Toradora’s third episode is largely dedicated to Ryuuji having his preconceptions about his classmate Minori forcefully challenged, first through Taiga’s defense of her close friend, and then through confessions by Minori herself. Trapped in a tool shed with a distressed Minori, he learns that the strength and energy which he sees as an effortless component of Minori’s base nature is actually anything but. Minori isn’t naturally confident or naturally strong; she simply plays the part, putting on an appearance of strength in order to inspire real strength.

But to call Minori’s actions “playing a part” implies she’s doing something disingenuous, or shielding herself from true emotional honesty. And to be fair, masking your true self is something pretty common to character dramas, but that’s not what Minori’s doing. Instead, Minori is practicing something all of us must embrace at times – putting on the appearance of a greater self not to trick others, but to eventually internalize that aspirational behavior, and make it true.

Trying to grow as a person is a process that demands active effort. Though we all grow naturally through experience, meaningful self-improvement often demands willfully changing your behavior in ways that don’t actually feel natural. In time, willful behavior can eventually become habit, and habit can eventually become truth. Minori is acting confident because she wants to become a person who embodies that confidence; while her classmates fret about being embraced for their “true selves,” she’s already embarking on a process of transformation more common to post-high school young adults.

Toradora’s sympathetic depiction of this process speaks to its generally insightful approach to characterization. As demonstrated through Minori, Toradora understands that no person is any one thing, and no personality is truly stable. Every single person is a person “in progress,” and we are all slowly transformed by both our own choices and the environment around us. And when a story embraces that truth, the results are spectacular. Over time, Toradora’s characters will not just come to care about each other, but actively grow and change both due to their own willful decisions, and due to the transformative friendships they’ve fostered.

But while Minori is already pretty far along on her path to self-actualization, Ryuuji and Taiga still have some ways to go. As we enter the show’s fourth episode, a visit to Taiga’s apartment ends up revealing her collection of blurry, altogether indecipherable photos of Kitamura. Though she’d like to have a nice photo of him to obsess over, her inability to keep calm around him has tragically resulted in a lengthy series of fuzzy portrait blobs. And so Ryuuji offers to take a photo for her, setting this episode’s rambling capers in motion.

The next day at school, Taiga greets Kitamura with an overloud, extended “Ohaaa!!”, mortifying herself until Kitamura unexpectedly returns the gesture. It’s a funny, awkward scene in its own right, but it also speaks to Toradora’s general embracing of conversational awkwardness, which is actually something key to its dramatic strength.

For most types of stories, it’s not really that dramatically useful to include all the awkward points of misunderstanding, random pauses, and misspoken phrases that tend to crop up in actual human conversations. Including them is like making sure to indicate in a scifi opera where all the spaceship bathrooms are – yes, you are technically enhancing the “realism” of the narrative, but in such a way that adds nothing to the show’s actual goals, and actually detracts from its overall focus. But in a story that’s actually directly about adolescent miscommunication and the difficulties of coming to understand each other, Toradora’s attentive focus on the slight hiccups inherent in human communication is a welcome choice.

Toradora’s conflicts and stakes are arranged such that miscommunications like these lie at the core of its emotional drama. Because of this, Taiga making an awkward conversational faux pas feels like a genuinely meaningful conflict. And in response, Kitamura returning the gesture feels like a genuine dramatic victory, one solidified when he actually embraces Taiga’s weird greeting and uses it on someone else. This, in turn, echoes Toradora’s generally sharp eye for character and perspective. To Taiga, Kitamura’s actions are just an inexplicable source of relief – “oh thank god, he for some reason didn’t find that weird.” But for us in the audience, Kitamura’s actions speak to his own social grace, and his apparent investment in making sure Taiga always feels comfortable.

Unfortunately, Taiga refuses to ever be comfortable, ever. A trip outside for the morning announcements introduces us to the school’s student council president, who lays down the law as vice president Kitamura whispers corrections in her ear. Incensed by this display of closeness, Taiga starts a fight pretty much just because she can, only to be defeated by Kitamura literally lifting her off her feet. It’s an extremely Taiga sequence, and speaks to the contradiction at the core of her personality – she likes having actionable, immediate targets to hit, but can never actually be honest about her intentions.

