Darker Than Black/Headscratchers

• Since when have cases of "Death by Electrocution" had their causes of death marked as "Unknown", as indicated by the police in the first episode? I mean how is Hei killing people with electricity without damaging any organs, or if he does damage organs, how does the Police Coroner miss it?
  • As pointed out on the Fridge tab, Hei's power is a bit more than just shocking things. He doesn't always electrocute people (especially ones like Loui, who jump on his Berserk Button by telling him to be rational). He stopped the natural flow of electricity in Loui's body, basically turning him off like a light switch.
• Why does the second season not have more episodes? The first season did really well by having two-parters with really good but simple self-contained storylines that still built on the overall myth-arc. And that was just with Japan to play around with. Season two took place throughout Russia and Japan, and the massive change in the status quo could have been some good fodder for new stories. While I don't exactly mind the focus on the overall story, it's kind of lacking in flavor-text, as it were, and characterization is a little bit watered down due to the number of important characters. It would also have diluted the rampant pedophilia subtext. The OVA even pulled it off to some extent by focusing on Hei and Yin's interactions and characterizations on the island as well as the inspection of the contractor society, even though it only had four episodes.
• While it's Handwaved that this is because of the random nature of the Gate, I've noticed that Renumerations/power use only really come into effect when the plot demands. Specifically, while I get that Hei won the Superpower Lottery, there's no explanation for why the French Contractors as well as November 11 get really physically exhausted after using their powers on top of their renumerations (in fact, the French ones have it a lot worse- November is able to get away when he's tired out; they just lay on the ground in the middle of combat) but on the other hand, Wei is able to continually use his Bloody Murder power and releases it with a snap of his fingers. Literally, this guy is continually cutting himself and shows no signs of pain or fatigue from blood loss.
  • Wei's Required Secondary Powers are weird. But he has "elven" ears and survives electrocution without police noticing he's not exactly corpse, so his entire physiology seems to be deeply messed up by the powers of Gate, so this weirdness is sort of justified.
  • Plus if you actually watch the finale your discover that Hei did not in fact win the Superpower Lottery.
  • Wei's remuneration is to shed blood, making himself a sort of endless murder cycle. It seems to depend a lot on chance, and the people themselves. For example, singing, invoked right after the death of a loved one. Bai, for instance, may well have just up and passed out the first time she used her powers.
  • It's a psychological compulsion, not a requirement. You can use your powers for an extended period of time, but at some point, you have to smoke/break your fingers/ etc. Most of the contractors who simply "get away" don't manage to stay away for a very long time if they have a time-consuming renumeration.
• What's the deal with Wei's Pointy Ears?
• Regarding the suggestion on the Superpower Lottery page that Amber is immortal, it bugs me that she is strongly implied to die. I would think that anyone who ages backwards would be immortal - at worst, they'd end up trapped as a baby forever, but I can easily see them "resetting" or just being normal once they've aged down to an infant.
  • Maybe Amber's implied dying actually means she's suffered a Fate Worse Than Death: pre-life! Then death.
  • She could be immortal, but she overused it. Remuneration happens after the use of power, not before or at the same time, even postponed a little. So nothing prevents her from being driven far beyond the age when she would be unable to activate it — but she will suffer this after dooming herself by accumulating enough of "debt" to be dropped to -1 year or so and vanish.
• While it's a cool concept, I'm a bit bothered by the idea that you can erase someone's memories or implant memories in a Doll, but the methodology is never explained. The series hints at the Gate providing Magitek to The Syndicate, but this is never really explored.
  • ...or advanced Truth Detector and countermeasures for it, or glass flowers, or those seeds. Whoever stole stuff got from it whatever they could. After all, people we see are handful of operatives and handful of technicians with already working systems. They know which button to press, but it's all they can do about "xeno"-tech. That is, everyone save Mad Scientist (who's not quite sane to begin with) and some of his comrades (who never said anything on screen). Hand Wave is simply out of scope. That, and none of "Roadside Picnic" derivatives ever unambiguously handwaved anything. Uncanny Valley incarnate is supposed to be weird.
