I’m a bit late, but that’s because as usual I got distracted by a new game and I’ve been working long hours. But never fear, the weekly dose of tsundere loli adventures is here, complete with chapter skipping and ugly birds making jokes about shampoo commercials. However, what I find the most disturbing is the addictiveness of the ED song.
Taiga’s even more abusive than Louise, with a constant stream of insults directed at the poor fellow. Her voice in this episode also sounds a lot more Louise than it did in episode one. Ryuuji fights back to a degree, but he still makes her food. Then she totally cockblocks him from Minori with a nasty smile on her face. Ouch dude, ouch.
She’s a strange one with her obscure references and quick method of speaking. One of the members of the group that subbed this, [gg], has a fairly detailed set of TL notes for Minorin this episode, you can check it out here.
That…looks like it hurt. Like others who have read the novels, I noticed that some of the first couple of chapters were skipped out on or cut down heavily, like the basketball scene. I’m holding out judgment on whether or not this is a good idea, because I think a lot of what was cut was important development. However, if this gives them more time to flesh out some of the better story sections later on (like Ami) then I’m all for it. On the other hand, if they use the extra time for shitty JC Staff fillers I’m going to rage.
This girl is hard to follow, she goes from melodramatic pondering, to angry facial contortions, to asking the guy to take care of Taiga. I guess that’s what makes her endearing. I’m starting to warm up to Hocchan’s portrayal of Minorin, at least for the time being.
This…was strange looking.
Instead of actually showing a wide shot of them kicking the pole the whole time, we get the occasional foot, a shaking face, and then shots of power lines. Trying to save a few bucks on animation there guys? Anyways, the scene was fairly well done, if anything Rie has a really good angry/emotional voice. She gets lots of practice.
Aha! The show can’t end 2 episodes in now can it! Instead she gets the dreaded “friend zone.”
Like the scene before it, I guess there wouldn’t be a story without stuff like this, despite the stupidity of it all. “Not being able to leave her alone” and trying to get closer to Minorin just can’t be worth all the abuse and explain his dedication in a realistic sense. Ah, the world of anime, how I must suspend my disbelief for thee. When I read the source material I kind of glazed over this beginning material, and I’m glad I didn’t give up, because it got a lot better afterward.
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Here’s a warning: Ep 3 looks like it’s shitty J.C. Filler already. And as for the rest, at least she does lay off on the abuse… unlike Louise. Or at least she does in the novels and the manga… even going so far as to accompany him to the family restaurant that Minorin works at, every day, paying their meal, just so Ryuuji gets to spend time with Minori in her cute waitress uniform. As I’ve said elsewhere, Ryuuji understands and ACCEPTS Taiga the way she is, period. Not even Minori really sees who Taiga is, or understands her – she just accepts her, and that’s it. That’s why Taiga was railing at the world and Kitamura and Minori during the lamp post scene. Nobody gets her… except Ryuuji, which is why he joined in and then told her the pole was tilted even though it wasn’t, to make her feel a bit better. She knows he’s lying, as he did when he ate the cookies, but she appreciates that understanding and.. well, complete understanding and acceptance. He really can’t leave bad enough alone – that’s why he’s willing to be there at her side, still. He can’t leave alone a girl who’s hard working and clumsy, even if her attitude sucks; his OCD makes him NEED to take care of things, and Taiga appreciates the instant acceptance she gets from his family which is why she described his place as ‘cozy’ unlike her old home or the apartment.
Beyond that, they amped the physical violence here against people AGAIN – in the novels and manga, she’s violent towards object but not often with people. Even Kawashima didn’t get smacked across the face… and I suspect she’ll get hit here, just because they want to make Taiga like Louise, except less yandere.
What pissed me off was the lack of inner monologue during that pole attack, which explained that he DID understand what she was going through and that the pole wasn’t really tilted.. but he thought it might be, since she was the one person in the world who might end up being able to do so. That, and the order of the confession got screwed up… oh, and Kitamura didn’t elaborate on the ‘last year’ bit where he got instantly rejected by the tsundere, which is why he himself doesn’t accept her proposal – he thinks it’s all over, and so (with her ‘I don’t hate Ryuuji’ speech, sounds more like she’s confessing to Ryuuji).
