Durarara!! episode 18

I wouldn’t call my numer­ous para­graphs I’ve writ­ten about Izaya ‘fan­boy­ing’, and yet I’ve noticed that I spend an awful lot of my posts talk­ing about this guy. I’ll try to keep it to a min­imum this time around but I’m not sure how long I’ll be able to hold out.

Kida and the Yel­low Scarves. In this pic­ture they look noth­ing more than a group of kids try­ing to act tough, and that’s all they really were. It was never really explained why Kida set the group up but they never really needed to. Kida is just a hugely cha­ris­matic char­ac­ter who nat­ur­ally draws people towards him. He also strikes me as the kind of guy who’d get heav­ily influ­enced by pop cul­ture, hence I can see why the idea of start­ing a gang would appeal to him. I’d say he simply under­es­tim­ated his own cha­risma and abil­ity to attract mem­bers. At heart he had no inten­tion of ever clash­ing with any rival gangs. I doubt he ever thought that far for­ward, he was just a kid at the time. There was someone who thought that far for­ward though…although I did say I’d try not to talk about that person…

Speak­ing of influ­enced by pop cul­ture, even the world of the otaku can drive people to viol­ence. I quite like Dotachin’s group in that van. They rep­res­ent the every­day Ikebukero young adults. They’re heav­ily influ­enced by the cul­ture around them and extremely street smart. This epis­ode also cleared up why they were so inter­ested in the idea of the Dol­lars in the first place. After dis­cov­er­ing what the Blue Squares were doing, they’d want to join a group that was more inter­ested in help­ing soci­ety and yet let them do their own thing. Being part of a group without hav­ing to wear your col­ours. For a city that was entrenched in gang war­fare, I can see why you’d join Dol­lars. Be able to walk into Rus­sian Sushi without other tables being wor­ried about your pres­ence. Not hav­ing to be wor­ried about a large oppos­ing gang attack­ing you yet keep­ing the com­fort that your fel­low mem­bers will look out for you. The thing is, it’s still a gang, even if it is col­our­less. Which is why someone like Izaya is able to con­trol it…oh dear, there I go again…

Oh Kida, you know noth­ing good will come from start­ing up the Yel­low Scarves again. Sure, you get to stand in dra­matic poses in the lamp­light but what on earth makes you think this time will be any dif­fer­ent. Do you hon­estly think not get­ting any­one over the age of 20 will help your cause? Makes me won­der how old that man was when he was ‘help­ing’ the Yel­low Scarves ori­gin­ally. Well if Shinra was in school with him and Shinra met Celty ori­gin­ally when he was 4 and Dur­arara star­ted 20 years after that and the Yel­low Scarves dis­ban­ded 6 months before the anime star­ted, that man was about 23–24 around that time. I sup­pose it does help Kida keep the group under his con­trol, although in the grand scheme of things that prob­ably isn’t a good idea because I can see Kida let­ting his emo­tions get to him. Plus that man has him wrapped around his little finger.

It’s amus­ing see­ing Kida try­ing to flirt with a girl whose much bet­ter at it than he is. Quite the dif­fer­ent envir­on­ment from when he’s around Mikado and Anri.

This epis­ode felt very sim­ilar to epis­ode 7 when Shizuo was nar­rat­ing his past. While each epis­ode of Dur­arara is nar­rated, in these epis­odes the nar­ra­tion felt stronger and more rel­ev­ant, prob­ably because they them­selves knew what was going to hap­pen next. And, like epis­ode 7, the nar­rat­ors life star­ted to unravel when they met a cer­tain man. Their life, which they had tried to get used to, had fallen into the path of viol­ence under the tutel­age of that med­dler. Fuck it, I can’t hold back any longer.

It’s not that I par­tic­u­larly like Izaya. He is, as Shin­maru puts so ele­quantly in his post title, a humong­ous dick. There are some play­ful moments around him, best of all being his clas­sic phone-stomping scene in epis­ode 3 and his gen­eral jolly atti­tude to life. But for the most part he’s ter­ri­fy­ing and an abso­lute asshole to people in this series, send­ing their lives crash­ing down around them. His grand final plan revolves around send­ing Celty into a fit of rage by col­lapsing her trust to those she holds dear to her. How could one pos­sibly like a man who has the inten­tion to ruin the life of our favour­ite head­less moeblob? Yet he stands far and away as my favour­ite char­ac­ter in the series.

I was going to write a sep­ar­ate post about why I’m so fas­cin­ated by Izaya but I think it suits these Dur­arara posts more to have it in here. I love char­ac­ters whose shadow hangs over everything that hap­pens in a story, through will­power or influ­ence or gen­eral schem­ing con­trol and effect everything that hap­pens. Noth­ing can hap­pen in the story without con­sid­er­ing how this char­ac­ter effected the events. The Count from Gankut­suou is a great example of this. Noth­ing hap­pens in that anime without it hav­ing been factored into his plans. L from Death Note hangs over every decision Light makes, even after epis­ode 26. The best moments in Ber­serk come not dur­ing the hack­ing and slash­ing, but when the sheer power of Griffith’s ambi­tion and dreams over­whelms every­one who comes into con­tact with the man. Sim­il­arly we have Izaya in Dur­arara, manip­u­lat­ing everything in Ikebukero and factor­ing every event into his plans. That Sho­giGoChess board of his is the per­fect meta­phor for what he’s doing in this show. At first I thought it was just a gim­mick to show how silly and big­headed a per­son Izaya is but it’s rel­ev­ance has only really shown itself in this half of the season.

He lords over everything that hap­pens in this series. Try as you might Kida, but you can’t escape his influ­ence. You’re just another piece on that play­ing board of his, dan­cing to his tune.