I don’t watch TV much.  Never had cable or TV reception in my house, so I never got in the habit.

Anime was the one exception for a while – Bastard! hooked me, Cowboy Bebop reeled me in, and Kenshin landed me.  And, of course, I watched Evangelion and felt like Anno had written me a personal letter.

(That last sentence gave you the wrong impression about me, so let me explain: that sense you get, watching Eva, like you want to shake Shinji until he feels better?  That’s the right sense.  He’s deeply depressed for most of the show, and the story tells of his, and everyone else’s, struggle against not only loneliness but the fear of loneliness, the desperate fight to be your own person without cutting yourself off from the universe.  Shinji’s a boy with serious problems, surrounded by people who want to help – but have serious problems of their own.  Eva is a realistic look at the dark, scary sides of adolescence, and both endings are brilliant in their own crazy way.   So there.)

Anyway, after college I fell a bit out of love with anime, largely because I was getting tired of the Main Character.  I watched a lot of shonen stuff – boy’s stories – and man, some days it seems like you can’t throw a shoe in anime without four plucky young protagonists running up to challenge you to a shoe throwing duel, to prove that they’re THE GREATEST SHOE THROWER IN THE WHOLE WOOORLD!

It gets old.

I stumbled into Baccano! via the wonderful time-sink that is TV Tropes – Gangsters? Anime? New York City? Broken chronology?  Intersecting narratives?  Yes please.  Six episodes in, I’m a bit infatuated.

Why?  Well, all of the above – plus, there’s no Main Character.  The plot’s shifting between 6 or 7 groups of characters, each with their own (sometimes weird) moral universe.  Even the best are pretty flawed (‘cept for maybe Firo), but, thank the Maker, nobody’s running around trying to be the Best Gangster in All History!!1one.

Except for Ladd Russo, and he’s a mass-murdering lunatic.

In fact, the first six or seven episodes are a sort of commentary on Generic Anime Plotting.  The series has a frame narrative in which an information broker and his junior assistant are chatting about how to tell the story of these connected events – and they spend half of the first episode arguing about who the main character might be without reaching a conclusion.  Everyone is going about their own story, and the stories intersect, sometimes chaotically – at one point three different people try to hijack the same train! – and the consequences are fascinating, weird, and exciting to watch.

Sort of like real life, only with gangsters, immortal alchemists, demons(?), death cultists, spy-reporters, and murdering lunatics.

So, if you’re at all like me and a bit tired of the nice kid trying to be the Best Sumo Sushi Master In The World, check out Baccano!

Just be ready for the blood, because there’s a lot of it.