Durarara!! episode 24 (finale)

And so we come to the end of what could have been one of anime’s all time clas­sic series. What we got instead was still one of the best things you’ll see all year, but lacked the con­sist­ency. It didn’t lack oomph or the spe­cial factor, strangely enough. It had the ingredi­ents to be a clas­sic but didn’t quite mix them well enough to stand amongst the greats. How­ever, can one really com­plain when an A+ becomes an A-? This was still a fant­astic series, but let me get onto this epis­ode first.

This epis­ode serves as to a great high­light as to what this series did well and didn’t do well. The final scene with the Yel­low Scarves was awfully dull. Dot­achin leap­ing out with his yel­low bandanna, sud­denly act­ing like he was import­ant to the plot all along, was pretty badass but his way of solv­ing this plot line was to beat the crap out of the Yel­low Scarves? Really now, that’s the best he could come up with? Then there was the three ang­sty teen­agers all apo­lo­gising to one another for drag­ging the plot down these last few epis­odes. And what does Celty do in all this? Stand in a kung-fu pos­i­tion, totally ignor­ing the fact she can sum­mon a 10 foot sythe and beat them all by her­self. I mean, I get why this works. You shove Horada’s way of tak­ing over the Yel­low Scarves’ in his face by using the same method against him, but it wasn’t a par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing way to end the arc. The best part from that whole was the guy in the back­ground per­form­ing a crazy double-footed kick.

See! When Kadota was giv­ing one of his speeches, my eyes were trans­fied to the guy in the back­ground repeatedly hit­ting someone on the ground with an iron bar. Repeat­ing anim­a­tion move­ments make me lol.

This pic­ture might be the best to sum up what was wrong with the last arc. Horada was never a real vil­lain. Izaya said it him­self that he had found someone dis­tinctly unfab­ulous to fin­ish up his game with. The last arc crawled to a fin­ish, Izaya trolling away and the three ang­sty teen­agers being unable to do any­thing. It was a con­flict amonst the smal­ler char­ac­ters in the series that was really noth­ing more than Izaya’s plaything. Horada, Mikado, Kida, Kadota, Anri. They’re all minor play­ers in this big game of Ikebukero.

But bring the bit play­ers back into the pic­ture, dir­ectly con­flict­ing with one another, and sud­denly Dur­arara looks like the A+ anime it prom­ised us all it would be. This may sound like blas­phemy to some, but if there’s one place Dur­arara tops Bac­cano, it’s with the strength of per­son­al­ity of the char­ac­ters. Izaya, Shizuo and Celty in par­tic­u­lar, with maybe Simon lag­ging a bit behind those three. It comes as no sur­prise that the show was at it’s best when these char­ac­ters were in scenes together. The main overly­ing story of Dur­arara is a struggle for power in Ikebukero amongst these big­wigs. Well, not a struggle for power I sup­pose. More like con­flicts of per­son­al­ity between those. Each of the arcs in Dur­arara never dealt dir­ectly with these con­flicts, which explains why the build­ing up of these arcs was always stronger than the end­ing to each of them.

Izaya is what really makes this series tick though. Without him there would be no con­flict. But without those other big­wigs in Ikebukero there would be nobody to stop him. That’s why this last arc stumbled. Nobody opposed Izaya in a scheme he was much more dir­ectly involved in than pre­vi­ous arcs so it became repet­it­ive. Any­one who tried to oppose Izaya would inev­it­ably fail, apart from those very big­wigs I men­tioned earlier. Is it a coin­cid­ence that the only times Izaya was shown to be moment­ar­ily per­turbed by events were dir­ectly caused by Simon or Shizuo? There was one flash of annoy­ance at the pro­spect of him los­ing his beloved human­ity to a ‘stu­pid sword’ though, which shows that the super­nat­ural still has the abil­ity to throw him off guard.

That is why we need a second sea­son (yes, I think you all knew this was com­ing). The main con­flict of Dur­arara was not solved. The minor con­flicts each char­ac­ter had within them­selves were solved. Celty’s rela­tion­ship with Shinra, Mika Harima’s reveal that she was still her­self to Seiji, Shizuo com­ing to terms with his strength, Anri learn­ing to deal with Saika, Mikado under­stand­ing what the Dol­lars meant, Kida finally facing his past Spike Speigal style, but the main plot point of Izaya never came to a head. His fas­cin­a­tion with humans, his com­plex with Shizuo (I heard the squeals around the world when Simon said that line) and what it was he was really search­ing for were never truly solved. Simon’s reveal at the end that a lot of what Izaya does is a farce to him­self finally shows us that there’s more to Izaya then just being a bene­vol­ent sociopath.

There’s no way I couldn’t put this piece of fanser­vice in.

Even with all that jab­ber­ing over the rest of this post, this still is the last epis­ode and look­ing back at the series over­all, I really will miss it. Yes it could have been bet­ter, but what we got was fant­astic either way. The gradual reveal of Shizuo until his grand entrance in epis­ode 3 with his ‘IIIIIIIZZZAAAAAAYYYAAAAAA-KUUUUNNN’. Or how about the shortest-lived hobby in phone-stomping his­tory. Then there was bub­bling over how moe Celty was, fol­lowed by the out­rage that she jumped back into Shinra’s arms. Remem­ber con­stantly look­ing at the street signs for the latest ref­er­ence to other anime? I was totally duped into believ­ing that the head on Mika Harima’s shoulders did belong to Celty, which was often men­tioned in quick suc­ces­sion with how fucked up the sexual pref­er­ences of the Yagiri fam­ily was. The awe­some­ness of Shin­gen was short-lived. The bar­rage of yaoi fan­art was not, although was made bare­able by the glor­ies of gender­swap­ping. The con­stant the­or­ies thrown around as to what the Slasher actu­ally was. And how about the seem­ingly end­less parade of par­od­ies of the Trust Me end­ing song.

For those of you who fol­lowed my blog­ging of the series, I hope you enjoyed the ride as I spent forver blab­bing about how fas­cin­at­ing Izaya is, how moe Celty is, how I helped spawn now the biggest Dol­lars lookalike site and, by the end, how slow-moving the plot had become. Please do leave a com­ment if you enjoyed read­ing. For those who only joined for this episode…well, I hope you at least enjoyed read­ing this post at least. Good­bye Durarara!!