Review of Durarara!!

Jumping around, switching perspective and focus over and over promising there's something great at the end can't distract the audience from shallow and uninteresting characters forever, especially when you don't actually deliver on that promise. The show takes a while to really establish itself. I went in with no prior knowledge of the show and was really confused what it was trying to do for several episodes. There's not a real main character, not really any antagonist (not at first anyway), just a bunch of random stories about people living in the same city. This doesn't hold later content back as once the stories start overlappingit's very enjoyable and they needed that set up, but the first few episodes feel weak on first watch.

The show hits its stride specifically during chance interactions. Celty running into Shizuo is a great scene that breaks down barriers between the characters, Izaya beating up Mikado's bullies is fun and ups the stakes, those scenes are good because they show more is going on than meets the eye, the only problem is the "more" is just disappointing.

The mid-season finale for instance has a big reveal that's meant to shock you because 2 elements of the show are revealed to be connected and a certain character is revealed to be involved in more than we thought, and at first I was excited, but then I realized, this doesn't change anything. The bad guys are still insane, the good guys are still boring, I don't like anyone, and if the plot ever ends up going anywhere, I won't really care.

Okay, there were 2 characters I liked, but they still have their issues. The first is Shizuo, because he says what I'm thinking. He hates Izaya because he's shifty and doesn't make sense, I hate Izaya because he's shifty and doesn't make sense. He hates characters acting like idiots in the name of true love, I hate characters acting like idiots in the name of true love (no seriously, at least 5 characters behave completely irrationally and do things no sane human being would ever do because they're in love with another character for superfluous reasons. It's the single worst part of the show). He gets along with Celty (the other character I like) because she's the only reasonable human being (which is actually a pretty cool contrast because she's not actually a human being) in the show, I like Celty because she's the only reasonable human being in the show. The issue is Shizuo is presented as the weird one, like his fits of rage is an unreasonable character quirk instead of being right. As for Celty, her character is completely ruined by her relationship with Shinra, who's honestly just the worst. He’s manipulative and dishonest for contrived reasons, he basically holds Celty captive for a time because she has nowhere else to go and directly impedes her in her primary character motivation and trivializes all of her insecurities and desires, and she ignores all that because he says he's loved her ever since he was a toddler and sliced open her naked body (yes you read that right). Two seconds of analyzing Shinra as a character reveal he's about as bad as it gets, and the fact that Celty can't see that ruins everything good about her.

Celty is a perfect example of everything wrong with the show. There's a lot to like, I enjoy most of the stories, I can get behind a boy looking for his cute classmate’s shoes and a headless horsewoman tearing a city apart to find her head being put right next to each other as if they had the same importance, but major parts of the core of the show are horribly thought out and undermine the good. Every time I think of something I liked, and there's a lot that I liked, I have to add on "but it doesn't go anywhere," or "but it doesn't change the status quo any." I want to like it, "but," I just can't, it's extremely disappointing and more than a little frustrating.