Durarara!! episode 10

Each epis­ode of Dur­arara seems to have a con­sist­ent pat­tern. They start off slow, set­ting the atmo­sphere with the halfway point usu­ally hap­pen­ing quicker than you might expect, leav­ing you with a ‘what, halfway already?’ feel­ing. The next half gen­er­ally hits the plot rev­el­a­tions and action scenes. Toss in a twist at the end and you have your typ­ical epis­ode of Dur­arara. It’s a simple method that makes you enjoy an epis­ode more but it works. Well, it’s work­ing on me any­way.Lets start with the end of the epis­ode and the big plot reveal: Mikado was the guy to set up Dol­lars. Not Izaya, as was hin­ted at earlier on in the series. Neither was it Simon, who, for god only knows why, I had a sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that he was the guy to set it up (come on, he has to do some­thing more than run a sushi shop!). It’s Mr. Nor­mal Mikado. I would say ‘not so nor­mal now eh~’ except it’s through his nor­mal­ity that he set up Dol­lars in the first place. It makes me want to go back through the entire series and see his reac­tions to the men­tion­ing of Dol­lars. The only scene I can think of off the top of my head was where Izaya says he “thinks he has found the per­son he’s look­ing for”, clearly refer­ring to the fact he had a sus­pi­cion that Mikado was the head. Not that  he really wields much power as the head of Dol­lars from what I can tell so far.

For those who haven’t made this con­nec­tion yet, the three in the chat­room were Mikado (the bor­ing blue avatar), Celty (the avatar wear­ing head­phones) and Izaya (the pig­tails one that’s always hyper­act­ive). In that sense, it was kinda cool see­ing the three of them together in real life, even if they didn’t know it them­selves, although I wouldn’t be sur­prised if Izaya had an idea of who he was talk­ing to. The chat­room is on the Dol­lars web­site, a con­nec­tion I only made in this epis­ode, which sug­gests that both Celty and Izaya are part of Dol­lars too. I’m still at a bit of a loss as to what Dol­lars is meant to be other than a chat­room. Mikado set it up so nobody takes orders from any­one else but the­or­et­ic­ally, if he had con­trol of the Dol­lars net­work, then he is eas­ily the most power­ful per­son in ‘bukero.

When you look at the cliche gang mem­bers, like this guy and his non­sensical hair­cut (do they hon­estly have those hair­cut in Japan­ese gangs?) or that ‘yo yo hey man!’ guy who Izaya scalped in epis­ode 3, I can’t help think­ing they are inten­tion­ally made to appear as non­sensical as they are to off­set the even­tual arrival of proper gangs. Whenever there’s a men­tion of the yel­low scarves of the blue shape that-I-can’t-quite-remember-which-particular-cuboid-version-it-was, Kida puts on his SERIOUS FACE, which sug­gests that these gangs are much more dan­ger­ous than those that have appeared thus far. Get­ting real gangs into the pic­ture will only end up messy. Again though, I can’t see how the Dol­lars tie in with them as of yet because I still don’t quite see how they’re able to achieve anything.

Sorry for blab­bing on about the Dol­lars web­site but I’m try­ing to wrap my head around how it works. You get an invit­a­tion to the site and the pass­word (which, btw, is BACCANO. Oh Brains Base and your con­stant ref­er­ences to your older series and ran­dom other series while your at it. There was a Rail­gun ref­er­ence in this epis­doe too). Set up your pro­file and chat to people. Look at the above pic­ture with Mikado look­ing far cooler than he usu­ally does. It just looks like a chat site where you can see who else is online. It’s hardly that dif­fer­ent from some­thing like 4chan, except with far less meme abuse. Unsur­pris­ingly, a Dol­lars web­site has been set up here, but it’s all in Japan­ese. How­ever I think I man­aged to unin­ten­tion­ally taunt Gar­g­ron, the guy who designed this site, into mak­ing a Dol­lars web­site of his own. It would be pretty cool, and inev­it­able, that some sort of chat­room web­site would be designed based off this series.

If Izaya is plugged into Dol­lars dur­ing most of his waken­ing hours, which he cer­tainly appears to be, no won­der he is such a great inform­ant. Just toss out some ques­tions into the Dol­lars web­site and answers will start to appear. A lot of them could be non­sense but where’s there’s smoke, there’s fire. Speak­ing of Izaya, he is such an abso­lute nut­ter isn’t he? His leap­ing on an uncon­scious gang mem­ber isn’t quite as awe­some as the phone stomp­ing scene (which already has over 21000 views on you­tube)  but was just so typ­ical of the guy that I couldn’t help laugh­ing. It’s a tough choice to pick my favour­ite char­ac­ter in Dur­arara. It’s a toss up between Izaya, Celty and Shizuo.

Wild facial expres­sions in anime. They’re such an easy method to make the audi­ence laugh but they still get me. Some ran­dom other thoughts before I run over my 1000 word count would be where has Scar­neck got­ten to? Speak­ing of her, I was given some con­vin­cing the­ory in the com­ments in my last post by Rak­uen that she isn’t actu­ally wear­ing Celty’s head at all. The gen­eral idea was that they never con­vin­cingly showed a dead Mika Har­ima and kept obscur­ing her face so the idea was that they’d per­formed sur­gery on her face to make her look like the Celty head. Seiji, as Shizuo found out, is so blinded by his ‘love’ that he wouldn’t notice, Mika has found a way to be with the per­son she loves and creepy inces­tu­ous sis­ter has a way to keep Seiji away from the real head. It also works in well with the flow of the story. The grand reveal in epis­ode 9 that she was wear­ing Celty’s head was pretty obvi­ous and felt like a bit of a let down in terms of grand end­ing plot reveals. If it turned out that wasn’t the case and Dur­arara had trolled us all then I’d be migh­tily impressed. My gut feel­ing still says she’s wear­ing Celty’s head but I’ll be damned if I can come up with con­vin­cing evid­ence to counter this argument.

Is there really any bet­ter way to end this post than with Celty show­ing off her figure?