Well so far I like it for he most part, but I don’t want it to become another ZnT.
@Haesslich
Well that explains much about the failed confession, how deliciously ironic it could have been but alas for the JC Staff and their infernal cuts.
Crusader: That was the point. He confessed to her last year, she shot him down as she shot down every boy that year – she was new to the school, and her doll-like appearance won her many admirers. That’s how she earned her Palmtop Tiger name; the shootdowns of confessors, as well as angry confrontations with everyone else. Unlike Ryuuji, who merely looked like a delinquent, she really acted in ways which earned her the reputation. A reputation she really didn’t want, and now resents… but due to her nature, keeps earning. Look at how she dealt with the rumors at school this episode.
So Kitamura confessed to her, she turned him down angrily, and over the course of the year she found herself falling for Kitamura but she’s so klutzy and insecure that she can’t figure out how to do it, and even after getting some quiet support from Ryuuji to lean on she screws up the confession, although it starts with “I love you” and then goes on to “I don’t hate Ryuuji”. And, of course, Kitamura (being rejected last year) is somewhat amused by her funny faces as of late; she’s not just angry, but gets embarassed and shy and then mad in a different way at Takasu Ryuuji, who happens to be Kitamura’s best friend. So he’s happy for Ryuuji, getting a ‘friend’ like Taiga who understands him… and is happy to be friends WITH her, since she ‘obviously’ doesn’t want him, due to her botched confession which sounded more like a love song for Ryuuji. She sure never got that worked up about anyone before, not even Kitamura. Angry? Sure. The other ‘funny’ faces? Nobody else has done that to her yet.
Whoopsie. Tsundere responses killed the relationship before it began.
Wow, seems the the anime is a bit “it’s all there in the manual” kind of deal. Seems like the tsundere did things that have come back to bite her in the ass, if only such justice happened elsewhere though.
Poor Kitamura, well it would seem that the Taiga has much to repent for if she wants to succeed… Still seems the school is heavily slanted towards the loli-con side of things. Such a pity Taiga applied Machiavelli’s lesson that it is far safer to be feared than loved, in the context of romantic pursuits.
Crusader: More like ‘here’s how J.C. Staff fucked up because they want to make this into the next Zero no Tsukaima, and this is how it was SUPPOSED to go’.
And part of the issue is that Taiga was never loved – not by her folks, not by her friends. She doesn’t know how to react to it, or to softer feelings.. which is why she goes with her instinctive yelling and shouting and lashing out. Tsunderes don’t always win… which was part of the original series’ point, and which seems to have been lost on J.C. Staff. As in real life, a lot of the time the guy gets put off by the initial cold reaction unless he’s either a) a stalker, or b) obsessed… with the very rare c) he knows she didn’t mean it, except with case ‘C’, that’s usually classified as ‘the guy is a control freak’. Which, y’know, he usually is. Or deluded.
So the tsundere response, which wasn’t shown here, blew up in her face a year later. And of course, leave it to J.C. Staff to forget that important part.
While I agree that tsunderes give off hostile vibes that ought to be met with hostility so long as there was a process of shared “trail by fire” (sort of like what Sheryl and Alto-hime went through) is done reasonably well there shouldn’t be too many problems, and hopefully this won’t be Saito and Louise Redux.
Still hoping that Taiga’s antics change otherwise success for her will remain a pipe dream. Perhaps I’ll read the scanlations instead since it seems that JC Staff might end up slaughtering the source material whole sale, rather than limit themselves to mere butchery.
Episode 3′s a filler. That does NOT inspire confidence in me.
Besides, if a girl keeps yelling at you and blowing you off… sooner or later, you tend to lose interest in the girl, especially if you never see the ‘dere’ side, which most tsunderes in anime don’t show to the guy they like except in extremely contrived circumstances.
