Way back in the first Voice Module, Pontifus challenged me to apply mythology to Toradora!  I am here today to accept that challenge, no matter how many souls I destroy in my mad quest for the perfect explanation.   This is definitely exploratory writing, so I have no idea if I’ll arrive at any kind of useful conclusion by the essay’s end, but we’ll just find out, won’t we?

Typically I start a myth-post by defining each character according to some mythological analogue, the better to gauge their positions in my madly-constructed framework.  So let’s do that.  Ryuuji feels an awful lot like a mimetic version of the hero of a romance.  For a while I thought Ya-chan was his sister, and thus he was entirely orphaned.  Oops.  It’s pretty telling, thematically though, as he is effectively estranged from the society that spawned him in the way an orphan is:  his father is gone, his mother is, uh, not very motherly (though very loving, bless her), and his appearance has, like the Phantom underneath the opera house, removed him from society despite his other social graces.  He’s similar to Lancelot as portrayed in Steinbeck’s re-telling of the Arthur stories (in that version, Lancelot was incredibly ugly, but he found renown in Arthur’s court *cough* and Guinevere’s heart *cough* anyway).  In that sense Ryuuji is a kind of knight-errant, and I’m not just saying that because he reminds me of Lancelot.  He is fearsome, making people around him afraid at the sight of him, and yet he typically does good deeds for no reason, like turning in those wallets in the first episode.  There are a few Arthurian stories of knights winning tourneys or other challenges and renouncing or returning their gifts.

Taiga has two roles as I see her.  The first is from Ryuuji’s point of view.  She is a kind of mystical spirit — since I’m going with Arthurian stuff here, let’s see how far I can extend the comparison.  There are several Arthurian stories about witches, hags, or other nasty lady-folks who beg a boon of the questing knight — the one who gives it to her gets lots of good stuff, up to and including kingdoms, sometimes.  Taiga, for most people, would be a problem too big to countenance.  She doesn’t exactly ask Ryuuji for help, but what sort of knight would pass up the chance?  He promises, despite her prickly nature — which could be a kind of mimetic replacement for the physical loathesomeness the Arthurian hags typically hid behind — to help her with her own goal, that of netting Kitamura.  He is offered, instead of a kingdom, something perhaps better still:  Minorin.

There’s her second role, one of a quester on her own terms.  But while Ryuuji quests with no particular goal in mind (he has one, but his adventures aren’t furthering them at the time), Taiga is trying her best to head straight for Kitamura.  She is not only pursuing her love, but righting a past wrong.  Taiga accidentally rejected him, and we learn early on it weighs on her mind continually until she manages, with Ryuuji’s help, to, well, right that particular wrong.  Unfortunately I can’t remember particular names, but there are several Arthurian knights who don’t know their own strength until they learn how to control themselves — they’re analogous to Cuchulainn from Celtic myth, who was powerful but untrained until he met the witch Scathbad.  Taiga is this kind of untrained knight, and Ryuuji can serve as a model for her, in a sense.

Minorin, of course, is more than a goal:  she’s a fisher king.  Something is wrong in Minorin’s kingdom, and she needs a knight to say precisely the right words, or do the right task, to make everything bloom again.  As of yet (episode fifteen), I’m not precisely sure what’s turning her bounty to ash, aside from her growing affection for Ryuuji.

Ami is an interesting case.  I suspect she’s, at her core, a princess or queen figure — this comes as a surprise to no one — but filed down further into the world of the mimetic than the show normally bothers with.  Her problem is that she has no problems; she is a delicious paradox of the lower-mimetic / satirical world.  She is a high profile person with no iron in her backbone strong enough to withstand the pressure, because it was never forged properly.  Usually these royalty figures snap, like Guinevere or the ladies of several tragedies, such as Desdemona.  Ami isn’t going to, though, she’s getting better over time.  This is due, again, to our knights-errant, who now number two.

That’s a lot of words, around 700 I see, about analogies between characters and myth-figures.  You may be wondering what the point is.  I think I have discovered one, just in the writing of the last paragraph.  Toradora! is a quest after the Holy Grail.  These characters, in the act of trying to attain their loves (the surface level goal for almost all of them), are trying to make themselves good enough to have their own goals.  They are paragons of self-improvement, striving always to find the things that will lift them up, while simultaneously hefting themselves towards those things by their own power.  This quest can only end happily for all of them when they are all so much advanced that the loss of their perceived goal will no longer injure them.  The uneven cast distribution is, in this light, incredibly telling.  One of the characters will not end up with another of the characters (though I suppose, if a complete, sappy Happy End is required, Kitamura could finally win over the class president’s flinty heart).  They will only be happy when they can all accept the moment in which they are not the one their chosen love, in turn, chooses.  I can go so far as to say they will only be capable of attaining their chosen love in the moment that they accept that chosen love may turn away.

Contrast this with something like Lovely Complex (I showed TheKittyMeister the first episode this evening).  All the characters pair off by the end — or start off that way.  Neat, compact, like a Victorian ending which flourishes into a neat bow rather than trailing edges into the floor.  Toradora! can’t end that way.  It’s all very reminscient of Buddha and his quest for Enlightenment.  Rejecting it, or finally being able to do so, is the only way to attain it (forgive me if I’m paraphrasing the Buddha’s story poorly, but hopefully you’ll take my intention in this case if I have strayed too far).

So, you want me to bottom-line it for you?  Toradora is Enlightenment!