Toradora! - Character Discussion - Aisaka Taiga
 

The purpose of this thread is to provide a place to discuss all things Aisaka Taiga related.

http://forums.animesuki.com/picture....ictureid=11483

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Specifically, the dissocial personality disorder is described by the World Health Organization by the following criteria:

1. Callous unconcern for the feelings of others and lack of the capacity for empathy.
2. Gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms, rules, and obligations.
3. Incapacity to maintain enduring relationships.
4. Very low tolerance to frustration and a low threshold for discharge of aggression, including violence.
5. Incapacity to experience guilt and to profit from experience, particularly punishment.
6. Marked proneness to blame others or to offer plausible rationalizations for the behavior bringing the subject into conflict.
7. Persistent irritability.

The criteria specifically rule out Conduct disorders. Dissocial personality disorder criteria differ from those for antisocial and sociopathic personality disorders.

(Wikipedia: WHO)

Okay, she is not really anti social, she is dissocial. She did not fit all the description, but she does exhibits strong tendencies in few key areas.

That makes her look like a weirdo :heh:
Now we have a proper place to discuss whether she is "loli" or "petite", and whether she is a proper tsundere or just a bithcy aggresive girl. :p

Another possibility is that she has a slight case of Emotionally unstable personality disorder.

F60.3 Emotionally unstable personality disorder

F60.30 Impulsive type

1. The general criteria for personality disorder (F60) must be met. [see below]
2. At least three of the following must be present, one of which must be (2):
-------1. marked tendency to act unexpectedly and without consideration of the consequences; Trying to give someone a concussion to make them forget a love letter they found? I think that fits here.
-------2. marked tendency to quarrelsome behaviour and to conflicts with others, especially when impulsive acts are thwarted or criticized; She doesn't seem to actively confront others and be quarrelsome, but I don't think she makes any attempt to avoid such confrontations, and she definitely reacts violently to perceived confrontations even if in reality they aren't (i.e. Ryuuji bumping into Taiga accidentally and getting a fist to the face. Though that may actually have been from him calling her Palmtop Tiger...).
-------3. liability to outbursts of anger or violence, with inability to control the resulting behavioural explosions; Shown multiple times in the first episode...hell, shown multiple times in all four episodes so far.
-------4. difficulty in maintaining any course of action that offers no immediate reward;
-------5. unstable and capricious mood. A couple examples: when fighting over Ryuuji's bag in ep 1, at the breakfast restaurant in ep 3, at the end of the roof scene in episode 4.

She fits four of the five listed items, and as only three are required, I think this fits her quite well.

eh…

I’m having serious troubles to like, understand, or even sympathize with this anime version of Taiga. It’s somehow strange because manga Taiga and novel Taiga are probably my favorite versions of this dreadful archetype. While the anime is actually making a good depiction of Taiga’s behavior/personality, I simply can’t find, or even remember, anything of what I loved about her counterparts in the source material—either I missed something in the novel/manga, or her character has been lost in translation.

For starters, Rie Kugimiya… she has one of those voices that can shatter glass without too much effort, especially when it comes to her tsundere roles. This time around, well, is all the same with the tsundere, but slightly different to convey the little details that can make a “huge” distinction with her closest cousins. Add it to her “violence-upgrade” and it becomes even more difficult to like this "new" version of Taiga.

But, but… my greatest complaint lies exactly on the very fact I still don’t know anything about her—her background, motives, and the likes. Her characterization has not been very effective in this sense, in order to illustrate her issues and situations in more detail. And instead, the character has remained static when it was supposed to change (or let's just say improve) as result of the second episode, the moment Ryuuji vows to stay with Taiga. (was this really what it attempted to convey? not really sure of this either)...

I disagree with 3 and 5, perhaps due to my "lack of" understanding of the definitions(that is to say that my perception of the actual def given might be incorrect).

3.Wouldn't the "inability to control resulting behavioural explosions" mean that you could not control the fact that you are acting with violence once you start that outburst, like a kid who didn't get what he wanted and falls into a temper tandrum? I think that, other than the love letter attack, all of her attempts of physical violence were conducted with the reasoning that she did not agree to what Ryuuji was doing, whether it was warranted or not.

