Character · Toradora!
Taiga Aisaka
A hundred and forty odd centimetres of rage, nicknamed the palmtop tiger, and unable to make her own breakfast.
In Otakana the clue reads: Tiny girl nicknamed the palmtop tiger
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Toradora!
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Taiga Aisaka hits people. She swings first, apologises rarely, and has broken enough school property to earn the nickname the palmtop tiger, a joke about a fighter small enough to sit in your hand. What the reputation hides is that she lives alone in a large flat next door to Ryuuji, cannot cook, cannot tidy, and was parked there by a family that found her inconvenient.
The tsundere label attached to her immediately and does not quite fit. Takemiya writes the temper as a defence built out of one specific childhood rather than as a character type off the shelf, and the second half of the series takes it apart piece by piece. By the end Taiga is doing things that need more courage than shouting does.
Her friendship with Minori is the relationship the show cares about most, whatever the romance plot claims. The two of them are loud in complementary ways and protective of each other well past the point of sense. J.C.Staff animated the novels in 2008, and Taiga has been on best-heroine lists ever since.
Spelling TAIGA
TAIGA is five letters and reads like the English word tiger with the R filed off, which is roughly the pun the nickname makes. In Japanese it means a great river. Note the AI in the middle: two vowels side by side, both pronounced, ta-i-ga. There is a second Taiga in this library, Kagami of Seirin.