Toradora!

I had a very rough time watching this anime. I found the first 15 or so episodes to be extremely boring. I thought the characters were unlikable, and everyone acted astoundingly stupidly. Most of the problems the characters face throughout the anime would be solved if they weren't all so dishonest and unpleasant. As the anime progresses, it starts to trick you into thinking that the characters will learn their lessons, and at this point I began to like it a bit more. It presents Ami as some sort of observer who is seeing everything wrong from an objective standpoint and is deciding to be the ultimate troll by not telling anyone anything. But even she is not safe from the writing. And as the ending came upon me, I found myself hating the anime again.

Basically, the anime tries to present the moral of the story to be that people should pursue their own happiness and stop trying to force their ideals on to others in a self-sacrificial and dishonest manner. The way that this concludes is when everyone gets together to force their ideals in a self-sacrificial and dishonest manner onto Ryuji and Taiga at the end, which then goes happily ever after. Basically, everyone other than Ryuji and Taiga are massive hypocrites, and the moral of the story is proven by breaking itself. Ami and Kushieda end up crying because they manipulated Taiga and Ryuji into a relationship, precisely because they thought Taiga was in exactly the same position as they had just put themselves into. The complete and utter hypocrisy, the fact that literally no-one learns their lesson, makes this anime an extremely bizarre and frustrating watch for anyone who actually questions what is going on and what the moral of the story is.

As for more nitpicky notes, the anime is frankly too long. This is probably more so because I didn't enjoy the story, characterisation, and though that the moral of the story made no sense, so it's hard to judge whether the pacing was actually as poor as it felt. There were also times where I felt the music was too simplistic and found the piano playing in the back of some scenes a touch irritating.

I have, however, given some points to this anime because it is not all bad. The art style is enjoyable, the music mostly holds up, the voice acting is generally superb. It's a huge, huge shame that this anime ended up being such a mess of hypocrisy and unearned happy endings. I can see why people like the anime, but I think that's because they haven't realised how little all the characters have learned by the end. I saw a reddit user say that the point of the anime was for Ryuji and Taiga to stop worrying about them being happy with other people and realise what they had in each other. Fine, so be it. But when you do that through characters that are all at the same fault and never resolve that, in fact present that as precisely the catalyst for Ryuji and Taiga to get together, it ruins the whole message. 3/10