This contradiction is understandable, particularly for a person like Taiga. It’s very discomforting to think that our potential ability to date our crushes ultimately rests on a coin flip of “do they like me or not.” We’d rather be able to steadily work towards achieving a specific goal, secure in the knowledge that our efforts are actually meaningful. Taiga isn’t truly angry at the student council president, but “I have all this rage and she started it” is something she can actually act on, an emotional conflict she can theoretically resolve through action and willpower. Outside of her inability to confess to Kitamura, Taiga embraces direct, blunt action in every way she can – even her moping is the Most Moping, a testament to her straightforward strength.

Taiga’s amazing moping posture highlights another of this anime’s great strengths – the fluidity and elasticity of its animation and character designs. Masayoshi Tanaka’s character designs pretty much always hold to this rounded, blobby, almost jello-like fluidity, naturally lending themselves to pleasingly cartoonish character acting and great expression work. In Toradora, the strength of those designs is embraced through a wide array of flavorful, exaggerated expressions, along with goofy animation beats like Taiga’s jump here. Taiga’s body language often makes it seem like she’s literally melting into the floor, a charming articulation of her usual combination of scheming, entitlement, and despair.

Ryuuji and Taiga ultimately end up sharing their lunch break with Kitamura and Minori, in a sequence that once again demonstrates Toradora’s unique talent for natural, dramatically effective dialogue. This sequence in particular rides heavily on the mundane yet naturally flowing arc of Kitamura’s conversation. Kitamura comments on Taiga’s lunch, asking a question that is then redirected to Ryuuji. Ryuuji stammeringly answers the question, and Kitamura picks up on one detail of that answer, asking a relevant followup that brings the whole table into the discussion.

When plotted out like this, point-counterpoint conversations like this seem incredibly basic, but many anime forego this naturalism to instead embrace familiar, prewritten conversational beats. Countless romantic comedies rely on dialogue that either feels transposed from other shows in the same genre, unrelated to the cast’s current situation, or which all possesses the same highly specific authorial voice. These styles of conversation are familiar enough to not feel abrasive, but that very familiarity means they are often incapable of telling us anything genuinely new about their participants. Instead, Toradora embraces the fact that all four of these characters are entering this conversation from different points of personal familiarity and different comfort levels with idle conversation. There’s a lot more jostling between conversational threads and mundane comments, but that’s how actual conversations play out, and depicting these conversational negotiations in all their messy glory is a key part of Toradora’s emotional appeal.

After demonstrating just how awkward they are around their crushes, Ryuuji and Taiga spend most of the rest of this episode being extremely comfortable with each other. Led by the guiding conflict of Taiga’s quest for pictures, we see by Ryuuji’s expressions that he actually enjoys getting caught up in Taiga’s capers, and being relied upon. As I will continue to reiterate, Toradora’s most core strength might be its focus on potential romantic partners who are already friends, and actually enjoy each other’s company. Though Taiga bickers plenty and their quest never actually reaches a conclusion, it’s easy to see that Ryuuji enjoys seeing Taiga happy, and appreciates getting to know more about her.

That crucial step, the process of actually coming to understand someone, is underlined by this episode’s shocking finale. While sorting through Taiga’s photos, Ryuuji bumps into Kitamura, who offhandedly reveals that he actually confessed to Taiga once before. Taiga shot him down that time, but she ended up noticing him more as a result, and eventually falling for him in turn. As it turns out, love is a pretty messy thing; not only can we find ourselves falling in love with a facade like Ryuuji, but we can also fail to see a potential love due to our own preconceptions. And as we’ve already learned, every person is a perpetual work in progress – we might not love someone today, but who’s to say who we or they will be tomorrow?

The only true guiding principle these characters can trust is articulated right here, long before they actually come to terms with their feelings. Reflecting on Kitamura’s incredibly blunt, almost insulting confession, Taiga says “I felt vindicated, because someone appreciated me for who I truly am.” Ryuuji doesn’t truly love Minori – he loves the Minori he thinks he sees, who embodies all the qualities he feels he lacks. And Taiga doesn’t truly love Kitamura – she loves the idea of being loved, and embraced not in spite of, but precisely for the person she is. Eventually, these two will realize they’ve already found someone who appreciates all the messy, socially unapproved parts of themselves. Until then, these idiots at least have good friends to take care of them.

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