A person does not know what real loneliness is when he is alone in a room. And when the room is full of people, and one of them is a traitor.
Sign contracts. Walls are built instead of bridges. And someone stole the moon and the sky, replacing them with fake stars. So now the gods of this world shine from heaven. And when the stars are falling, you don't want to make a wish at all. After all, a wish made under the death of a fighter will most likely turn out to be gloomy.
By the way, it makes no sense to think about why this series at the same time wants to attach the label "noir", and at the same time not. In fact, "Darker Than Black" essentially incorporates almost all genre diversity. recent years, and of course it can't do anything on its own. The stamps swell. Therefore, I want to call it the loudest nonsense of all this time. However, when the head flickers familiar word"noir", this shortcoming immediately fades in the darkness. In that world where beautiful and treacherous women rule the show, where the hero merges with the antihero, and the danger trivially hides in the shadows, everything exists - irony, romance, action, detective, drama, and psychedelia - and at the same time none of this No. Noir, like matter. The color scheme is a stellar glow reflected in the surface of the lake.
Ridiculous, of course, but extremely interesting that the young Li Shen Shun, an exchange student, is the most ordinary-looking guy. Timid, insecure, moonlighting wherever he can. Everyone simply adores him, and not only for the outstanding collarbone line, but also for his gentle character. It's all just a mask. As soon as the eyes turn away from him, the colors again flow from the face. Because in fact he is the Black God of Death, as he was called by the cops. And without superpowers, he is more dangerous than many who have signed a contract, but with supernatural power it's doubly scary. At night, he puts on a white mask with an ominous smile and destroys the same contract soldiers as he does in the city next to the Gates of Hell - almost the Strugatsky Zone ... no, the Tarkovsky Zone ... By the way, the smiling white mask still reminds a little of the revolutionary V, but nothing else not related.
Now you don’t even have to try to find noir in pure form, in whatever form. Noir is extremely outdated since the post-war economy stabilized and the American people regained faith in a brighter future. And here it is the result of the search for new potential bottoms this genre: Blade Runner, No Country for Old Men and Sin City. By the way, "Darker than Black" has even less in common with noir than the aforementioned tapes.
And if a black cat is hiding in a dark room, Tensai Okamura clearly does not want to turn on the light and check. With amazing enthusiasm, he infuses his series with noir suspicion, legends and fatal lyricism. He makes riddles, but does not ask the audience to find their own answers. Riddles remain rhetorical. But damn adorable. How to conclude a Contract? What happens if you don't pay the price? What is actually a Gate? And why is the Wall necessary? And too much has already been said about this to consider it only metaphorical symbols.
One thing Tensai has definitely succeeded in is regret. The Japanese generally proved that they do not know how to regret correctly. This feeling translates either into sky-high pathos speeches and landscapes with a tear-jerking melody, or into a black, cynical silent camera slide. And in "Darker than Black", which is, in fact, a collection of short stories, each two episodes long, it is the most natural, canonical, even somewhat American.
Yes, be it wrong, this is regret, here there is the same philosophical Zone that Tarkovsky once squeezed out of the Strugatskys. One has only to overcome the huge Wall, and there, in the empty streets, the contractors are looking for answers to the questions that they ask themselves. They die alone. They save each other. They kill each other. And again looking for answers.
Contractors, they are, as the sources say, no longer people. They suppressed their emotions, became deceitful monsters who value their lives above all else. Dolls are mediums whose personality was destroyed, and only information important for existence was left. But here's the irony - it seems that over time they will be able to become people faster than people themselves. Rare glimpses of their humanity are more valuable than the strongest words of the masters. And their payment for power adds human colors to them and makes them philosophers. They don't know why they sometimes smoke, or lay out pebbles, or bend the corners of all the wanderers in the book. From the outside, it looks so much like those meaningless habits that are so characteristic of real living people.
This is what the conversation is about. Lee (Hei, Black God of Death, BK-201) is overly human even with his perpetually bored face. Yin is too human, a doll with an absent gaze of purple eyes. Yes even black cat and she is human. By the way, how else, in this case, to separate people from non-humans? After all, the light falls equally on everyone, and in the rain everyone gets wet at the same time quickly. Any comparisons seem artificial and contrived.
