Durarara!!x2 Ketsu – 02 (26)

This week’s narrator is Shingen, whose wise, matter-of-fact tone is somewhat offset by the fact his voice is slightly muffled by the gas mask he never takes off (He’d be right at home in a Gundam anime). And what does Shingen talk about all episode? Women. No, nothing so crude as how they be shoppin’ all the time, but how women are women, whether they’re human or not.

Just take Anri and Erika at the hospital when Chikage arrives with his harem in tow. The two girls donning black may as well be sisters, but only Erika is fully human; Anri is a vessel for Saika, her calm, timid facade concealing churning multitudes of power and potential for destruction. By comparison Erika can’t do much besides not call Chikage back after giving him her email.

Later, then Izaya shows up to have his injuries checked out, he tries to lure Saika into losing her cool and proving she’s not human but just a pretender…and Izaya knows humans, loves them, and believes that gives him leave to mess with them all he likes.

His tortured metaphor of Mikado and Masaomi walking a tightrope with nooses around their necks connecting them, and all the various people trying to help or hurt him, is nevertheless enough to get Anri’s Saika blood boiling, until it’s all she can do to not kill him.

The whole episode, Manami is walking around with a bag we later learn contains Celty’s head. She’s ostensibly working for Izaya but also trying to hurt him wherever she can after failing to kill him before. But Izaya has made it clear humans who hate him are free to try to kill him, but he’ll never stop loving and forgiving them. But that love means nothing to Manami.

Erika consoles a very disturbed Anri; after all, it’s plenty human to feel like killing Izaya now and again. And just as Izaya will always forgive humans no matter what they tried to to to him, Erika will always love and forgive Anri, even if she becomes the dark instrument of the world’s destruction.

As Celty, another non-human whose human friend (and lover) Shinra will always love and forgive even if she destroys the world, is run ragged getting all the freeloaders situated in the apartment, her “still unknown enemy”

Kujiragi Kasane shows that she isn’t always Saika, or the shadowy leader of an organization using body doubles as the now-dead Yadogiri Jinnai to conduct business, or Ruri’s mothers half-sister (as we learn from the gossipy Shingen). Sometimes, she’s just a woman who buys cat ears, takes her shoes off and relaxes in the park, contemplating cafes to try out.

When Erika sees how Anri smiles and cries and feels such concern for her troubled friends, she can’t help but disregard “humanity” as some kind of requisite for being a good person. Anri is a good person, whatever’s stewing within her, and I think she has a crucial role to play in mediating the war between her two friends soon.

It’s a little heartbreaking, then, that just when Anri is accepting Erika’s words of encouragement (and going to buy cat ears for her, only to find they’re sold out), she runs into Niekawa Haruna in the street, who asks her to come with her, or else.

As I said, Shinra, like Erika with Anri, sees Celty as a woman first and foremost, but a woman who, due to her non-humanity, is disposed to act even kinder than humans usually act towards one another, aware of the stigma of what she is and how hard it is to hide. Without even thinking, Celty is a passionate, warm, caring, generous woman, and all Shinra asks is that she not think any less of herself.

But like Anri with Niewkawa, Celty has her non-humanity thrown in her face, as Manami took her head from Niekawa and unceremoniously hucked it in the bushes for all to see. It even making the news, which after chatting with the twins is how Celty finds out. And when she sees her head, exposed and vulnerable; the very object she was made the head of a new guild to retrieve, she does something a woman is more likely to do than a dullahan – she faints.

Shingen completes his monologue about “women being women” human or not, telling the women listening he has nothing more to say, but warning the men they “can’t be too careful,” implying the woman you choose may be someone like Anri, Ruri, Kasane, Haruna, or Celty, who are all more than just women.

It’s less of a condescending warning to stay away, and more of a warning to make sure you’re worthy of such women, and are resolved and prepared to stand with them when things get tough.

Durarara!!x2 Ketsu – 01 (25)

This third and final cour of Durarara!!x2 is subtitled Ketsu (結) Japanese for (among other things) “sintering” (compacting a solid mass without melting it) and Chinese for “knot.” (It can also mean “ass”, referring to the end of Dura2…but stay with me.)

We begin where Ten ended: Celty in her and Shinra’s apartment, which is full of random people, and she has no idea why they’re all there. That is the knot, the puzzle that is loosened and unraveled in this episode. On a larger scale, Ikebukuro itself has always been like a knot: a combination of disparate strings periodically tightening and loosening, with often surprising results.

This episode follows the same pattern as most Dura episodes: a central narrator (this week Shinra) comments on all the various goings on. We dart from string to string in the Ikebukuro knot, from Mikado still mixed up with Aoba in an imminent war with the Yellow Scarves, a potential conflagration Aoba wants to keep Kururi and Mairu out of. Two cops under Saika’s control try to get rid of Heiwajima, but the motorcycle cop Kuzuhara frees him.

It’s not easy when the only people in her house who aren’t certifiable are Igor and “the driver” (Togusa), Celty gradually learns their reasons for being there. Shingen and Igor descended on Seitarou and Kujiraji Kasane in gas masks to rescue Namie (using gas bomb that made the news in the process). Walker and Togusa are hiding out, as is Yagiri Seiji and Mika.

I must say there’s a great imaginative, insane energy to putting all these kooks together. Shingen, Emilia, Walker, Namie and Mika are each their own special blend of crazy, and knotting them together makes for interesting exchanges and reactions, none of which really help Celty get to the bottom of things.

As for Izaya, who looked to be in bad shape last cour, was only pretending to be passed out as the Saika-controlled Sloan took him to a hideout of Izaya’s enemies. He had Sharaku and Kine follow Sloan, who he knows is under the influence of Kujiraji, not Niekawa or Anri.

The immediate puzzle of her many houseguests thus solved, Celty lays out her goal: to retrieve her head from Izaya and leave it in the care of Nebula (which Shingen and Emilia belong to). She’d rather they poke and prod it than leave Izaya to use it as a ball or vase; it’s a matter of pride and principle.

The crazies all unite right then and there to form a “guild” on Shinra’s suggestion in order to aid her, with his true reasoning being keeping his lover as minimally involved as possible in the head retrieval process, knowing that she and the Dollars, are at the very center of the storm brewing…which is, after all, nothing new.