Toradora Week 2 - Episodes 3 and 4

Episode 3 - "Your Song"

Minori and Ryuji make the best of being trapped inside the storage shed.

Ryuji's rice cooker breaks, so he and Taiga go to the local "Johnny's" family restaurant to eat. Minori works there as a waitress, one of the many part-time jobs she apparently holds. Another is at a liquor store, and Ryuji offers to help her out, dragging Taiga along unwillingly. Ryuji and Minori get locked in the storehouse, and while inside Ryuji learns a bit more about her.

Episode 4 - "That Moment's Expression"

Ryuji finds out that Yusaku confessed his feelings to Taiga a year ago, and that she rejected him.

Ryuji finds Taiga's stash of blurry photographs of Yusaku, and offers to take some better ones for her to have. After getting her prizes, Ryuji offers to laminate the ones she likes the best, but she can't choose and leaves the photos with him. Yusaku finds out about them, and then reveals that he confessed his feelings to Taiga a year ago and was rejected.

Thoughts
While episode 3 garnered a lot of cheap laughs from Taiga's inability to ride a bicycle, it was redeemed by its focus on Minori who, despite being a little bit wacky and extremely enthusiastic, seems to have some hidden reasoning behind her upbeat attitude and her multiple part-time jobs. What's going on there isn't quite clear at this point, but having established her as having something of a hidden side has boosted my interest in the series a bit.

Of course, it becomes even more clear in episode 4 why tsunderekko are annoying to me - Taiga's tsundere rage appears to have quashed any chance at a relationship she could have had with Yusaku right from the start, since she rejected his confession a year ago. Yes, again I realize that if things worked logically and people behaved themselves, then there wouldn't be enough conflict to fill a series of this length. But it still grates on me to see people behaving in immature ways that are counter-productive to their own happiness. Doubly-so because I think that the tsundere character type is very unrealistic. At least, I've never met anyone who was so standoffish, but perhaps I'm just lucky.

Looks like next week the last of the five main characters gets a proper introduction (she appeared briefly in episode 4), complicating matters even further.