You know how it is, you follow a link and then you follow another link and then you find a series you never considered before and decide to download it. So I ended up with a copy of the first Durarara!! series and watched 2.5 episodes of it before dropping it like a hot rock.

ANN categorizes it as "action, comedy, drama, mystery, supernatural, thriller" and it is all of those. They didn't mention "horror" but really should have. Ye Gods.

I got onto Wikipedia for the series, which is my main source for spoilers these days, and it has a separate page for main characters. Where I found out some stuff:

The protagonist is a hick from the countryside who never left the village in which he grew up until now, when he's age 15. He is in Tokyo to attend high school. That's how he's introduced. He comes off as naive, overly polite, overwhelmed, and a real nebbish.

But it turns out he's actually something of a crime lord. He's the head of a pretty major gang in Ikebukuro, which gang he actually organized. It's a gang that his friend mentions in the first episode, which means he did all this before the series began. And that means everything, everything we see and are told about him must be a cover story.

That seems so ridiculously out of character as to make me wonder if there's really any kind of coherency to the story telling at all.

The headless motorcycle rider is obviously the most interesting character in the series. I had seen her in fan art and so on and didn't know where she came from. Her story seems to be the center of this series, but I'm not willing to wade through all the other stuff just to learn the rest of it.

Actually, by the time I gave up, the series was nauseating me. Just not my kind of thing. So I'll be deleting it.

UPDATE: It's always hard to write a really good bad guy. The problem is coming up with a plausible motive for him, a reason why he's doing what he's doing and really wants to do it.

The bad guy this time, Izaya, is evil because it's fun to be evil. And that's all; he claims to love humanity but his motive seems to be that he enjoys seeing the faces of people that he's really screwed over. In essence, he's a sadist.

And that's a cop out. It's just too easy to make your antagonist insane and vicious. It's lazy writing.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:13 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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