However, noir is what it is. He does not open the way for the heroes to escape. Does not divide heroes into good and evil. He pulls the fools out of the crowd to throw them back into the darkness. Welcome to rain and melancholy. Loneliness and theft. Fatal encounters and betrayals. Here, out of place, the parodic character reveals the secrets of being and the future, and the most bitter disappointments turn into even more bitter deceit. And excessive lyricism turns actions into an echo of other actions, forcing the eyes to be involuntarily surprised by their own insight. It all looks like tinsel hung around things that are inconspicuous and uninteresting at first glance. Here already in some way Sinkaev's passion to be alone quietly whimpers - and from the general mass, from dialogues and actions, pots, telescopes, corners of rooms begin to quietly stand out. This n-th secret bottom seems to completely unfold the romance of sad and unhurried confrontations between monsters and people and monsters with monsters, again turning it into a discordant and downtrodden, but from that it is such an ideal regret. Regret is worse than the wildest hatred. Regret is sadder than the most empty desire. Darker than the darkest thoughts. Darker than black.
This is the end of the second season of the anime series. Darker than Black 2, which lasted 12 episodes. In history, there was a place for both well-known heroes and new faces.
Suo Pavlichenko became the main character, and the Russian city of Vladivostok was chosen as the place of action.
Among old acquaintances remained Hei, Mao, who moved to new form, July, Kirihara, etc. It is not directly mentioned what happened between the seasons; for this, four OVAs will be released along with the discs of the second season.
Meanwhile, the gap between the two seasons isn't the only thing that leaves viewers confused. Bones famous for creating open-ended anime such as Xam'd, DtB, Eureka Seven And soul eater , so DtB 2 was no exception. On the one hand, this was facilitated by a small number of the series themselves, on the other hand, that the creators decided not to reveal the cards until the very end - which caused confusion. Therefore, conclusions about the end of the second season are up to each individual.
This article is the result of a collection of different opinions supplemented by the opinion of the author himself.
Brief retelling of the events of the last series.
Suoh meets up with Shion and they go to the gate. Hei meets with Yin, or rather with her shell, and also goes to the gate for her soul.
Kirihara, along with Maou, meets with Madame Oreilly showing off the supercomputer.
Shion disappears and Suoh meets up with July.
Hazuki meets with Genma and they have a fight. July brings Suoh to a half-dead Shion and Yin. Shion dies, July falls unconscious, Suoh pulls out a PTJ and aims at Yin.
The meteorite shard on Suoh's chest shatters, and Hei appears. Terrible and incomprehensible things are happening. Yin suggests that Hei kill himself. Kirihara sees Hei with Yin for a moment, then a flash of light envelops everything. Suoh is alive, her parents are alive and she was late for school.
Kirihara leaves the Gate with Kabayashi.
And now what happened.
Shion leaves Suoh at the center of the gate to make a deal with Yin, which he tells Suoh afterwards. The exact terms of the deal are unknown. One of the opinions is this. Shion is able to create physical copies of everything including humans, but is not able to endow them with souls. In the past, ME was used for this purpose. But the creation of a new Earth requires the infusion of a large number of souls, and here the role of Yin begins. According to the theory, all the killed (or committed suicide, if you like) contractors that Yin saw, gave her their souls. Indirectly, this theory is confirmed by the fact that on the new Earth Suo meets people who died on the old one: her father, mother, etc. The purpose of creating a new Earth is to give contractors normal human life, and the cost of the deal is Shion's life.
Suoh doesn't remember anything about " past life”, due to the destruction of the pendant with the meteorite fragment. As explained in the series, the meteorite is needed to hold the memories of "cloned" people. If you carefully examine Madame Oreilly's supercomputer, you can see a huge sphere - a meteorite that allegedly fell on Dr. Pavlichenko and his children. After the transaction is completed, this ball is no longer there.
Suoh supposedly lost her contractor abilities also due to the destruction of the pendant. It may have contained Hei's sealed power. In this case, by destroying it, Yin would restore Hei's abilities.
Series "Darker than Black: Ryuusei no Gemini"
Darker than Black
Darker than Black (jap. Darker than BLACK -黒の契約者- Da:ka: Zan Burakku -Kuro no Keiyakusha-, Darker than black)- anime directed by Tensai Okamura with music by composer Yoko Kanno. After the success of the series in the magazine Asuka A manga of the same name began to come out. In 2009, the series received an animated sequel. Darker Than Black: Ryuusei no Gemini, and in 2010 - a 4-episode OVA - a continuation, chronologically standing between the first and second seasons.
