Toradora! (the title is excited) is the story of two high school students, Taiga Aisaka and Ryuuji Takasu, who encounter each other and learn that they each have an unrequited (for the time being at least) crush: Taiga on Ryuuji’s best friend Yuusaky Kitamura and Ryuuji on Taiga’s best friend Minori (“Minorin”) Kushieda. The two agree to attempt to play mutual matchmaker, but end up getting closer with and falling for each other in the process.

That really doesn’t sound like it would fill 25 episodes, does it? Mercifully, though, the slow-burn romance actually manages to work, and stay engaging for the show’s run. How does Toradora! do it?

I personally feel that the biggest element to Toradora!’s success is its treatment of the secondary characters. Kitamura, Minorin, and latecomer third wheel Ami Kawashima are the sorts of characters that would usually be flat, and a romantic comedy could even afford to leave flat. It would be safe to have the first two simply be idealized objects of affection for the leads to start out with. Before coming to understand that something real can be worth more than an idle daydream. It could also be tempting to make them… less than great people, so that the turnaround from matchmaking to matchmakers falling in love is easy; have the initial pair ruled by flaws and simple to discard once you know them better.

Instead, Toroadora! chooses to display these characters as… people. Mostly good people, but people. You get to know Kitamura and especially Minorin almost as much as Taiga and Ryuuji. We see why Taiga and Ryuuji might like Kitamura and Minorin, and even though the two lead characters ultimately turn each others’ way, it’s nice to be able to follow along with what they feel and think before that time. Minorin is kind, devoted, energetic, and more than a little bit quirky. Kitamura is refined, and also low-key passionate, caring a lot about the things and people he cares about, running cooler as opposed to how Minorin runs hot.

In the mean time, the development of Taiga and Ryuuji’s relationship is interestingly imperfect. They become close long before they become romantic, bonding not just over their shared project (mostly the direction of trying to get Taiga able to hook up with Kitamura) but over feelings that are natural and genuine and we ultimately (after we’ve been seeing them for a while) come to understand stem from who they are as people and their life experiences up to this point. Ryuuji, for instance, is extremely nurturing and domestic: he has a resting death glare that strikes terror into most who know of him, and he ends up seeing in Taiga (though this is never spelled out) someone in need of some care and nurturing, and goes the extra mile for her because that’s the kind of person he is. For her part, Taiga seems to have some deep-seated issues about reliability and abandonment (perhaps related to her father, who shows up in the show only to not show up when he promises), and ends up clinging to Ryuuji even during the early phase where she declares him her dog rather than anything like a friend.

Ami Kawashima is another part of the recipe. I called her a third wheel earlier, and in terms of the romance, that’s being generous. She’s a friend of Kitamura, an Idol on sabbatical from her business for reasons of stalker, but she never expresses any interest in Kitamura. She might develop some interest in Ryuuji, but if she does she does so from a position where she knows she can’t ‘win’. She has her own arc, dealing with the fact that she feels the need to present a double face: a sweet and vapid idol persona, and a cruel and intelligent persona that’s… closer to the real her, but also born from overreaction to having to play idol day in and day out. As the show develops and she comes into her own with a group of friends (well, kinda) she can be her actual self with, Ami acts oddly like a Greek chorus. When it comes to the development of Taiga and Ryuuji’s relationship, Ami says what the audience, or at least the more cynical subset of the audience, might be thinking. She notes how Ryuuji is “playing house” with Taiga, and that both of them will have to grow up if anything is going to change from the awkward phase where they’re still trying to matchmake each other on paper but have started to move past that at heart. It’s odd, but I actually very much like her scenes, and find her to be one of the stronger and more unique parts of the show for how she throws focus onto the real and legitimate problems.

Of course, problems or not, the main charm point of the show is seeing the relationship between the leads grow and develop. Toradora! is a romantic comedy, and like the other romantic comedies I’ve reviewed lately such as Quintessential Quintuplets and Kaguya-sama: Love is War there’s not enough focus on the ‘story’ to really justify going through it episode by episode or movement by movement and doing a summary. It’s essentially slice of life.

What I would like to talk about is the ending, and how it handles moving these characters that have spent the majority of the show locked into at least the illusion of the status quo to a satisfying conclusion. They give it a long time – eight episodes from the arc where Taiga finally comes to understand her own feelings until the end, which is an eternity in anime time. Despite Toradora being a romantic comedy at heart, there are some dynamite dramatic scenes through the arc, in a case of miscommunication and mistaken intentions that’s been a staple of the romantic comedy since Shakespeare at least, and probably since there were words.

These moments are difficult ones to get right, at least in part because when poorly handled they can reek of artificiality. And while I won’t say that that every moment is entirely natural (there’s at least a little contrived coincidence in Minorin just happening to be in earshot of a broken, sobbing Taiga calling for Ryuuji on Christmas Eve or with a semiconscious Taiga mistaking Ryuuji for Kitamura and confessing where her true feelings lie), the places where there’s more dramatic convenience also have strong showings from all the characters, and deliver some of the show’s more effective scenes in exchange for that contrivance.

At the end of all that though, the confrontation and confession between the two is a big moment. It brings things, that had been hurting for a while, back around to the funny (even with a bit of physical comedy as Taiga tackles Ryuuji into a stream with her response), and pays off the fact that there is so much time spent building up to it – it couldn’t just be a low key moment. However, confession is not where the show stops, as it has one more curveball to throw at us. Facing the possibility of Taiga being taken away by her mother, and Ryuuji’s mother running away, Ryuuji and Taiga go so far as to elope.

You’d think this would be call for a round of zany hijinx, which the show has had no shortage of up to this point, but instead it’s handled as a slice of bittersweet reality.

They “elope” to the home of Ryuuji’s grandparents, who he had not before met thanks to her mother being estranged from them, with a means of introduction that his mother left when she vanished. There, they get some time to think and work out their issues in a calm and surprisingly welcoming setting, while also pulling Ryuuji’s mother in so she can make up with her parents the way that Taiga may have to make up with her mother. At the end, Taiga has to transfer out, but she keeps her connection with her friends (and especially Ryuuji) and the final scene is a year later where the two of them meet again immediately after Ryuuji’s graduation.

If Kaguya-sama leverages its overall comedic composition to provide surprising drama, Toradora! leverages its overall comedic composition to be, in the end, surprisingly earnest. Even at their most earnest, the characters in Kaguya-sama are at least a little larger than life. As much as I knew people like that, they represent how you would know them from more of a distance. Toradora!, on the other hand, presents its characters as very human. As melodramatic as Taiga especially can be, everyone here feels like an actual person and their struggles, as big as they can feel in the moment, belong very much to the real world. Neither approach is the one right (or wrong) approach, they’re just different strategies, and which you would like best depends on what you value more in media.

For myself, I’d have a hard time picking, but when it comes to rating the shows as a whole I’ll give Toradora! an A-. Why A-? Because Toradora!, as well as it uses its 24 episode time, feels like it has fat. I was never bored watching, and the duration working with the essentially slice-of-life episodes is leveraged to build depth in the characters and a connection with the audience, but the really great scenes are fairly far apart, particularly in the first act. Toradora! does a lot right, and at the time I thought it was pretty astounding that it got me to like a romantic comedy, but in retrospect while it’s extremely good, it’s not without flaws and its highest peaks don’t reach as high as some others. All the same, I’d very much recommend it.