Minori without a doubt; she became my favorite not just from Toradora, but from every story I've watched, read, or played. In practically every episode she was doing something or other to make me smile or have some distant admiration:
- Her unusual metaphors: beating up her weaknesses, nosebleeds as perspiration of the heart, wanting to cut her hair so short that berries could grow on it.
- Her wacky anime antics: a cute girl detector, fake chest police, painting eyeballs on her eyelids and sleeping in class.
- Her random unapologetically dorky moments: "sighing GET," phrasing her inquiry to Ryuuji about what pictures he was buying in the context of a card game duel.
- Her courage and strength both physically and emotionally: never flinching when she needed to make some sacrifice for her two favorite people in life, taking out the track team with a softball, tackling four more guys at once (and this in an anime where the girls aren't super characters who kick guys through walls and whatnot!).
- Her subtlety and artful dodging to convey her feelings: her first ghost discussion, her ghost rejection, her reverse psychology with horror.
And the thing is, I don't even like the way she's drawn--to be honest, practically every time Minori appeared on screen I had to consciously ignore her constant wide-eye look. But I just walked away completely impressed by what the writer had done with her, keeping many typical traits of similar hyper-girl or weird-girl or brave-girl character archetypes but also giving her so many moments of originality that truly made Minori her own individual.