Just when you thought that the shark had been jumped, a NEW shark appears beneath the soaring motorcycle

Anime all too often sucks because it’s too much about sneaking soft-core porn into an adventure story.

Mind you, adventure fiction has had a huge porn component for a long, long time. Gothic fiction was pretty close to bodice-ripper porn even before King Solomon’s Mines invented modern adventure fiction, and once R. E. Howard started writing, it was pretty much heaving bosoms and mighty thews all around.

So I won’t complain that adventure fiction USED to be pure and non-sexual. That was true only for a small subset written by guys like Rudyard Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle.

The second season of Durarara jumped the shark by putting a threesome romance into the main story.

That’s soft-core porn territory; at that point, the action-adventure fights are just a distraction.

But shows like Durarara require me to care about the characters. The whole point of a character like Anri is that she’s supposed to have tragic feelings and a deep need for meaningful love that the male hero has a chance to satisfy.

There are two problems here.

1 – If Anri is emotionally stable enough to get groped without going into violent PTSD-induced rages, Anri is not all that tragic. And if Anri is not all that tragic, she is an annoying drama-princess.

Anri was tolerable because her ridiculous advantages – magical combat powers, physics-defying breasts – were counterbalanced by her psychological frailty and isolation. If her isolation can be cured by a little girl-on-girl groping, there was no point in Anri’s long, drawn-out romance with the male hero. Anri should have gotten groped in the first episode of the first series, thus getting rid of her character-development arc, because HER STORY SUCKS.

2 – The second line of dialogue really sums up the problem with the writing. The writer started with an Action Girl stereotype. Her magical combat powers make her a Muramasa clone with ridiculously oversized breasts.

Important rule of pop fiction writing: if your female characters are just men with breasts, you have failed to write good characters!

I was somewhat charmed by the original Durarara back in 2010, but this sequel feels like they’re milking the old property for more than it is worth.

I should probably save myself a lot of frustration and just drop the show now. It’s not like it’s a treasured comrade; it was a show with a good opening song, “Uragiri No Yuuyake.” Don’t cry because everything after that failed to live up to the opening; smile because the original opening was awesome.

It’s hard to believe that “Uragiri No Yuuyake” only came out five years ago, not fifteen years ago. It feels like one of those songs that I have known for a long time. However, whatever attachment I once had to it does not justify wasting my life on bad anime.