Plot
In the near future, ten years before the events described in the first season of the series, the Earth appears anomalous zones, later called the Gates of Paradise (a zone in South America) and the Gates of Hell (a zone in Japan). On their territory mysteriously people die, plants unknown to science grow and ghosts appear. Governments are organizing evacuations, and the zones themselves are being walled off. On the basis of the UN, a specialized institute for the study of the anomaly, Pandora, is being created. And everything would be fine, but the influence of the zone has spread far beyond its borders. Contractors (contractors) began to appear among people - people endowed with special abilities, but devoid of emotions and feelings. Each contractor has his own fee for the power provided to him: someone is obliged to constantly smoke, someone - to lay out pebbles in a certain way. The capabilities of the contractors were appreciated and, soon, many of them got to work in the special services, yakuza or terrorist organizations.
The protagonist of the series is Hay. As part of small group works for the mysterious "Organization". While on assignments, Haye tries to figure out what happened to him, his comrades, and his sister five years ago.
Manga
Darker than Black
The events of the manga "Darker than Black", released in 2007, are connected with the girl Kana Shinou. Walking with her friends, she meets a man who looks like her father, who was killed over a year ago. Cana begins her investigation and soon comes across an organization called "Wiegenlied". At the same time, Hei and Mao are interested in the same organization. When the Wiegenlied agents try to kidnap Kana, they take her under their protection...
Darker than Black: Shikkoku no Hana
A new manga, Darker than Black: Shikkoku no Hana, launched a few months before the premiere of the series' second season. Unlike the first series of the manga, Darker than Black: Shikkoku no Hana is not published in the shojo magazine Monthly Asuka, but in the male audience Young Gangan. The new manga is longer: Darker than Black manga has 9 chapters, Darker than Black: Shikkoku no Hana has 33 chapters. Manga author Yuuji Iwahara also worked on the character designs of the original series.
Characters
Note: for a number of characters, despite the use Japanese version hieroglyph, Chinese reading and meaning is used. For example, the meaning of the character's name Hei is indeed "black" but is used japanese character 黒 ( kuro), which is read as Chinese 黑 ( hey).
Voiced by: Yuna InamuraYoshimitsu Horai- Misaki Kirihara's boss. At the end of the first season, Misaki Kirihara is arrested for murder in the first degree.
Voiced by: Michihiro Ikemizu02. The star of the contract has fallen... (part 2).ass (UPLOAD SUBTITLE)
You know, every time a star falls, one of their lives ends.
A contractor just died in this world.
Ten years ago, a fake sky hid the real stars from us.
Contractors are cold-blooded creatures with unheard-of strength.
The so-called dolls are bodies devoid of a soul...
03. New star lit up in the morning sky... (part 1).ass (UPLOAD SUBTITLE)
The head of the column speaks. What happened to you?
What's happened?
Can you report, Tahara?
I don't know... I can't explain.
It's hard to hear. What is going on with you?
04. A new star lit up in the morning sky... (part 2).ass (UPLOAD SUBTITLE)
This new contractor is just showing off.
According to the astronomical department, the spectrum of its star contained the characteristics of a moratorium.
Fried to a crisp, just like the bacon I had for breakfast.
Moratorium?
05. A trace of a crimson nightmare is lost in Eastern Europe... (part 1).ass (DOWNLOAD SUBTITLE)
I can keep my word.
I'm a businessman.
I like your businesslike approach, Mr. Smith.
I'd like to get down to business.
06. A trace of a crimson nightmare is lost in Eastern Europe... (part 2).ass (DOWNLOAD SUBTITLE)
You were there when South America disappeared.
You, Amber, Pye - you were all there.
What happened?
Why are we the only ones left?
08. The fragrance of gardenia in the May rain... (part 2).ass (UPLOAD SUBTITLE)
List of employees for the last ten years.
I think ten years will be enough.
If we can find spies, then in the end we will also find the contractor who is behind everything.
Where is Mao, still unknown?
09. Pure white dress stained with girlish dreams and blood... (Part 1).ass (DOWNLOAD SUBTITLE)
Richard Lau?
Do you really have information about the contractors?
