Durarara!! episode 15

Dur­arara is to Bac­cano as Samurai Champloo is to Cow­boy Bebop. They both draw com­par­is­ons to their pop­u­lar pre­de­cessors, not exactly in a bad way but rarely in a way that expresses that the later ver­sion is super­ior. The later ver­sion fed off the hype that it was related to the earlier clas­sic and yet they both largely lived up to the massive hype they spawned, a rel­at­ively rare occur­rence. While almost every­one likes both series, most people also con­fess that they prefer the older series. It’s not exactly liv­ing in the shad­ows of their pre­de­cessors. It’s like the younger brother of the kid with the biggest repu­ta­tion in school. He may still garner a repu­ta­tion of his own but he will still be con­stantly com­pared to his sib­ling, even though it’s often in praise-worthy terms. (For the record, I actu­ally prefer Champloo to Bebop but prefer Bac­cano to Durarara).

A bit of a sur­prise nar­rator this epis­ode, this time we got Niekawa Shuuji, the reporter. I have to say that I much prefer it when we get one of the proper cast nar­rat­ing the epis­ode because it always gives us some inter­est­ing insight into their warped minds. Simon and Shizuo’s epis­odes stick out in my mind as being two of the best nar­rated epis­odes because of how little they express of their real feel­ings verbally oth­er­wise. The reporter is just a reporter. He is far from being an bril­liantly crazy Nar­ita char­ac­ter and hence doesn’t have a whole lot inter­est­ing to say. Not that it was a bad epis­ode because of it, far from it. It’s just that in pre­vi­ous epis­odes the high­lights have often been reveal­ing aspects of a char­ac­ter through their narration.

What made Simon’s nar­ra­tion so great, as I just said, is that he reveals so little oth­er­wise. It was even men­tioned in the epis­ode that his ‘Sushi umai-yo!’ funny for­eign accent is all a per­sona he puts for­ward so nobody per­ceives him as a threat. Con­sid­er­ing the guy is often named in the same as ‘strongest fighter’ and ‘Shizuo’ (albeit, usu­ally with the phrase ‘not as strong as’), he could quite eas­ily be a feared char­ac­ter in Ikebukero. A big black Rus­sian sushi chef that gives off the aura of being dopey but harm­less is quite an achieve­ment. I’m not sure how suc­cess­ful he is at this see­ing as people still talk about him being one of the strongest fight­ers, but at least nobody is run­ning away from him on the street when he’s hand­ing out Rus­sian Sushi fly­ers. It’s still a total mys­tery as to how he’s going to fea­ture in this final battle of Izaya’s though.

So to become a ‘Slasher’ you have to get stabbed by the real slasher? So the pos­sessed sword Saika is cur­rently in the hands of some long haired girl whose cam­era crew are ter­rible at get­ting the expos­ure right on her. Wild guess would be that the Slasher girl is the daugh­ter of the reporter. Actu­ally that isn’t that wild a guess at all. The only time we’ve seen her she was lying in bed with a creepy-girl-from-the-Ring-esque hairdo and on her laptop, pre­sum­ably spam­ming the Dol­lars chat as Saika. That would also explain why she star­ted spam­ming Shizuo’s name on the chat. Her dad was obsess­ing over Shizuo for his art­icle and that has effected her as well. The ques­tion remains as to how she got the sword in the first place. Izaya didn’t sound too happy earlier in this epis­ode at the pro­spect of hav­ing the Slasher run­ning around ‘bukero so I doubt it was him. It makes far more sense for Shinra’s dad, Shin­gen, to have done it. For one, he had the sword in the first place to take Celty’s head. Although that the­ory falls apart when you con­sider the time-frame the Slasher has been around. It only star­ted appear­ing 6 months ago and Shin­gen wasn’t even in the coun­try then.

In this weeks issue: Wan­nabe gang­sters Izaya has thor­oughly embarrassed.

I found the scene in the Dol­lars Chat room when Celty said she was a fan of the journ­al­ist rather amus­ing. It reminded me of those times I’ll be lurk­ing in ran­dom anime for­ums and sud­denly find The Cart Driver men­tioned (90% of the time it’s Hetalia related though, and about half of those Hetalia related com­ments only men­tion my dis­like for Chib­italia). Hey, speak­ing of lurk­ing ran­dom inter­net for­ums, remem­ber how I taunted the guy who designed this site into cre­at­ing a Dol­lars web­site of his own? Well that site has grown phe­nom­en­ally quick to the point that it crashed all his serv­ers and he had to cre­ate an entire new web­site to hold it. I present to you, The Col­or­less!

I dunno about you guys, but Shizuo run­ning full pelt at you hold­ing a van door in shaky mono­chrome is the stuff of night­mares. What got me about this whole scene, apart from its total awe­some­ness of char­ac­ters com­ing together, was how the journ­al­ist saw everything in black and white. Who else saw the world in this form? Why, no other than Anri when she was get­ting bul­lied by those angel girls. This re-enforces the the­ory that the Slasher there was some form of pro­jec­ted image. The whole Slasher thing is still so unformed that it’s dif­fi­cult to form any con­crete the­or­ies on it. Do you really have to get stabbed by the ori­ginal slasher to become one your­self? There’s just to little evid­ence and too many ways it could go, even though this epis­ode was entirely Slasher based.

You know, I rarely talk about Shizuo much in these posts com­pared Izaya, Celty, Shinra etc. That’s not because he’s a dull char­ac­ter. It’s just he’s so simple that there’s not a whole lot to dis­cuss. Watch­ing him bounce up and down on Celty’s bike like an impa­tient child mut­ter­ing his war chant was hil­ari­ous, espe­cially when you have the usu­ally needy Celty act­ing like his older sis­ter, try­ing to calm him down. CeltyX­Sh­izuo has always been amus­ing to watch but never from a romantic point of view. As much as I don’t like the CeltyX­Sh­inra rela­tion­ship, there’s no way Shizuo is going to steal her away in romantic fash­ion. Actu­ally that’s a rather amus­ing thought. Shinra and Celty stand­ing at the alter together only for Shizuo to slam open the doors, traffic sign in one hand, cry­ing ‘I OBJECT!’. Now if the women doesn’t fall for Shizuo at that sight then I’m afraid there’s no chance for our favour­ite viol­ent bartender.