Bungou Stray Dogs

For weeks, Atsushi Nakajima's orphanage has been plagued by a mystical tiger that only he seems to be unaware of. Suspected to be behind the strange incidents, the 18-year-old is abruptly kicked out of the orphanage and left hungry, homeless, and wandering through the city.

While starving on a riverbank, Atsushi saves a rather eccentric man named Osamu Dazai from drowning. Whimsical suicide enthusiast and supernatural detective, Dazai has been investigating the same tiger that has been terrorizing the boy. Together with Dazai's partner Doppo Kunikida, they solve the mystery, but its resolution leaves Atsushi in a tight spot. As various odd events take place, Atsushi is coerced into joining their firm of supernatural investigators, taking on unusual cases the police cannot handle, alongside his numerous enigmatic co-workers.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Dazai, Osamu Main

Miyano, Mamoru Japanese

Nakajima, Atsushi Main

Uemura, Yuuto Japanese

Nakahara, Chuuya Supporting

Taniyama, Kishou Japanese

Edogawa, Ranpo Supporting

Kamiya, Hiroshi Japanese

Akutagawa, Ryuunosuke Supporting

Ono, Kensho Japanese

Yosano, Akiko Supporting

Shimamura, Yuu Japanese

Izumi, Kyouka Supporting

Morohoshi, Sumire Japanese

Kunikida, Doppo Supporting

Hosoya, Yoshimasa Japanese

Miyazawa, Kenji Supporting

Kagura, Kitsune Japanese

Montgomery, Lucy Maud Supporting

Hanazawa, Kana Japanese

Bezerra, Wendel Producer

Suzuki, Mari Producer

Simone, Jamie Producer

Kurakane, Chiaki Producer

Reviews

Mar 2, 2024

En-psychopedia

Recommended

The first season is more of an introduction of the characters and the world in which Bungo Stray Dogs is set. Mainly a Detective Agency where ppl have supernatural abilities. There's not much of an ongoing plot and is more episodic for the first season. Not bad but not great... It gets much more interesting by the 3rd season and the 4th season is heads and shoulders above the 1st. It gets into murder mystery detective stories and conspiracies. The special powers are also unique and original, not just ur run of the mill elemental powers or general magic. There are ... several wellrounded, likable characters.

Reviewer’s Rating: 7

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Jan 6, 2025

scy318

Mixed Feelings

The first review I wrote for Bungou Stray Dogs was so low effort and awful, when I rediscovered it, I had to delete it out of shame. Now that five seasons have been released, I feel like now’s a good stopping point to organize my thoughts about Bungou Stray Dogs as a whole.

Bungou Stray Dogs is a mystery action adventure anime that follows an orphaned boy who is recruited to be part of a superhero task force. Almost every relevant character has some sort of superpower, dubbed ability users. The characters and abilities themselves are modeled after real life writers and their works, which ... was quite interesting. The worldbuilding is kind of iffy, but generally ability users will gather together in groups to achieve some purpose, and that’s where the conflict in Bungou Stray Dogs (from now on referred to as BSD) comes from.

BSD fans will celebrate the anime for having such a huge ensemble cast with varying personalities, creative abilities, and most of all, moving character dynamics. Well, what I can say for sure is that if you ever meet anyone who says BSD characters are well written, just nod your head and quickly shuffle away inconspicuously (BSD fans are VERY passionate, I know since I used to be a hardcore glazer). The main characters have an inordinate amount of plot armor. They will literally never die. This isn’t even that much of a spoiler since it gets to a point where you can start predicting fake out deaths like clockwork.

