I Am Completely Serious

Though I do feel the need to put its title in quotes there, to prevent anyone from thinking I would voluntarily double up an exclamation point.

This is an anime by the director who did Baccano!, based on a light novel series by Ryohgo Narita, the guy who wrote the Baccano! light novel series, with the same basic structure as Baccano! - but an even less cohesive plot, and, obviously, an extra exclamation point. It is hard for me to discuss without constantly referencing Baccano!, is basically what I'm saying.

The series is set in modern-day Ikebukuro. As in Baccano!, there is a massive cast of characters whom the opening credits carefully label one by one, to help us remember their names. However, there are two in particular who are always pretty close to the center of the narrative. One is Ryuugamine Mikado, a typical high-school boy who you can tell is supposed to be the protagonist, his friends point out, because of his name. He moved to Tokyo from his quiet rural town in search of excitement, which he finds in the form of bountiful silly gang violence.

The other is the Black Rider - an allegedly-androgynous-but-really-clearly-female underworld courier who dresses all in black, rides a silent black motorcycle without lights, is apparently invincible in combat, and never takes off her inexplicably non-black helmet. There is nothing underneath the helmet; she is a headless Irish fairy called a Dullahan, really named Celty Sturluson, and she came to Japan twenty years ago in search of her head. I tried to keep this character description short for symmetry with Ryuugamine's, but it wasn't possible.

(Incidentally, given Narita's amazing track record with non-Japanese names, I am 100% confident that "Celty Sturluson" is a totally normal name that you hear every day in Ireland. It's just like how my real name is "Americany Björnsson."

...it pains me to write this, but: I'm really afraid that the man may think Ireland and Iceland are the same place. I wish that Celty's inappropriate patronym weren't the only evidence for this, but he also seems to think that Valkyries are an Irish thing.)

Other characters include Ryuugamine's friends from school, Masaomi and Anri, who have Dark Secrets; Celty's smiley-but-skeevy roommate/manager/lover Shinra, an underground doctor who is clearly lying to her about some sort of Dark Secret; a yakuza guy named Shizuo with anger management problems, who is ostensibly a normal human, but throws vending machines around, and whose Dark Secret is actually just sort of pale gray at best (it's refreshing); a sneaky, unpleasant "information broker" guy named Izaya who is ostensibly a normal human but can cut you to ribbons really fast, and who has a Dark Secret; a black Russian guy named Simon who runs a bad sushi restaurant, and it's supposed to be funny that he's bad at Japanese and runs a bad sushi restaurant, and the way he's drawn is also awful; two cheerful-but-off-kilter otaku, Walker and Erika, who cannot be said to have a Dark Secret as they are not in fact very secretive about it; and a broody guy named Seiji, his silent, passive girlfriend, and his manipulative businesswoman older sister Namie, all of whom have Dark Secrets.

I'm leaving a few people out because they so far haven't done much. Maybe they were important in the books. Anyway: like Baccano!, a large cast, most of whom end up being surprisingly likeable - but it's hard to care about them quite as much.

The overarching structure of the first twelve episodes - it's hard to call it a plot - is that Ryuugamine becomes interested in finding a friend of Anri's who's gone missing, and by extension in a mysterious internet-based gang called the Dollars. As he wanders around Ikebukuro getting to know its bizarre residents, his path frequently just barely misses intersecting with Celty's in her search for her head.

Celty is essentially indestructible, and can manipulate a black mist constantly pouring from her neck to form weapons, catch people falling from great heights, see around corners, etc.; however, she can't talk, and communicates by typing very quickly into her cell phone and showing people the screen. Ryuugamine's superpowers are his self-conscious internal monologue and unrequited crush on Anri. These traits, of necessity, give Celty less dialog, but more cool entrances and scenes in which she destroys evildoers. I find this ratio acceptable.

It's a pretty meta show. At one point Ryuugamine runs into a girl in the street, knocking her down, and is forced to hide her from a pursuer in his apartment, where he learns that she has amnesia. Masaomi, upon hearing of this, informs him skeptically that the girl is supposed to also be a transfer student who was his childhood best friend, and preferably a queen. (I do think he went off into a different genre at the end there.) Walker and Erika base certain important life decisions on a fortune-telling system involving violent manga, and Shinra, when Celty's hands are otherwise occupied in doing violence to his person, is able to hold up her end of the conversation by means of his knowledge of genre conventions.

It's got some of the same oddly casual brutality as Baccano!, though not quite as intensely; the major conflict of the first arc is resolved, not by indiscriminate slaughter, but by means of a flash mob. Still, there's a lot of surprising unpleasantness from likeable characters. I personally don't really have a problem with this. It for me is a feature rather than a bug when a narrative does not attempt to justify an obvious fondness for bloodshed as having something to do with justice or protecting the weak. (Bleach and I had a very unpleasant breakup.)

There is, however, somewhat more violence towards women who can't defend themselves than in Baccano! I would say that this was happening in some misguided impulse towards "realism" in the modern setting, but the most egregious incident involved a woman strapped naked to a table so a mad scientist could force his four-year-old son to operate on her without anesthetic. Not so much with the realism. Also, there's obviously a certain amount of racism in the form of Semyan. So, some problematic stuff in there. I am mostly able to tolerate it thus far, but your mileage may vary.

...Can I just say that I used to live twenty minutes from the place, and I cannot take this show at all seriously when it talks about how scary Ikebukuro is? And it does this all the time. Sorrowful voice-overs about the darkness of the city and suchlike. I'm getting the impression that that you're supposed to go into it thinking of Ikebukuro as a place full of gangs and crazy bullshit, but... I am just unable to suspend my disbelief. I find Baccano!'s portrayal of Chicago more plausible, and Baccano! thought that people in Chicago were named "Jacuzzi Splot."

And I mean, I understand that many Japanese people would, with some justice, see Kentucky as a horrifying dystopia if they knew more about it than "that's what the K in KFC stands for." Also, I work for a criminal law firm and routinely take calls from drunk dudes who have stabbed other drunk dudes. So maybe my opinion as to what qualifies as "scary" is, itself, problematic. But my living room probably has a higher crime rate than Ikebukuro. It's where people buy used manga and visit the cat cafe. (This cat cafe was on the top floor of the department store shown during the credits, by the way.)

Clearly I was not plugged in to some sort of commonly-accepted Japanese narrative of the place during the period in which I was wandering vaguely about its bookstores and curry places at all hours. Perfunctory research suggests that this drama may have something do with it.