11. Time to get back what was lost inside the wall... (part 1).ass (UPLOAD SUBTITLE)
Do you believe in urban legend?
The gate can give you back what you once lost.
But you will have to pay for this.
I wonder how exactly?
12. Time to get back what was lost inside the wall... (part 2).ass (UPLOAD SUBTITLE)
Oh, the star has fallen!
Brother, I saw another meteor!
Make a wish next time.
Yeah. A meteor is a light that escapes whenever God opens the lid of the sky.
14. On a silver night, the waves cannot shake my heart... (part 2).ass (UPLOAD SUBTITLE)
What happened mom?
Plane... Dad's plane...
Now I have nothing to lose
15. Memories of betrayal - memories of Amber's smile... (part 1).ass (UPLOAD SUBTITLE)
Will you issue an invoice?
Yes please.
A person does not know what real loneliness is when he is alone in a room. And when the room is full of people, and one of them is a traitor.
Sign contracts. Walls are built instead of bridges. And someone stole the moon and the sky, replacing them with fake stars. So now the gods of this world shine from heaven. And when the stars are falling, you don't want to make a wish at all. After all, a wish made under the death of a fighter will most likely turn out to be gloomy.
By the way, it makes no sense to think about why this series at the same time wants to attach the label "noir", and at the same time not. In fact, "Darker Than Black" essentially incorporates almost all the genre diversity of recent years, and naturally cannot cope with anything in isolation. The stamps swell. Therefore, I want to call it the loudest nonsense of all this time. However, when the familiar word “noir” flickers in my head, this flaw immediately fades into darkness. In a world where beautiful and insidious women rule the show, where the hero merges with the antihero, and the danger trivially hides in the shadows, everything exists and irony, and romance, and action, and detective, and drama, and psychedelic and at the same time none of this No. Noir, like matter. Color scheme stellar glow reflected in the surface of the lake.
Ridiculous, of course, but extremely interesting that the young Li Shen Shun, an exchange student, is the most ordinary-looking guy. Timid, insecure, moonlighting wherever he can. Everyone simply adores him, and not only for the outstanding collarbone line, but also for his gentle character. That's just all this mask. As soon as the eyes turn away from him, the colors again flow from the face. Because in fact he is the Black God of Death, as he was called by the cops. And without superpowers, he is more dangerous than many who have signed a contract, but with supernatural power, he is doubly terrible. At night, he puts on a white mask with an ominous smile and destroys the same contract soldiers as he does in the city near the Gates of Hell almost the Strugatsky Zone no, the Tarkovsky Zone By the way, the smiling white mask still reminds a little of the revolutionary V, but nothing else makes them related .
Now you don't even have to try to detect noir in its purest form, in whatever form. Noir is extremely outdated since the post-war economy stabilized and the American people regained faith in a brighter future. And here it is the result of the search for new bottoms of the genre's potential: Blade Runner, No Country for Old Men and Sin City. By the way, "Darker than Black" has even less in common with noir than the aforementioned tapes.
And if a black cat is hiding in a dark room, Tensai Okamura clearly does not want to turn on the light and check. With amazing enthusiasm, he infuses his series with noir suspicion, legends and fatal lyricism. He makes riddles, but does not ask the audience to find their own answers. Riddles remain rhetorical. But damn adorable. How to conclude a Contract? What happens if you don't pay the price? What is actually a Gate? And why is the Wall needed? And too much has already been said about this to consider it only metaphorical symbols.
One thing Tensai has definitely succeeded in is regret. The Japanese generally proved that they do not know how to regret correctly. This feeling translates either into sky-high pathos speeches and landscapes with a tear-jerking melody, or into a black, cynical silent camera slide. And in "Darker than Black", which is, in fact, a collection of short stories, each two episodes long, it is the most natural, canonical, even somewhat American.
Yes, be it wrong, this is regret, here there is the same philosophical Zone that Tarkovsky once squeezed out of the Strugatskys. One has only to overcome the huge Wall, and there, in the empty streets, the contractors are looking for answers to the questions that they ask themselves. They die alone. They save each other. They kill each other. And again looking for answers.
