I say weakness because I actually didn’t think he ended up developing characters in Baccano to great affect. Since he didn’t employ stock characters really he ended up spending too much time getting to two-dimensionality without having enough time to get to three dimensionality. I guess that’s kind of like saying he has ideas for characters, but not characters themselves. I think he’s been doing slightly better with Durarara!! (and the anime staff) in showing us that these characters are people first. He hasn’t completely gotten them there yet, but I reserve a lot of hope

I haven’t read the original works for Durarara!! yet so it’s hard for me to anticipate anything at this point but I do hope Narita adopted a different style in how he wants to present the characters in this series. Usually authors have a habit of creating the same set of characters throughout different works, but I’m hoping he gave himself a bit more liberty in how he wants to experiment with Durarara!!’s gang. I do admire him taking the risk of avoiding stock characters but as you mentioned, there’s a danger of failing to make them dynamic in the long run especially when a large cast is involved. Hopefully this won’t be the case with this series. I’d be happy enough if he and the Anime writers are able to sufficiently develop three or four characters from the cast. Hmm… Perhaps four is stretching it a bit. :p

It is necessary in a few cases to have the narrators talk about themselves because we do need to engage our attention with their character somehow but in Kida’s case, his narration felt slightly…self-absorbed. I assume in this sense, there’s a fine line between being subjective and self-absorbed when sharing their views?

Normally I wouldn’t really peg subjective and self-absorbed as mutually exclusive. Your right that there is a difference in how we should view Kida’s dialog though. All of his opinions are going to be mostly subjective in this kind of context while self-absorbed would be attacking the actual content of what he was saying (if he talked to much about himself). All humans are self-absorbed to a certain extent, but unless the dialog is actively trying to engage that it can be irritating for the watcher. Kida was the thoughtful youth. He’s witnessed enough trouble and experienced enough hardships to really understand a lot of what’s going on. That of course also isolates him and has made him keep most of his true thoughts to himself, thus I would expect narratives about himself to be somewhat self-absorbed. They’ve so far avoided showing this to be the case with everyone by having a different narrator tell their stories and I think that’s really helped. Shinra just kind of had his own weird thing going on where he was a part of the story with Selty so he was still relating the experience based on himself.

What fascinates me is how through his narration and the revelations he divulged in this episode, he showed that there’s a lot more depth to him than the public image he projected of himself as an average jovial guy with a trippy habit of hitting on girls.

:). I have to say that I did expect this. We had a discussion already about Baccano, but when I said that the characters all were pretty much how they appeared I guess I probably shouldn’t have. Narita obviously likes the idea of characters being more than they initially appear. He doesn’t employ stock characters and that’s both a strength and a weakness.

I say weakness because I actually didn’t think he ended up developing characters in Baccano to great affect. Since he didn’t employ stock characters really he ended up spending too much time getting to two-dimensionality without having enough time to get to three dimensionality. I guess that’s kind of like saying he has ideas for characters, but not characters themselves. I think he’s been doing slightly better with Durarara!! (and the anime staff) in showing us that these characters are people first. He hasn’t completely gotten them there yet, but I reserve a lot of hope.

Then again, I still like Kida’s narration more than Shinra’s though. Shinra’s take sounded obsessive and selfish…delusional even whenever he speaks of Selty and it creeps me out in many inexplicable ways. Kida on the other hand, spent a good amount of time relating himself with others instead of only talking about them, for instance him acknowledging that he’s relying on Mikado, how the latter’s presence is gradually changing his life and relationships, and how he wants to protect Mikado from the dark world that the former experienced before. With that said, I probably ended up contradicting my own earlier statement about Kida sounding like he was self-involved. He could be one of the least conceited characters of the cast judging by how he genuinely wanted to protect the people around him and his relationships with them. What fascinates me is how through his narration and the revelations he divulged in this episode, he showed that there’s a lot more depth to him than the public image he projected of himself as an average jovial guy with a trippy habit of hitting on girls.