Tiger versus Wood
I was motivated to pick up ToraDora! after reading about totali’s happiness with the first episode but Kabitzin’s warning about ‘Taiga and her horrible inu comments in the Kugimiya Rie tsundere voice’ stopped me in my tracks. It didn’t help that Mr Love Power himself developed concerns about the quality of manga adaptation. Overall the consensus on the internets is that the show could be good if Taiga doesn’t get too abusive/annoying. If things continue as they did at the end of Ep 2, this could be a very fun and enjoyable series indeed. More power to Ryuuji!
And I just kept thinking that Taiga is Minami Chiaki post-surgical removal of her ahoge. And what we learned when the PPD! gang tampered with Himeko’s should have been warning enough!
On the other hand, there was no such ambivalance with respect to Kannagi. Kurogane bestowed unto it the title of most delightful series of this season. Though I needed to check the dictionary to find out what hashihime meant when she praised ‘the nimble twists and turns of [Nagi's seiyuu Tomatsu Haruka's] voice are virtuosity with artistic meaning‘, I did find myself going: ‘Wow! Who *is* Nagi’s seiyuu?’ as I watched the first two episodes. Great emotional range as well as two very distinct mannerisms and the killer delivery of lines that are so stupid that they’re pure gold.
While I’m a little disappointed about a certain leaf as well as no ‘uguu‘ in the first episode but no hesitation to say that Kannagi has the upper hand, at this point, in my viewing priorities.
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She want supposed to be this heartless or mindlessly abusive either. Verbal cutdowns and intimidation happen, but at least Ryuuji could cut those off and she knew when to stop.
Oh, and Cantabile got butchered this week too. Oops.
That’s pretty much my main beef with the series. I mean, I can tolerate a poorly written and thought filler episode every now and then; as anime overall goes those are near unavoidable, in the way of taxes and stupid people.
But the idiot who decided it was a good idea to reduce Taiga to a cardboard Looney Tunes caricature needs to lose his job. Badly. It’s not just poor taste, but severely undermines some (IMO) rather important aspects of the story and the character relations. In the original material Taiga’s certainly foul-tempered and acid-tongued enough; Ryuuji seems to get used to that right quick (and talks smack right back willingly enough, although he unsurprisingly can’t really match her in pure spitefulness). Being generally hateful and rude appears to pretty much be her way of trying to deal with a reality she more or less hates (Taiga’s not a very happy camper at this point of her life… plus, Hell, we’re talking about teenagers here; irrationally hating stuff when life sucks is pretty much part of the job description), and Ryuuji obviously grasps this. It’s not like he was all that much better off himself, so the two can relate to each others’ circumstances easily enough.
Not that Taiga’d very likely be Little Miss Sunshine even without all the crappy life circumstances, mind you…
But it’s very rare for her to become concretely, physically violent. Seems to generally require some pretty acute desperation or fire-breathing rage before it happens, really. (I’ve a theory about this, connected to the rather startling physical feats she occasionally does offhandedly, but I digress…)
This is why the JC Staff adaptation so annoys me. They take a pretty competently written case of teen anguish, frustration and anger expressed credibly enough as rather unsociable behaviour and vicious temper – and turn it into a crude physical-violence ‘comedy’ hack job for shit and giggles.
That kind of thing is something of a cardinal sin in my books; dumbing down good source material into tasteless lowest-common-denominator bleh. Either their scriptwrites seriously dropped the ball, or – which I consider more likely – some luminary in suit and tie thought this’d make the show easier to sell.
Wasn’t, even. Damned typos.
And yeah, the butchered adaptation (this week includes more Taiga flying kick) with extra violence and less characterization on everyone’s part but Ryuuji’s is why I really am starting to loathe J.C. Staff. The only reason Ryuuji’s interesting is because they didn’t cut out most of his character details unlike Taiga, who comes across as typical Kugimiya Rie tsundere.
Oh good, I killed Myssa Rei with a wall of text. Ah well – at least the Kitamura confession was referenced in Episode 4. I feel a bit better about it now.. especially since that was important as she remembered that it was after he confessed and she tsun-tsun rejected him that she noticed Kitamura and THEN fell for him.