• It doesn't make any sense if you think about it a bit that Contractors could have any talent as covert operatives. Sure, they kill without remorse, but as is noted, they each have their power tied to the artificial stars created by the Gate, and using the "Messier numbers" you can tell when any Contractor is using their powers. Bearing that in mind, the covert aspect doesn't seem to hold up.
  • It was not stated that anyone with sky map and eyes can do this. As long as agency they work against has access to observation-analytics-library facilities like the one we saw, they aren't too "covert", yeah. And that's what happened on-screen, especially if Contractor doesn't leave the scene immediately. Lois was cornered, and then cornered again. Berta and her partner were pinpointed after first use of her power and would be caught if guy could not deal with so many observers so quickly. "Gate-sama" was an enigma only for Muggles. Primrose's hideaways were visited by police at least twice. Hei got away repeatedly only on pure ninjutsu. On the other hand, we see too many Contractors already knowing each other anyway, whether personally or from briefing.
• Those random Scandinavians (which I think are supposed to be Finns, based on the names, but I could be wrong here, as the guy's name is kinda odd, as far as I've observed) were an interesting addition and all... but c'mon, is it too much to ask to get the VAs to learn how to pronounce their characters' names right? Eelis' VA did get close with Eelis' name, yeah, but considering that Eelis should be of the same nationality as Yin/Kirsi, not to mention having been closely acquaintaced with her, he really should be capable of getting Kirsi's name right.
  • This is a failing of the Japanese language, not the VAs. They don't actually have a "si" sound, so the closest approximation is "shi". Unless you're talking about the dub? In which case, just ignore me.
    • Actually this troper, when I was learning Japanese, was taught to pronounce his name in Japanese syllables when introducing himself. It's possible they're simply doing the same thing, rendering their names in a way that's easier for the language?
• If rockets vanish once they're launched past the stratosphere due to the false sky, how come cell phones and other commnication devices are able to work?
  • Well, cell phones use cell towers, not satellites, so they wouldn't have a problem. However, satellite TV, spy satellites, and anything else that relied on satellites would be in trouble. However, that would mostly effect the government, not your average citizen. Satellites do a lot for us, that's true, but most stuff still that your average citizen uses uses cables or radio waves as opposed to satellites. And even if they did run into trouble due to the lack of satellites, they'd have had plenty of time to have set up alternatives.
  • Read Robert Charles Wilson's Spin; it has the same premise as far as the sky vanishing, and explores how telecommunications could work with the same limitations.
• "Obeisance" makes more sense than "remuneration", given that the latter implies money while the former is a physical act of submission. Why did the translators change it?
  • Presumably to keep the "contract" metaphor.
• Why did Mayu focus on Hei's collarbone when she had such a wide array of much more gorgeous features to choose from? Girl must have issues.
  • It seems to be missing, but one of the pages had a quote from her Doujinshi which involved a character based on Hei having sex with a male elephant. So yes, yes she does.
    • ...Wait, What? I must see this page and quote, if only the confirm that totally cracked-out tidbit (as for the initial question, Mayu's collarbone fixation probably has to do with the fact that Hei was wearing a) a mask and b) a shirt that was neither his usual man-cleavage-showcasing button-up nor the skin-tight spy catsuit that's usually under the Badass Longcoat. Therefore, the most immediate object of focus would be the infamous "delicious collarbone." Also, she was drunk during the rescue. People think of some pretty weird things while drunk.)
• The fucking pedophilia everywhere.
  • Ugh yes, it's really starting to put me off season 2, which is a shame because it's otherwise excellent.