Contractors, they are, as sources say, no longer people. They suppressed their emotions, became deceitful monsters who value their lives above all else. Dolls are mediums whose personality was destroyed, and only information important for existence was left. But here's the irony it seems that over time they will be able to become people faster than people themselves. Rare glimpses of their humanity are more valuable than the strongest words of the masters. And their payment for power adds human colors to them and makes them philosophers. They don't know why they sometimes smoke, or lay out pebbles, or bend the corners of all the wanderers in the book. From the outside, it looks so much like those meaningless habits that are so characteristic of real living people.
This is what the conversation is about. Lee (Hei, Black God of Death, BK-201) is overly human even with his perpetually bored face. Yin is too human, a doll with an absent gaze of purple eyes. Yes, even a black cat, and that one is humane. By the way, how else, in this case, to separate people from non-humans? After all, the light falls equally on everyone, and in the rain everyone gets wet at the same time quickly. Any comparisons seem artificial and contrived.
However, noir he is. He does not open the way for the heroes to escape. Does not divide heroes into good and evil. He pulls the fools out of the crowd to throw them back into the darkness. Welcome to rain and melancholy. Loneliness and theft. Fatal encounters and betrayals. Here, out of place, the parodic character reveals the secrets of being and the future, and the most bitter disappointments turn into even more bitter deceit. A musical melodies from Yoko Kanno evoke those same doomed notes of melancholy that once sounded in Cowboy Bebop. And excessive lyricism turns actions into an echo of other actions, forcing the eyes to be involuntarily surprised by their own insight. It all looks like tinsel hung around things that are inconspicuous and uninteresting at first glance. Here already in some way Sinkaev's passion to be alone quietly whimpers and from the general mass, from dialogues and actions, pots, telescopes, corners of rooms begin to quietly stand out. This n-th secret bottom seems to completely unfold the romance of sad and unhurried confrontations between monsters and people and monsters with monsters, again turning it into a discordant and downtrodden, but from that it is such an ideal regret. Regret is worse than the wildest hatred. Regret is sadder than the most empty desire. Darker than the darkest thoughts. Darker than black.
Dark side blues
10 years ago the world changed. Some of the people became contractors, having entered into a contract with an unknown force and acquiring various abilities. In addition, mediums appeared - people (dolls) more like “vegetables”, devoid of personality and memory. This is how the darker than black anime starts.
A paranormal zone called the "Gate of Hell" appears in Tokyo, which is surrounded by a wall. The secret services begin to hunt for contractors, either by attracting them to themselves or by killing them.
Hey - main character, a contractor nicknamed "The Black Reaper" with the ability to manipulate electricity, works for an organization, performing various tasks and constantly clashing with his past. His team includes the emotionless Yin doll girl, the former police officer Huang, and the talking cat Mao.
Anime Darker than black (darker than black) is an extremely interesting mixture of fantasy, action, detective and noir with a well-thought-out universe that is slightly different from ours.
IN Lately often there is a theme about a person endowed with incredible abilities, whether it be films, TV shows or anime. However, in "Darker thab black" the contractors are something like cold-blooded, calculating bastards, main goal which is self-preservation. The concept of conscience and morality becomes something distant and forgotten, and “Everything for yourself” comes to the fore. Due to their blunted senses, such superhumans become ideal weapons for killing, ready to fulfill any order.
However, you have to pay for everything, even in the Darker than black universe. For the use of their abilities, each contractor pays a special price. For some, this is the harmless eating of eggs, laying out pebbles, and for some, this is breaking fingers on own hand. At the same time, the fee is more of a psychological dependence than a physical one.
Hey is unique. He pays no price, is the most irrational contractor, differing in atypical behavior from others who have own life above all. So living during the day the life of an ordinary transferred student, and at night turning into the black god of death, Hei seems to rush between the world of people and the world of contractors, not allowing him to turn into a completely soulless killer.
If I could describe the show in two words, it would be gray days adventures of the protagonist in the company of a doll girl, talking cat and a man of the old school from the same sandbox as all the brethren. At the same time, a feature of the series is the division of each mini-story into two series for each story, which are practically unrelated.
Regardless of the fact that the trump card of "Darker than black" is a fantastic entourage, excellent graphics, simply excellent dynamics of battles, the heroes themselves, their feelings and past come to the fore. Everything obeys the law of the blues: a slow narrative, a gloomy city and the same grim heroes. This state of affairs will not suit someone at all, forcing them to stop watching this creation after a couple of episodes, but we advise you to be more loyal, because “Darker than Black” is a rare and by no means bad creation.