5. I wouldn't consider her mood "unstable" or "impulsive" since it is within her natural personality to do those things. To me, "unstable" would constitute having radical fluctuations in mentality, acting nice to an individual one moment, then, for no or little reasoning completely change to someone different. Taiga's normal personality only seems to change when refering to Kitamura, which is the guy she likes. Because she doesn't change her mentality in normal situations, I wouldn't say she's unstable. I wouldn't consider embarassment, nor physical violence unstable unless it is used outside the parameters of her character, which it doesn't seem to be.

It would just be easier to say that her size, and looks just fits her personality, childish. Though her tantrums are of epic proportions.

A tiger is a cat after all. When it is left alone, it is cute (just like how Taiga is curled up on her bed like an adorable little kitten...). But you provoke it, you will never tie your shoelaces again.

One word! Ice-queen-chibi-tsundere.

She definitely has a lot of trouble processing her internal feelings and translates many of them into almost panicky violence.

But those problems are much better showed in the novels and in the manga than in anime.

That and the fact that she isnt really tsundere yet, but more of a bitchy girl to some (like Ryuuji, who deserves to be treated better) or nice to others like Kitamura or Minori. In anime it is still unclear why someone would like Kitamura, as the only reason so far seems that he has 'harem-lead' implant installed and is explained as being nice... Otherwise girls would probably run away as far as they can from such stalker goof.

Since this IS a character discussion thread, can someone put in descriptions from the novels and manga? With spoiler tags, of course.

Falkor, as for what you ahve noted I have to agree...But the problem for that the most of those explanations where in the material that should have been in episode 1 and 2 yet anime breezed through them juts to make two fillers in a row (in a sense has no real importance to the plot) and because of that those explanations were lost. They may ahve decided to pull them out later, but due to that the tsrnegth of her character is lost in the scenes that are played now. In manga/novels you already know enough about her at this point so each scene has a more special ring to it...In anime, due to rushing in the beginning a part of it has been lost.

I agree, although her character has developed and she's become less violent (thankfully!), and we even know a bit of backstory like she could have had Kitamura but rejected him, nevertheless we don't know why she's so violent or anything about her as a person. She remains my least favourite character of the series, I think this would change if something more were filled in. OK so we don't know much about any of the characters, but there are inklings about Ryuu and Minori, and nothing much we need to know about Kitamura. Taiga though is such an extreme person that we need to know more if we're to sympathise with her.

Still, Taiga getting owned by a bicycle. Goes to show that any and every one has something which they suck in.

Taiga should die a very painful and bloody death, end of discussion....

*gets shot*

J/k, j/k... lol I honestly don't like her though. Her attitude sure pisses me off limits.

Oh the character development… yeah, there was a lot of it missing as far as my knowledge of the source material concerns. But I didn’t want to mention it, even though I was aware of it, because I was trying to look at Taiga from an anime perspective, and seriously, it’s very frustrating.

Why making her so violent? In this regard, she is no different from her anime counterpart in ZnT. She wasn’t really this violent in the first two volumes of the novel (I’m not sure if past the second volume, things become more chaotic with respect to Taiga). The problem with making her so violent is that I don’t see anything that can offset it, or serve as a good motive/reason for doing so in the form of character development. One of my expectations for this adaptation was actually that, whether or not they would tone down Taiga’s selfish behavior a little bit, since even her verbal abuse was too much for some people, but they did the opposite. I’m trying to understand a reason why they would try to make Taiga more violent character-wise, and it serves no purpose within the story—other than upsetting me, and decreasing any kind of “love” I had for the character.

I get the feeling that there's tension on the writing team. Someone with decision making power *wants* Taiga to be "like that girl in ZnT" (physically violent rather than verbally dangerous). But others on the writing staff (probably those who have actually read the novels, etc) are pushing back in certain ways since Taiga is much more complex than a typical loli-tsundere archetype. Hence we get odd back'n'forth behavior swings like we saw between ep 3 and ep 4.

Can we say "Executive Meddling"?

Or "Improvised Industrial Creativity", since her template is based pretty much on typical tsundere characters.

Anyway, a tsundere is a part of the story, an element. It is all how you cook it in the pot to make the story radically different. Clannad is a starkly reversed example of Toradora, a little more nostalgic feel to it, but otherwise, incorporate regular character types (just a larger number of tsunderes as supporting, and having Mei as the only loli, that is all).

I'm hoping the Louise thing was just a choice by the director of that particular episode and we'll see less of that in future anime-original content.