In the main police task force (called the armed detective agency), there are two super geniuses who dictate all the action. Now, one would think a single super genius is enough, but BSD is all about crazy, inhumanly smart people playing 5D chess with each other. Hell, one of these such characters can solve murder cases in under a minute. How can BSD function with all these plot defying characters, then? The answer is to shoehorn in more super geniuses and have them fight a war of attrition. They will pull solutions out of thin air just to say “haha I outsmarted your outsmarting!!!”. It was fun the first few times, but it just drags on and on and on and finally nothing is resolved since the writer doesn’t have the guts to kill off characters. I mean, the current arc STILL hasn’t finished despite starting at the end of season 3… (Recap, five whole seasons have been released and a sixth is probably on the way).

That’s not to say BSD characters are cardboard cutouts. They’re not, exactly, but it’s like the author took stereotypes and boosted that certain trait 1000%, and then lightly sprinkled some other side stuff like garnish. The writer, like the fans, is way too attached to his own characters, and as a result, to have these characters develop would be equivalent to overhauling everything established. There’s a good example of this in one of the main characters and I’ll put an explanation at the end of this review which will 100% be spoilers*.

The writing in BSD is very messy and convoluted, but the reason I stuck around for so long is because it’s actually pretty fun. The BS 5D chess can get boring, but once the fun wears off, BSD is still okay fodder. It’s not bad to watch, and if you’ve got nothing else to do, it’s fine. The animation is average, but the fight scenes are interesting. If you’re like me and have the patience to watch this “anime fast food”, by all means, Bungou Stray Dogs is a good time.

Final Rating: 6 (For all the seasons)


*Dazai is an interesting character because even though he’s one of the superhuman geniuses, there’s more than meets the eye with him. In season 2 (I think), he gets some backstory which introduces a really intriguing concept in regards to his intelligence. BSD’s writer takes the idea that very smart people are less happier than other people and runs with it. Apparently, Dazai’s nigh-omniscience renders him completely isolated from everyone else, therefore making him “empty”. It’s like he can’t empathize or form genuine relationships with anyone else since his traumatic Mafia past and skills let him read people like a book. Dazai would know instantly just from looking at you if you’re lying, what you want, and what you’re scared of. This gives him so much leverage that any relationship is fundamentally imbalanced. There’s no push or pull, which is essential for a moving, impactful, relationship. Anything that Dazai does will be perfectly successful, and he knows this, so nothing can truly excite him. As a result, he has no purpose in his life, and coupled with the lack of real relationships, it makes sense that he feels suicidal.

In situations where he meets a character who has intelligence that rivals his own, there’s a mutual distrust and wariness between them since they both know each other’s capabilities. With other smart characters, Dazai can feel the thrill and exhilaration normal people feel, but it's still very insubstantial. I guess this is the reasoning behind his ability name, “No Longer Human”. Dazai is the furthest possible thing from a human, lacking all capability to be sympathetic or empathetic by virtue of his own mind. I haven’t seen Monster, but from what I’ve heard, this is very similar to Johan Liebert. Dazai is an inhumane monster devoid of true feeling.

This is the best interpretation I could come up with given the backstory we got, since everything else about Dazai is shrouded in layers upon layers of mystery. There are points where it's uncertain if Dazai's inner ideals and motivations are changing, but they're still too inconsistent and vague to draw any conclusions. I've often wondered what BSD would end up looking like had the author decided to explore Dazai's conflicts and inner self loathing. A potential storyline would be to start off with Dazai as this monster, and have some event limit his capabilities so self doubt, peer pressure, and meaningful introspection can occur. Then, BSD would be about rediscovering what it's like to be human, to feel the myriad of emotions that people do and to connect yourself with others. The thing is, the author is so preoccupied with maintaining this mystery that Dazai can never truly develop as a character. Even the author himself has confessed that he cannot imagine writing Dazai’s POV. This is the pedestal he has placed his characters on, and exactly why they can never be more than just an interesting concept.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Apr 27, 2023