Still, Kitamura lost out last year… which means that his turning her down is either ‘sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose’, or else just showing he’s an asshole, depending on who you talk to.
Fillers are annoying but they aren’t anything new or impossible to pull off well, then again its JC Staff…
Indeed the dere side often doesn’t come out normally enough, but male lead thickheadedness can also be a factor. If a woman is yelling at you and she ain’t an authority figure, chances are she’s an enemy that has declared hostilities, a guy can then ignore it or oblige such hostility with his own.
I don’t think Kitamura is being an asshole, Taiga made her feelings clear it will take more than the passage of time to heal that one…If he wanted to be an asshole he would not even consent to being a friend.
I know, but without that ‘last year, when I confessed to you and you turned me down’ bit, it looks a bit like he’s acting like an asshole. At least one blogger declared it so, based on the incomplete data from the episode.
Funny how we tend to blame the guys in anime for screwing up more often than not. Guess it comes with the medium, though I still think poor Kitamura had to have had some guts for trying considering how many mangled would be suitors were probably strewn about before he tried. We usually get saddled with loser harem animu leads so it comes as no surprise we treat almost all male leads in shows with a hint of romance as such. Reminds me of why I liked Alto-hime at least he wasn’t being a total jerk off…oh man Macross withdrawl. In any case we rarely blame the moe blob for shit that goes wrong. It doesn’t look as if JC Staff is going to give the truth and pretend that Kitamura is an ass to make Taiga more sympathetic.
Did you catch the Gundam 00 stream by chance, comrade?
Haesslich, may I call you out on something that you don’t actually know but is spreading around like wild fire?
obviously spoiler on the novel…..
The reason that Kitamura reject Taiga is not because Taiga rejected him last year nor was it because he thinks that Taiga and Ryuji is a pair (he made it quite clear that he understood what’s coming from Taiga, and he said he accepted her feelings too! That is not a misunderstanding), it’s because he actually has a crush on *somebody else* now (which the manga won’t even begin to be able to touch as that is dealt with in volume 5 of the novel which AFAIK is not fan-translated yet, so stop using only the first volume of either the novel or the manga to base your reasoning). He was going to reject Taiga regardless anyway because he already has eyes on someone else (which is actually hinted in the anime OP if you look really carefully). If you don’t know this piece of information and only base it on what is out there in English only, yes, you would think dropping out the whole “one year before” information changes the context, but in fact if you know the REAL story, it changes nothing, at all. Kitamura probably rejected her in the nicest way possible and gently nugged her to someone besides her, that’s real tact instead of being a jerk.
houkohlic: I’m not saying Kitamura rejected Taiga because he was rejected – I’m saying that he TRIED for her last year, got rejected, and right now doesn’t see her in that fashion… plus her confession sounds a lot like she’s confessing more to Ryuuji with how she phrased things, especially in the anime where they had Kitamura asking if she liked Ryuuji (rather than ‘do you dislike him?’) before saying she liked Kitamura, rather than having her say “I love you” and then going on about Ryuuji AFTER that. It completely skews the scene as far as context goes. Plus the way the anime presented it suggests she confessed to him last year as well, and he blew her off then rather than it being the reverse. Without the part about him confessing, it makes Kitamura look worse to some bloggers (as linked) than it really was.
Like I said in earlier posts, he’s moved on from Taiga – as Volume 5 of the novels suggests more openly. And if you’re talking about Kawashima, he says he grew up with her and doesn’t see her THAT way either… but hates her hypocrisy, which she engages in around him now as well as around adults and everyone else. But, the fact remains – a year ago he did ask her, got rejected… and since then he’s moved on from Taiga, which makes her own cause (trying to win him over now that he’s moved on, a year after she blew HIM off) a lost one. Of course, that doesn’t stop her from trying…
I’d say the plot moving along nicely.
