about the series

durarara is like this crazy ass series. it's written by ryohgo narita, who also worked on baccano and some stuff for the fate series. the character designer/novel illustrator is suzuhito yasuda, who also did the novel illustrations for danmachi and the art for the devil survivor series, among many other things. (fun fact: he also illustrated the jacket cover for a persona 5 anthology manga back in 2017! imagine how excited i got when i first heard abt this lol.) so it originally started out with the light novel series in 2004. and then in 2010 it got an anime adaptation under brains base...! the manga started seralization in 2009, with the art done by akiyo satorigi for the first 3 arcs. aogiri picked up the manga after them in the following manga, which is called durarara: re dollars. i love all 3 of them... they all have their own charms that make them all very fun to watch/read.

one of the big themes of durarara is that everyone's lives are interconnected to some level. in the anime, they mark background characters as just gray silhouettes (like persona 5 if you've played that). as an example, in episode 1, there's this shot:

on its own, it's just a random shot, and the grayed out characters are just unimportant characters. but just one episode later, that changes:

it was izaya all along...! (not like it could be anyone but his nosy ass😒) it's really cool to me. they actually expand on this concept in one of the video games called durarara relay. it came out in 2015 for the ps vita. i am lucky enough to have a copy myself...! (i have never actually finished it)

going off of that theme, there's not really... one main character? like typical stories. that being said, i think it's intended for celty to kind of act as the main character by the way narita writes. in the novels, there's this one excerpt that he puts in every volume about celty not being human and her backstory to kinda drive this home i think.

anyways, the plot is that mikado comes to ikebukuro from the country to start high school with his childhood friend, masaomi, and then gets involved in a bunch of crazy shit. then they meet anri who is this cool and quiet girl. they're like the trio of the show and all three of them are hiding their true identities from each other. btw there's these two color gangs in the city that are at war with each other and this is a major plot point. everyone in the show lives in ikebukuro except for izaya's gay ass he has to live in shinjuku cause he needs to be within walking distance of kabukicho🤦‍♂️

my lore with the series

this is the one thing that has arguably had the most impact on my life and who i am (for the better or the worse, you decide). i first got into the series when i was 12, back in 2016. i actually didnt gaf about it for a little bit when i first watched it. 😭 i nearly dropped it after a few episodes... but then one day i was like ok fine let me watch more of this cause that black haired guy is speaking to me(haunting foreshadowing) so i watched episode 3. girl that was all it took for me to get into that series omfg i saw shizuo izaya fighting on my computer monitor and 10 seconds later i was on google.com searching up "is it normal if i want to see shizuo and izaya making out". the answer to that is yes btw.