Baccano! – The end? THE END!? Never! How the hell can I not love this show to pieces?
13 July 2008
Baccano! is amazing. Baccano! is awesome. Baccano! is not over. There is no end and there is no beginning.
I just watched the last two episodes, and I’m, how do you say this? At a lost for words, yet at the same time I have a gratuitous amount of feelings, emotions, just things I need to convey, one of them being how awesome Baccano! is. I sound like a fangirl, I am a fangirl.
Those last three episodes made it even better than the original thirteen. It was like, it was like, something that was just shy of being absolutely perfect finally becoming perfect. It was like finishing a jigsaw puzzle and slotting that last piece in place. It was like placing that last domino on the ground and watching the pieces fall.
Firstly, I love Vino (or, whatever he decides to call himself in the end) and Chane. I love Firo and Ennis. I love Isaac and Miria. I love Jacuzzi and Nice. The characters were amazing, the story was amazing, everything is amazing. The man who wrote the light novels is amazing. I need to learn Japanese. I want to experience Baccano! in its native media, print!
Baccano! falls into the same spirit as Gurren Lagann, or at least what I perceived this spirit to be, the sort of happy go lucky, nothing can go wrong zaniness. But, they are two completely different animals. You’d walk away from something like Baccano! on a sugar high. It’s New York (all good stories happen in New York, don’t argue with me on that), first of all, in the 1930’s, bootleggers, train robberies, mafia wars, tommy guns and all that nice jazz (quite literally), and the main characters are a bunch of immortal alchemist people from the 18th century, but they’ve all been around for 200 hundred years, toss in a couple of lovable, goofy, crazy, insane personalities like Ladd Russo, Jacuzzi, Firo, Isaac and Miria, and born is Baccano!
A small tangent: I love this show for being in New York. I remember at the end of episode 13, seeing Isaac and Miria walking around in present day New York, seeing the camera lift out of the street and zoom out, seeing the place I live, anime-style, touched my heart in a really odd way. The backdrops, the subway cars thundering past, the stores, the restaurants, the harbors and the parks and Chinatown, it presents the city in a vastly different way from, say, Darker Than Black.
I’m an official Claire Stanfield/Vino/Cross Continental Conductor/Rail Tracer fangirl. Way back when, when the conductor was just a nameless personality that I found cute, who had no lines, who had barely a role, but was listed in the credits and even had his own two second spot in the ending, I could never have guessed how big the twist was going to be. He even reminds me a little bit of myself, not that I’m crazy and walk around covered in blood, squishing little (immortal) boys on train tracks, or that I can do crazy acrobatics and dodge bullets, but just way he talked about Chane when he was eating with Rachel, that’s how I talk about people I’m in love with. How great of a character is he? Self-righteous mass murderer, pompous jerk, lovesick fool out to find the love of his life, a mute girl that he met on a train, literally on top of a train. He’s also insanely gorgeous, the red hair, that quirky smile, the way he toys with Graham because he knows he is so much better, the way he looks at Chane…
Shows like Baccano! fuel my love for anime like no other. Not only is it chock full of hot guys (Vino and Firo being my personal favorites), but it’s an exhilarating adventure, completely crazy and trippy, with a heart of gold. You can’t have characters like Isaac and Miria without having a heart of gold. Baccano!, sadly, for the most part is relatively unheard of. I met a cosplayer at Anime Fest last year that came as the Conductor. It took me a good few minutes to finally discern who he was cosplaying as and then I glomped him in joy.
And, before I forget, Luck Gandor is the demon? Is it me, or was that like a huge brick in the face? In a really good way? How insane is that? Luck Gandor, this unsuspecting, almost minor, character is the demon! The demon! From 1711! And he’s looking after Maiza! Man, they played it like Maiza was looking after everyone! Twists and little things like this just make me love the show all the more.
There’s just always so much going on in Baccano! The last three episodes are proof. They wrapped everything, and I mean everything, up in three twenty-four minute chunks. They even introduced a new character and left no loose ends. Everything, everything is explained. I guess that was the point of the last three episodes, but I’m just amazed that they did it so perfectly, so flawlessly that I have nothing to say, none of my usual, “Oh, you have loose ends.” crap apply here.
I loved that flashback of Jacuzzi and Nice. Jacuzzi is a strange character. I like him, I like him for the same reason Graham likes him. He breaks down that wall, that paper-thin wall between fun and sadness. All of those selfless things he ends up doing breaks my heart because the world is missing people like him, no wonder Chane is confused.
None of this could’ve happened in real life and I love it. That mouse, under the Empire State Building, that mouse under the Empire State Building represents everything I love about this show. There is no end to this story, it’s like a slice of life, it’s like a really good slice of life, without the sappy high school dramas and the pantie shots, instead you have guns and knives and immortals and action. Baccano! is about people’s lives entangling, in the most unrealistic, the most impossible, the most fascinating way, ever, as the chief points out to Carol (I had almost forgotten they were there). The possibilities are just mind blowing, if you even as so much look away for a second, you’d miss it. It’s like Ferris Bueller said, life comes at you fast, if you’re not careful, you might just miss it.
Despite it not having an ending, I felt like they closed the book on Baccano!, hard. It’s like putting down a really good novel, the satisfaction of having read something intensely fulfilling, like a good meal, it kind of stays with you and keeps you warm. I’m going to miss it, Baccano!, like I missed Gurren Lagann. This is the sort of stuff I can honestly say I live for, the sunshine of my love, you can call it that in a really strange way. I’m going to miss it alright, I’m going to miss it, everything from Isaac and Miria to the mice.
Actually it isn’t Luck who’s a demon. It’s Ronnie. Though it think you meant the latter.
But yes, Baccano! is awesome.
Oh god, lol, wow, my mistake! I knew it was, too…weird. This puts my sanity back in place. I thought it was Luck, I just watched it! I’m remember things wrong already. XD Thanks for the clarification!
lols, I also really love Baccano! and I like the way there’s no end to it ^___^