Review of Durarara!!

A little bit of a series retrospective here. I haven't seen Durarara since it came out and would never rewatch it. In my mind, it is one of the original massively overrated series of my childhood, with baffling storytelling and focus problems that ruin everything good about it. Let me start with an analogy: imagine JK Rowling creates the world of Harry Potter, filled with wizards, magic, lore, history, a haunted castle, centaurs, giant spiders, elves, soul-stealing dark phantoms, dragons, etc. But as she's writing it she decides, "no, Harry Potter is too much a chosen one type and involved with interesting people, secrets, andhigh stakes drama. Instead, let's make Dudley the protagonist because he can learn about all the interesting stuff as a three-times-removed bystander who never acts to move the story forward, but simply observes interesting things other people do." That's what Durarara is. Craft a world where a waiter has superhero strength, a headless horseman rides a motorcycle around the city, gangs fight one another, a Machiavellian psycho who's waiter's mortal enemy creates chaos across town. Which of these interesting characters is the MC do you ask? How about some stupid, aggressively bland and boring high school nobodies who do nothing but occasionally witness some of the cool stuff that happens.

You watch this show and see interesting characters, setting, and plot lines but then have to constantly return to the most uninteresting nothing characters. Sorry, not enough time for Celty to solve the mystery of her head's location, but yeah, enough time for us to see emotional high school boy do nothing for several episodes. Make the interesting character the protagonist. Place the center of the story where the interesting stuff happens. Why would anyone want to watch Harry Potter but through Dudley's POV? A total catastrophe of storytelling.

tldr; It should be titled Dunonono!! since that would accurately how it feels to experience all the stupid narrative zagging from interesting and exciting characters back to the story of high schoolers doing nothing.