Blogging Toradora!: The Intro

For those of you who have dug around my blog here (or have even paid a visit or two), you’ll know that I spent the better part of two months blogging every episode of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. I had intended for that particular feature to be a one-off occurrence, making a big deal about a show that has more or less become a must-see for anyone even remotely interested in anime or animation in general. It was long, it was grueling, it was exhausting, and at times I wanted to quit and walk away because the urge to binge-watch the rest of the show was intense. Also, it would have been nice to scroll through an FMA tag on Tumblr without risking spoilers.

And now I’m going to do it again.

To be fair, the experience of blogging every episode of a show—especially one that I have next to no real idea about in terms of plot—was a lot of fun. Yeah, there were days where I wanted to punch a kitten in the face (Blogger has some horrible problems with its formatting and there are days where words are just hard), but for the most part I enjoyed writing out my thoughts and taking the time to process the episodes as I went. It kept me flexing my writing muscles, too, which is always a good thing.

But keeping in mind that I took two whole months to finish that series and that I am in a rather demanding grad school program, I figured this go-around I’d pick something that wasn’t going to take me an entire summer to complete or stretch my brain to the limits of its ability to analyze. So I dug around various streaming sites trying to recall some titles that I knew were under thirty episodes. I’ve already seen Baccano and Anohana, two shows that are under fifteen episodes, so those were out. Toradora popped up and I remembered hearing good things about it through a couple of different sources. Since my previous show was a shonen/action-adventure story, I figured I could slow things down with a romance.

My knowledge of Toradora is limited. I know that the lead female is kind of insane and her name sounds like “Tiger” (fitting, I suppose) while her love interest's name has something to do with dragons and he has blue hair. My watching will be free from any bias or previous experience aside from a clip of her attacking said male love interest inside his house. The only other anime romance I’ve watched is Your Lie in April, which made me cry like a baby, and I’m hoping that this show doesn’t try and pull another one of those on me. I cry enough as it is with my grad school work. The general premise sounds kind of generic, so I’m relying on the good reviews and word of mouth that this won’t put me to sleep or make me groan with its immaturity.

So, without further ado, here are some points before diving in:

• Again, I’m keeping with the “no more than three episodes in a post” rule. Nine times out of ten it will be two episodes to a post, with the exception here and there. At this point it’s probably safe to assume that I will never have the time or the patience to comment on four episodes at once, but hey. Gotta reign in the potential insanity somehow.
• The streaming site I’ll be using is Cruchyroll.com. Why they have this show and not FMAB, I have no idea.
• I am choosing to watch this dubbed. The show was licensed by NIS America, a company I’ve never heard of, and stars a cast with not a single name I recognize. NIS America is still around, since they re-released the show on Blu-Ray in 2014, so that’s encouraging I suppose. I don’t know if the dub is good or not because I didn’t want to read too much information should I accidentally run into a spoiler. If it sucks, I’ll switch to Japanese.
• If, for some reason, you see something in these blog entries that you’d like to reply to or comment on and don’t want to leave a comment at the bottom of the entry, you can send me an Ask on my Tumblr (if you have one as well). I’ll lose my mind. Seriously. I love it.

And that’s it! We’ll see how this goes!

Entries in This Series Include: 

(Hover over the text for links to each entry)

Episodes 1 & 2
Episodes 3 & 4