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.

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.