Sukamii

Not Recommended

Bungou Stray Dogs desperately attempts to be a quirky anime that tries to tell a "dark" and "gritty" story about organized crime, detectives and their interplay with a little bit of magic sprinkled in. However, the writing, whether it be the main characters, or any of the antagonists, or even the beats of the entire plot are at best generic (not inherently a bad thing) and at worst (which is the majority of the time) pedantically annoying and annoyingly melodramatic. It so badly wants you to empathize with the main character that every 2-3 episodes it flashes back to our protagonist Atsushis backstory, to the ... point it becomes overplayed and hard to care about. There's no nuance or subtlety with the character or how his tragic upbringing really affected him outside of these flashbacks, and a moment early in the season that feels empty due to its immediate resolution. It feels like a surface level justification that has little to do with the characters growth, struggles and life. For a show that's about detectives, psychology, and understanding the human being- its delivers nothing but shallow analysis and conclusions. It's boring and unentertaining.
Speaking of boring and unentertaining, the "Gifted" systems implementation feels like a half baked idea to me. On one hand, I totally understand the desire to add some degree of a power system to a story like this as it has some noteworthy potential- but this suffers from a similar issue as to what I felt like the Imperial Relics from Akame ga Kill did- there's no real cohesion with what's being chosen for gifts. It's just a power system but for detectives, with some having interesting implementations, with strengths and notable weaknesses like Kunikidas- and others feeling entirely haphazard like Akutagawa or Nakajimas. They don't seem to fit in the overall narrative cohesion of the story, and are more akin to "cool superpowers that we wanted to include" with there being no real precedent for what being "Gifted" actually is outside of apparently being magic that is somehow extremely prevalent but simultaneously not relevant in the public sphere.
A note about the characters, their designs, etc. While this may be more of a personal preference, I don't think any of their designs were all that interesting or memorable. It's a situation where each of the characters were meant to fill a specific aesthetic, but also be designed in a way that they reflect their personalities but often come off as strangely uninspired and uninteresting. I feel like I've seen all of them in another anime, whether it be the archetypes and rolls they fill, their personality, and even their powers- each one of them feels so bland I don't really expect to remember them outside of the names of the authors they stem from. Which is another fairly strong point of contention I have in regards to one character.
Osamu Dazai, the pen name for the author Shūji Tsushima, was a Japanese author who died in a double suicide via drowning in 1938. How does this anime interpret the tragic death of a real human being? By relegating much of the characters dialogue, and near every single one of his gags, to be how badly he wants to participate in a double suicide with a pretty woman. His character was first introduced attempting to kill himself via drowning in a river. It's so unabashedly tasteless, and frankly speaking its gross and was a horrible note to begin this series off with- and it set the precedent for the standard of humor and overall writing this show was to present.
Much of the show persists on an episodic format, introducing characters steadily that have a mild influence or importance to the story on the whole, and are relegated to importance later on- which I can only assume to be in its following seasons. If a character is introduced in an episode, then its more likely than not their arc will be concluded in that same episode. there's nothing inherently wrong with an episodic format, some of the greatest stories ever told have been done so in this medium. Stray Dogs, however, doesn't tell any interesting stories, or build the mystique of the world through this format. It wants to leave little crumbs of information that build towards a grander narrative, but that narrative is paper thin and I just don't think its good.
So far as positives I think the animation quality is fine, same with the directing of action sequences (however the lows for the action scenes are just rock bottom, like the gunfight in early episode 11). They're plenty punchy and tight, with the comedy scenes (while I don't think there's much humor to be found in the show) do a plenty fine job at conveying the attempts at humor and stylization that befits them- but that's not enough to carry the show, or even really do enough to help overcome the shows weaknesses.
Bungou Stray Dogs really doesn't care about its story or its characters, or even the real people they draw their names from. It's embarrassingly unfunny, bland, uninspired, and a slog to watch through. It was a struggle to force myself to watch this show, which is an utter shame as the premise was interesting- I wouldn't have considered it if there wasn't something I thought was worth my time. But the execution of the already struggling story results in a bad season. I'll more likely than not give the subsequent seasons a shot to see if they were able to redeem itself, but my hopes for what follows have plummeted.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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