Crossover With Non-anime Series Fan Fiction ❯ Terdwilicker's Anime Reviews ❯ Tora Dora ( Chapter 11 )

Tora Dora is an anime about appearances. How someone looks defines how they are treated. Their inner self is not valued or respected, because people are shallow and won't see past that. The hero of the story is a boy with an ugly face, the son of a dead Yakuza. His mother is a hostess and comes home drunk every night, but makes enough in tips to keep a roof over their head. She is a good person, though she's probably a bad mother. Her son has had to raise himself, in shame, and has the reputation of a Yankee, a tough guy, aka the Dragon, aka Dora. His neighbor is a foul tempered little girl in his grade called the Palmtop Tiger, Taiga. Dragons and Tigers are evenly match in Japanese and Chinese mythology, so they are destined to battle each other. 

The story is a Japanese retelling, with their own twists, of the famous French novel Cyrano De Bergerac, about an ugly man who gets asked for help by a friend to assist in wooing a woman he already likes. This puts him in a comic/tragic position of helping or betraying the trust, but at the cost of either his honor or his heart. ToraDora is the same. Both characters have crushes on other people, and are friends with each other's crush, so cooperate in order to woo them. In the process, their friends are not dumb, and attempt to get these two ferocious people to see the love between them rather than persue those who have other dreams. The characterization is deep, nuanced, and powerful. The story covers a variety of events, including a stalker of a celebrity attending their school as a student, how to deal with a bad parent, and the heartache of being turned down by your crush. A great deal happens in 25 episodes of story, and you feel for these characters, right up the ending. It is a masterpiece of anime, and well worth seeing.