Review of Durarara!!

Durarara is like Baccano! if Baccano! was a complete mess of tropes and loosely strung-together subplots. Do you see how I used exclamation points for Baccano! and not Durarara? That’s because my excitement for Durarara is at least two exclamation points less than it deserves. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about the street gangs and the ambiguously omnipresent god character, but I just can’t bring myself to be sexually attracted to a headless woman. It’s a shame because Celty, the punk biker girl, is super hot from the neck down. When she was first introduced, I was like “holy boobies this is getting spicy”and I was really excited because the show was mind-numbingly boring up to that point. Much to my dismay, Celty was revealed to have no head and thus no cute anime girl features for my viewing pleasure. It’s like they were trying to teach me about how anime creates unrealistic portrayals of women and how I shouldn’t use it as a reference for actual people. You know, all women should be respected for what they are, blah blah blah. Just this once I wanted a sexy vigilante in a catsuit and they give me this headless weirdo with daddy issues. Yeah, she’s got a nice body, but what is she like in bed with no face? But I’m getting ahead of myself a little here. Let’s talk about the other characters. Oh wait, I can barely remember them because of how bland and inconsequential they were. Durarara (no exclamation point) does a horrible job of balancing the focus of all the characters and bringing their individual motivations to a satisfying climax. I think the outlines of their stories and backgrounds would work well on their own and with the impressive production quality of this show, but written together they don’t give you enough time to breathe let alone become immersed. Also, to nitpick more, Durara (minus one “ra” for disappointment) uses quick text messages for all of their exposition and it was such a pain to understand. I’m not Japanese, alright? I watch all anime subbed but the only phrase I know is “it’s stirring up my insides”. I doubt even the ultra-weebs could fully understand the texts anyway. If I wanted to pause the screen every episode to read the translations I would have just bought the manga.

7/10 for nice Celty fan-service but 5/10 for physically restricting headpats.