The ending of the show was supposed to be symbolic and show the growth and persona of the two main characters. For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, here is a review I created for it on another site:
Series: Toradora
Release Date: October 2008
Genre: Romantic Comedy
Director: Tatsuyuki Nagai
Writer: Yuyuko Takemiya
Creator: Yuyuko Takemiya
Number of Episodes: 25
Overview:
An unlikely couple agree to help each other by trying to get the people they love to return their feelings. While helping each other they see their personal feelings and emotions toward each other change dramatically and the only sure thing going in their head is the confusion of who they love, and how to tell them.
Personal Opinion:
The best thing about this series is the characters. From episode one to the finish of the series they are amazing. You will have at least one character who will make you laugh, one character who will annoy you, one who makes you cry, and one that you can show empathy towards.
The plot is simple to follow. Person A and person B agree to help each other to get person C (who person A likes) and person D (who person B likes) to return their feelings of love they have toward them. In the process of helping each other person A and person B go from enemies to frienemies to friends to best friends to something more?
For a 25 episode series, there were no useless episodes. Every episode seemed to show the progression/growth of the different relationships forming and foreshadowing to an inevitable end.
The conclusion (while obvious by the time you got there) was a great ending to a great story. It's nice to reflect on the character change of each person involved when the anime is over. Most endings that end up being obvious can be nice, bad, etc but very few makes you simply smile, this one accomplishes this difficult task .
The major con of the series would be the introduction of a new character that ends up having feelings for person A I mentioned above. She is a minor distraction to the main point of the story and it was obvious that she wasn't of great importance from the first few scenes she was in, nevertheless she ends up coming in late to the series and finishing as a "support main character".
Some interesting things about the series: I really enjoy the music, even though there isn't a great deal of it. I especially like the original closing which you can listen to here:
The title of the anime is "Toradora". It's often mentioned in the anime that the only animal that is on par with the legendary tiger is the legendary dragon. "Tora" means tiger and "Dora" means dragon. This easily reflects on the two main characters that are named Taiga and Ryuuji. Taiga sounds like "tiger" and the character Ryuu means dragon.
If you liked this anime you would also like: Hiyokoi, but I think it's just a manga. I've never seen an anime adaptation for it. Even though the plots differ, it gives off the same feel and there are many places (like Toradora) where you just stop and smile. Important to note that it's still ongoing, or my source of manga just doesn't update it much..
