Durarara episode 1

Just before I watched the first epis­ode of Dur­arara, I found myself flick­ing back through old entries on Animen­ano and see­ing how little an impact Bac­cano left when it first hit the air. The only posts I found on it were people won­der­ing why on earth this show wasn’t more pop­u­lar. How­ever you can’t keep qual­ity down for long. Word of mouth spread, rat­ings rose and slowly but surely word filtered through that anime fan­dom had missed one of the best shows of the year. Pop­ular­ity rose as more recom­mend­a­tions flooded in until, fast for­ward to 2010, and Dur­arara becomes the most anti­cip­ated new show of the winter sea­son based mainly upon the fact it’s done by the same team.

Now to give you a brief glimpse of how much I loved Bac­cano, let me list out all the anime I’ve watched in order of how much I like them until I reach Bac­cano. Death Note. Bac­cano. There, see? Find me someone who loves Bac­cano more than I do and I’ll show you someone who hasn’t watched Death Note yet. So even though this will obvi­ously be the most over-blogged show of the sea­son, I could hardly let this opper­tun­ity pass. I’m not so much hop­ping on the band­wagon as call­ing shot­gun on the pas­sen­gers seat in the front.

Right off the bat there are sev­eral sim­il­ar­it­ies between the two. The most obvi­ous of which is the huge explo­sion of char­ac­ters right in epis­ode one. The open­ing in Bac­cano cer­tainly helped with that and the names again are lis­ted by in the open­ing to Dur­arara. While we may have a full 24 epis­odes to remem­ber these names, I can already see a poten­tial prob­lem there. This show is on Crunchyroll. CR never trans­late the open­ing so I have ser­i­ous doubts that they’ll trans­late the names in the open­ing either. This first epis­ode was done by gg fan­subs but I’m pretty sure they’re not going to con­tinue. I hope the names get trans­lated in the open­ing but just in case they don’t I’m gonna screen­cap all the names from the open­ing and stick them at the end of this post. I’m hope­less with names and even worse try­ing to remem­ber Japenese names. Actu­ally I can’t remem­ber a single char­ac­ters name, not even this guy.

He spent the entire epis­ode yap­ping away and I haven’t a clue what his name is *checks screen­shots at the bot­tom* Masoami Kida? Good for him. Being bom­barded with so much inform­a­tion in the first epis­ode, it’s impossible to keep up but, again com­par­ing to Bac­cano, they don’t expect you to keep up. All they expect is to leave an over­all impres­sion of the show and little bits of info will have trickled into your mind. So many char­ac­ters, so many per­son­al­it­ies and yet the only thing I can remem­ber off the top of my head is that the main char­ac­ter, err…*checks bot­tom of the page again* Mikado, is an eensy bit racist. That ‘a guy who just so hap­pens to be black’ made me laugh. OK, I remem­ber a bit more than that. How on earth could I for­get her?

Yes her. I’m sure you all noticed those curves in that full body leather cat­suit, even fit with a nice pair of ears on the hel­met. To think you usu­ally asso­ci­ate fair­ies with pretty, prancy little creatures with sparkles and flowers. Not in anime I’m afraid. Nope, those things with sparkles are called ‘bish­ies’. Assum­ing she is a dullala (no spell checker, not a dullard), one of those head­less Irish fair­ies, you can see we make our fair­ies slightly dif­fer­ently in Ire­land. We give our fair­ies motor­bikes and scythes and then ship them off to Japan.

One thing I liked about the whole fight scene was the the ‘bad­dies’ (they kid­napped a poor, defence­less and sui­cidal girl, of course they’re bad­dies) weren’t all a bunch of pan­icky wimps. OK, I’d panic at the site of my pal get­ting his face smashed in by a cat­girl on a motor­bike doing a wheelie too but at least these guys fought back. Stun gun, quick brak­ing man­euvers. OK, hardly epic stuff but so often you would just see these guys panic and run away, with their trousers fall­ing down for comic effect or some­thing equally dumb. Dur­arara has more qual­ity than that though.

That’s the most prom­ising aspect of Dur­arara. No, not the ran­dom Horo, although that was cer­tainly wel­come, but the fact that it oozed qual­ity from every pore. The true test of qual­ity is whether a show can still be good even when not much is hap­pen­ing. The dia­logue is witty, the char­ac­ters are a wacky bunch (ok, not as wacky as Bac­cano but I really should stop com­par­ing the two now) and noth­ing ever feels forced. In the same way that the first epis­ode of Eden of the East embar­rassed everything else that sea­son without even doing very much, Dur­arara does the exact same. Not that this epis­ode was a good as the first epis­ode of Eden, but it def­in­itely eclipsed every other first epis­ode of the cur­rent season.

Time for some the­or­iz­ing. The girl who bumped into the main char­ac­ter towards the end with that scar on her neck will obvi­ously show up again. Now if I remem­ber cor­rectly from the syn­op­sis, this crazy Irish fairy is look­ing for her head. Any chance that this is the head and that she was run­ning away from the fairy? Think about it, the fairy appeared about 30 seconds after she ran off. I prob­ably shouldn’t be the­or­iz­ing so early in the game but it’s some­thing to keep in mind.

And now, char­ac­ter names! Sorry about the song lyr­ics but there was no way of sep­ar­at­ing the trans­lated names and the lyrics.

What I used to do when watch­ing Bac­cano was try to name the char­ac­ters before their names came up on screen. Jac­uzzi Splot was the easi­est­but I could never remem­ber the name of the Gandor fam­ily char­ac­ters. With them all hav­ing Japan­ese names in Dur­arara, this will be a con­sid­er­ably more dif­fi­cult task.