My stance remains the same than Nagi has a higher chance of being this seasons best moe than Taiga
They really cut out a lot of the character development and relationship building between Ryuuji and Taiga. They condensed 10 chapters worth of development into 8 minutes.
I raged so hard when I saw this episode and the fact that the next episode is a god damn filler does NOT help. I had high hopes when I heard they were adapting Tora Dora into an anime and this episode has pretty much crushed them all.
HNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNG at Taiga.
Haesslich:
Again, you are comparing stuff you don’t know about with what happened in the manga and not looking at the context of what is presented in the anime.
The context within the anime is perfectly logical, you picking on the whole use of like/dislike are just semantics which changes nothing in the context. Since being in Japanese the whole usage of “suki” has lots of meanings – it can be interpretated as both “like” in a romantic way and “like” as in friendship and is often used interchangably. Taiga made her confession clear to Kitamura that she was indeed “confessing” (kokuhaku) to him and she explains (albit very clumsily) she likes Ryuji as a friend, Kitamura clearly said he understood that but still rejected her eitherway. The meaning in the words are quite clear in the Japanese cultural context and doesn’t skew anything unless you want it to be skewed (like you are).
As for Kitamura’s crush, obviously if you think I was talking about Kawashima Ami then you know nothing about the later novels and how Kitamura’s crush of someone else makes the current confession scene logical without altering anything later, except that I’m now almost certain that my interpretaction of what you are thinking is correct – mainly you’re just angry the anime is not a one-to-one adaptation instead of looking at how the overall plot can/will progress (which you can’t anyway, since you obviously are not clued in enough about the later novels as shown by you raising Ami as Kitamura’s love interest), so I’m not going to talk about that anymore.
houko: I’m also looking at the light novels. ‘Suki’ can be like, light love, or very fond love… but the issue I have is that they didn’t explain what the “last year” was, which means that (in the context of the scene there), Kitamura reminiscing about how it reminds him of last year sounds like SHE confessed to him last year, rather than the reverse. I’ve already seen some bloggers complain that Kitamura’s an asshole for refusing her, especially with the way the confession was ordered – first she says she doesn’t HATE Ryuuji… then she says she likes/loves Kitamura, rather than going with the confession first, and then saying she doesn’t hate Ryuuji.
I’m not angry that it’s not a one-on-one adaptation, although I prefer those, so much that they appear to be setting it up so that this is a ‘typical tsundere scenario’. ToraDora the light novels and the manga aren’t like that, and yet J.C. Staff seems determined to make this square peg fit into the round hole by shaving off the corners which make it different. I’m repeating what OTHER people have said, people who’ve never read the novels or manga. This is how it looks to them, and that’s why I’m worried that J.C. Staff will make this like Shana or Zero no Tsukaima. They’ve added more violence to pander to the Kuguyuu fans who loved her Shana or Louise roles, and they’ve made episode 3 a filler already.
If you want to see what I mean, I suggest reading other blogs talking about the series so far… and you’ll notice ALL of them have the view that this is a typical tsundere show, albeit one where Kugimiya Rie is using a lower voice than her usual.
That, and J.C. Staff has a history of hacking apart original source work, the past few years, in order to make it ‘more marketable’. Between those, the filler ep that’s showing up so early on, and the way other people I’ve talked to seem to feel this is a normal tsundere show, or are calling Kitamura an insensitive asshole/ignorant/etc.
The fact that J.C. Staff was producing this worried me. The fast pace of episodes 1 and 2 was somewhat unnerving, and the way they cut out parts of the scenes which explained why things showed up the way they did (the reasons everyone saw Taiga and Ryuuji as a couple, the confession’s order and a few lines being dropped here and there)… I don’t have much confidence that they won’t suddenly make them a loving couple by the end. Or just another expy of Louise and her ‘dog’, in order to pander to Kuguyuu’s fans.
Nice to see people linking to the TL notes, since we kinda forgot to add the link to the notes in the episode and just tossed it out on IRC and TT. Probably going to be the same deal with ep3, 4 hours left till it airs now and I’m all excited.