and tactless on his part, btw, forcing the president by making a cliched confession) and by this point, now that he seems to be getting a complete character reset since the one source of him changing has buggered off to America, I don’t see there being any point in his existence. Oh wait, Taiga loves him. Except for that.

Student Council Preident got way less time than she deserved on screen and she will be sorely missed ;_;. She seemed emotionless all the way until after that fight (weirdly animated, btw) but she really shone after being battered and bruised into expressing her feelings. It kind of brought up this issue of maturity again; it was logical that she didn’t say anything to Kitamura, because yeah, he probably would’ve tried to follow her to America because he’s a dumbass, but at the same time it was a terrible thing to do because 1 he wasn;t being true to herself and 2. he’d just keep being a dumbass until she gave him some sort of reply. At this point, I’m pretty sure that she had the same feelings for him, but perhaps she was too wrapped up in being wise and making the “right” decisions to really acknowledge them.

It kind of reminds me of the idea of temperance in Jane Eyre. Before I bore you, suffice to say that one of themes of the books was that if you manage to control your passion, you’d be able to succed in life and overcome trials. Though there’s kind of the opposite message here. Anyway, I made my classical reference of the year, so hah.

In any case, all I can say is “See you Space Cowgirl” ;_;.

The whole episode had a nice theme on “moving forward”. Kitamura was just about able to do so with a little a lot of help from his friends, but with the other chracters they’re always progressing, albeit slowly. And yet it’s that slow development that’s one of the main attractions of the show, the feeling that all the characters are slowly advancing forward in their relationships with each other. However, for me the biggest developement was with Minorin, courtesy of Ami. Now that she knows that Taiga doesn’t (as of yet) love Ryuuji, what will her actions be? What will she, who has been covering up her feelings beneath a barrage of positive energy with occasional bouts of introspection, do now?