Durarara x2 episode 9 – Escape chariot

Celty really has stopped giving a fuck whether anyone knows her identity anymore. She used to drive around only at night and even then with her lights off. Now she creates headless horse chariots in the middle of a busy street in broad daylight with multiple people videoing her on their phones. I guess she has appeared so often on TV that she doesn’t feel the need to hide herself anymore. On a more serious note, it’s also part of her overall character development of being more comfortable with being seen as a person and not a monster. She has friends, hangs out with people and is not afraid of being with people.

Speaking of character development, Shizuo is undergoing to considerably more noticeable shift which appears to be the primary focus of this arc. Well, as much a primary focus as anything can be in Durarara when there are 6 different stories colliding at once. Shizuo is the one I’m personally the most interested in because Shizuo is mai husbando do not steal he’s otherwise been such a static member of the cast that it’s fun to see some shift in his personality. He’s trying to be non-confrontational so he can not be an embarrassment to his brother, as well as a general sense that he’s just letting himself down. I would particularly love if you saw Shizuo sitting on a train reading a self-help book and diligently taking notes. There’s something about the image of the most feared man in Ikebukero licking his fingers and turning the page while everyone else cowers in the corner that amuses me.

It’s something I’ll admit I didn’t really expect from Durarara. Seeing its more eccentric characters actually develop throughout the story. It’s not something I’m accustomed to with Narita’s writing. I love Baccano and there’s a reason it’s the top rated anime of all time by The Cart Driver Dot Com (although that list badly needs to be updated), but nobody in that show really develops. They come out fully formed eccentric people right from the word go. This is what you get when you allow one of his stories to grow. It’s what happens when you give one of his anime more than one season. So about that Baccano sequel hmmmmm…

Since it has become customary for me to mention the animation in these posts, boy I am glad that it’s back to normal. I had been so thrown by the animation being so awful that I hadn’t really registered a lot of what had been happening. Varona’s entire storyline is basically ruined for me now. I don’t care about her nor her Yahoo Answers buddy or any of their backstory or their involvement in the current plot because I was so completely taken out of their earlier story by the awful animation. Which may be on me to a certain extent but the end result is still me begin taken out of a large chunk of the story.