Durarara!! episode 21

In a mat­ter totally unre­lated to the epis­ode at hand, The Cart Driver passed 100K views in the past 5 months. Most blogs use this time to call for cel­eb­ra­tion. How­ever I find it dif­fi­cult to engage in much jubilation’s when, dur­ing my time at Bok­uta­chi no Blog, it went from less than 200K views to over 800K views. So, while get­ting 100K in less than 5 months is quite the achieve­ment when I’m not post­ing any por­no­graphy what­so­ever (although that doesn’t stop plenty of people com­ing here search­ing for Hetalia porn), I’ll save my cel­eb­rat­ing for when I pass 1 mil­lion views.

OK, back to DRRR now.

I’m begin­ning to get frus­trated at Dur­arara. I think the best way to illus­trate my cur­rent prob­lem with the series would be using my excel­lent artistic skills and the Japan­ese cre­ation of the 4-koma.

Another epis­ode is spent drilling these three kids fur­ther down the intric­ate plot­ting of Izaya and there’s abso­lutely noth­ing any of them can do about it. The thing is, this is exactly what Dur­arara has been doing for the past 3–4 epis­odes. It’s all excel­lently woven story-telling and everything but it’s get­ting repet­it­ive. At the end of each epis­ode I find myself think­ing ‘woah, shit is going to get real next epis­ode’ and then shit doesn’t quite get real yet and we’re left with yet another epis­ode of tan­tal­ising. It’s now reached the point that I’m no longer eagerly anti­cip­at­ing this war of Izaya’s and now just want him to get it bloody over with. They’ve pushed this tale an epis­ode too far and now it’s lost the impact it would have had. Well, we won’t know how effect­ive it was until Ikebukero finally does spill over into all-out gang­land war­fare, but my gen­eral think­ing is that it’s lost the power it had.

What more is there to say any­way? Mikado has gone for the ‘leave it alone and it will all work out’ approach, only to make things worse by doing so. Anri went the total oppos­ite dir­ec­tion and tried to break up the fights, only for that to back­fire and con­vince the Yel­low Scarves even fur­ther that the Dol­lars are out to get them. Kida has clearly given up hope in try­ing to pre­vent this upcom­ing war, judging by his dead­pan expres­sions. He’s let­ting him­self be con­trolled by Izaya. The three kids have no con­trol and are all begin­ning to see how imma­ture and use­less they are. It’s a harsh world.

As for the wild­cards who can stop Izaya, they’re doing noth­ing to help what­so­ever. Shizuo is too busy try­ing to find inner peace to bother con­front­ing Izaya. Simon is a paci­fist and is muck­ing about with his Sushi shop. The only per­son to con­sider doing some­thing is Celty but she’s a wimp. Besides, Shinra was right. It’s hard to see what she could do without mak­ing things worse. Leav­ing things alone won’t help it either though and Shinra is smart enough to know that.

In a round­about way, Namie has no become the char­ac­ter I enjoy watch­ing the most. She’s stuck in the same situ­ation we view­ers are in. Watch­ing Izaya’s plans all roll into action but being able to do noth­ing about them, she just sits in the corner and makes jibes at his ego and taunt­ing. OK, it’s not exactly Nagato dur­ing End­less Eight but we’re def­in­itely see­ing things from her point of view. She’s smart enough and has a large enough view of things to work out exactly what’s going on. I won­der if she’ll try fuck with his plans before the end? At least can someone fuck with his plans? Another epis­ode of Ikebukero dangling over the edge is not what I want to see.