  • Sex is a major theme in season 2, especially sexual deviancy. There is exactly one lolicon, one shotacon, one lesbian, and one okama in the cast so far, in addition to Suou's period. Why? I have no idea, but if I were paid money to guess I would say that it's meant to tie in to Suou's Terra-esque "what is love" motif. Alternatively, the writers may be going for an X-Men vibe of equating contractors to sexual deviants, much as X-Men recently started using mutants as the new gay people--note that the okama father is immediately and utterly accepting of contractors and doesn't question their coldness.
  • I am also offput by all of the lolicon- they better not hook up Hei and Suou. On the other hand, I did get the vibe that with the crossdresser father, they might have been going for the gay = mutant idea of the X-Men. On the other hand, it's kind of surprising, but besides The Syndicate, average people so far don't really seem to hate Contractors, which is weird given how mutants are treated in most series, and Contractors are a lot more dangerous. Like that mother in the latest episode telling her child not to look at Hei fighting Genma, because if Contractors see you, they will "take your bellybutton". Sure, that's making them bogeymen, but she seemed pretty calm.
  • I thought that the series handled the interaction well enough to be neither 'fucking' nor 'pedophilia', seeing as all but a handful relationships are developed in a way that practically spells out: "this is not healthy". And then there's Suou's heartbreaking "confession": ("It hurt even more when you hit me. There are so many things I don't understand... but when you called me Suou, I was so happy. Then I found out it was to save Yin, I became confused. You killed my dad. You're a terrible, good-for-nothing, violent drunk. Yet I became so lonely when we were separated.) That's bad enough coming from an abused wife, but this is from a kid, barely in her teens, who's been screwed up by events entirely beyond her control. If her character is being exploited, it's tugging at our heartstrings, not our nether regions. As for Norio, he's a nutjob and never taken seriously. It's interesting to note that Norio and Suou's age gap (~18 and ~13) happens to match that of another famously doomed couple.
• It bugs me that everyone says Contractors are emotionless when they're clearly not.
  • That would be a major theme of the series, yes.
  • Mao, in season 1, says something weird about being able to be scared, but without putting the emotion in the equation. Huh.
  • Tin Man is invoked intentionally for that reason. And the finale hints that Contractors used to be more emotionless but are slowly developing them.
  • Well look at it this way: When you feel fear, you have physical signs (blood moving from your stomach giving it butterflies), and often an awareness of the practicality of getting away, but also your brain goes "ohcrapcrapcrapcraprunmustgoaway". The question of "what is emotion?" is an interesting one, but when talking about The Sociopath it seems to be the first two are considered irrelevant compared to the last. After all, you have butterflies in your stomach when you're attracted to someone, how can you tell the difference between fear and attraction if you lack the "ohcrapcrapcrap"?
• Maybe it's just me who completely fails at physics, but what exactly happened to that blonde superspeed Contractor at the end of that fight in Season 2, Episode 1? Running at the speed of light and connecting to a raindrop and all?
  • Pay attention carefully to when and where he glows, and you'll notice that he doesn't necessarily use his power whenever he runs. Instead, he uses it for just a moment, existing at the speed of sound for just a split second and using his inertia to slow down (that's what happened when he ran into the tree--he couldn't stop himself in time). Now, speed has one of the longest lists of Required Secondary Powers--not only do you need some sort of protection against the muscle damage that would be caused by punishing your muscles like that, but you need to have a temporary forcefield that protects you from being brained by a fly, or ripped apart by the air particles themselves. The Russian had neither. After April was knocked down, a couple things happened at once: she used her contractor ability, making it start to rain, and the speedster started accelerating. Now Russia, you may be surprised to learn, is very cold--it actually shouldn't be possible for it to rain, because the droplets should freeze before they even hit the ground. When the rain did fall, it was supercooled, meaning that despite being liquid they will act like a solid upon contact with anything, like hail. What you had then, was a human being at the highest point of acceleration using a power that allows him to dodge bullets (much faster than the speed of sound, meaning at least four hundred meters per second) running into a wall of tiny balls of ice, which is something like what would happen if you were to fall into an iron maiden from a height of two hundred feet.
