Bungou Stray Dogs - Seasons 1 and 2

A bit late to the party on watching Bungou Stray Dogs, the show came as a very pleasant surprise to me. Following our lead character, an orphan named Atsushi, he discovers he is 'gifted'. The gifted all possess some kind of unique ability. In the case of Atsushi, under the full moon, he becomes a powerful White Tiger which possesses great power and speed, as well as the ability to heal itself. He joins the Armed Detective Agency, a group of Gifted and you quickly learn that being gifted tends to come with the side effect of some kind of very.... unique personality defect. It seems to be fundamentally tied to being Gifted.

While they usually solve cases involving other Gifted, the plot itself for the first two seasons focus around The Port Mafia and, in season 2, the Guild trying to get their hands on Atsushi for an unknown reason. There are actually a lot of great moments that come about through the course of the anime due to Atushi's own personal hangup, his inability to see his own worth. This causes a lot of tension between him and his most easily pegged rival in the series, Akutagawa. While some anime it feels strained, the clash of personalities and just how much they hate each other feels very real and genuine.

That really is the biggest thing that carries the show throughout it's run, the fantastic characters and how great their interactions are. No one feels like they interact with other characters in the same way. A great example being how Dazai interacts with his current partner in The Agency, and a former partner he had from before he joined, though I won't spoil who it was or his occupation at the time. When with his current Partner, Dazai has a lot of fun messing with the guy's plans and organization, as his current partner is obsessed with plotting out every minute detail. While his interactions with his old partner are a lot more sinister and cut to the bone, as he and his old partner hold a lot more animosity towards each other. Both interactions feel at home with Dazai as a character, and despite the similarities, both cases feel different.

The large cast of likable characters is really what the show needed, because to be honest the plot itself is kind of thin, and the way things work out feels overly convenient at times. The ending of season 2, for example, required a lot of people to act in a very specific way and come to some pretty unlikely conclusions to work, and yet it all goes exactly the way two characters planned out the events. And it's not even until the end of season two you even get an idea of what every wants Atsushi for, and considering that's kind of the crux of the main plotline of this show that feels like a long time to wait to finally get that information, and even then there is a lot left unknown.

There is also another aspect of the series that can get a bit bizarre, and I can understand why someone would be bothered by this. For me the characters and the insanity of some of these abilities let me overlook it with relative ease, but there are some really, really silly conditions on some of these abilities, to the point I have no idea how some of them were ever discovered. I will be spoiling a small thing that is revealed in season 2, but not something so big it will ruin any genuine surprise in the story.

There is a character you meat in season one from the guild that uses bombs shaped like lemons. The assumption was this was his ability, but come season 2 you learn that this is not the case, he hand makes those lemon shaped grenades himself. His ability is he cannot take any damage from explosives that come from devices shaped like lemons. This is utterly ridiculous. At the same time though... the show is just insane enough that I can run with this and get a good laugh, and enough of the characters are genuinely likable enough that in the end, it's not something that bothers me all that much.

The next big thing to look at is how are the actual fights of the show, considering the focus on everyone's gifts. This is another area the show really excels at, though you kind of has to accept 'anime logic' to enjoy it. You get a lot of scenes where, if you are thinking about everything going on you are wondering how exactly people aren't getting shot in certain scenes, for example. But on the other hand the action is very fun, and at times incredibly clever in how it goes about doing things. There are some excellent uses of abilities that come up, especially in the case of 'Light Snow' and it's ability to project images, that are incredibly clever and fun to watch. So long as you aren't here for realistic or the most sensibly choreographed fights, you are in for a treat.

While the show does a lot to make up for it, the lack of things going on in the actual plot of the show really is the biggest anchor this series has had so far. It's a story carried entirely on the backs of great characters and short personal arcs with them, great dialogue, and some fantastic, if at times nonsensical, fights, and deepening on how you view such things many really, really bizarre moments like the reveal of the Lemon Grenade mans power or the really bizarre inclusion of one of the Guild Members, Lovecraft (All guild members are named after Western Authors). So long as the weak points of the series aren't deal breakers for you, Bungou Stray Dogs is definitely worth checking out. I mean it features a nurse whose power only heals fatal wounds, so if you show up injured, but not fatally, she will still assure you she will be able to heal your wounds, by any means necessary.

….I may or may not have a thing for sadistic nurses.