    • Damn. Well, for moving so fast, he sure changed his expression into the show's biggest "oh shit" face in time. Thanks for the explanation!
      • Problem is, why doesn't his moving at the speed of sound through air itself trigger existence issues? Surely the body is not made to withstand air resistance while moving at 340 m/sec? Unless he has some secondary powers not mentioned.
• What the frick happened at the end of Ryuusei no Gemini? I got parts of it, but you can only put so much down to "mysterious setting" and "brain occupied with ignoring the squicky pedo subtext" before the Gainax Ending gets ridiculous.
  • I wouldn't dream of trying to make sense of all that, but here's what happened in no particular order:
    • An OVA is slated to come out in 2010 concerning the events between seasons 1 and 2. At the very least, it will explain some about Yin.
  • How I saw it:
    • Unfortunately, I have no freaking clue what Madame Oreille was trying to accomplish in this interpretation, or why.
      • My guess is that she was trying to stop the Izanagi and Izanami as well, Hei did it for her
• A clip-show montage, multiple single instances of flashbacks, and a totally mood-breaking insert of the transformation sequence? Is BONES really so strapped for cash that they had to cut that many corners for a final episode?
• How does Hei's mask stay on, anyway?
  • Static cling!
• I don't really like how Hei x Yin is more or less official. I always saw their relationship as that of a protective older brother and his little sister, which combined with the Lolicon factor creates a moderately uncomfortable amount of Squick for me. Sure, they love each other, but I never saw it as that kind of love.
  • Probably because all the other characters assume that's what's going on and shippers are physically incapable of accepting the Like Brother and Sister explanation.
  • After the Gaiden OVAs, the Like Brother and Sister explanation falls apart and Hei x Yin became canon.
    • No, not really. All we see is that they're really close and Hei gets extremely protective of her, which we already knew; it's deliberately left open, so a shipper can legitimately interpret their relationship one way, while someone who disagrees can interpret it differently. Sure, Izanami is all over Hei, but it's hard to tell if she's a Split Personality or a separate entity, and he mostly seems quite understandably creeped-out. Otherwise, all that happens is that they hug, which can just as easily be platonic.
      • That's just your personal opinion, Word of God has already stated them as being canon.
        • Where?
        • Word of God has been pretty tight-lipped about the entire situation, actually. This Troper hasn't seen much of anything from the writers alluding to them being in a romantic relationship or having mutual romantic feelings for each other. As the above troper states, it's relatively ambiguous and shippers can ship whoever they want, or ship no one at all. In other words: if you want to see it, it's there. If you don't want to see it, it's not there.
  • This troper doesn't really see it as lolicon, there doesn't seem to be that great a difference in height (at least in the OVA) between the two and the manager of the resort they visit posing as a married couple seems to easily accept that Yin could be Hei's wife so it doesn't appear the age gap between them is all that big.
• Okay, this has been bugging me for ages, but I think I finally figured out why Hei's second-season characterization bothers me so much. I understand that they wanted to do a storyline where he's in terrible shape psychologically and slowly gets over it. Heck, I might have been able to forgive some of the jerkass behavior under different circumstances. But why the hell would someone whose job constantly puts him in situations where he has to fight for his life start drinking? Hei isn't stupid; he'd know perfectly well that not thinking clearly in his line of work is a really bad idea. Not only that, but his reaction seems extreme even given what he went through, since he's had to cope with pretty much the same thing in the past. I'd think it would be more in character for him to just retreat even further into stoic paranoia, with Yin/Izanami as a new Berserk Button, since that's what happened last time he was betrayed, had his hopes smashed, and lost someone he loved. There's no previous evidence to suggest that when he's angry he lashes out at random people; he just gets quiet, calm, and absolutely vicious to whichever poor sap pissed him off.
  • Perhaps because, no matter how depressed he gets, Hei retains the need to consume. Since he doesn't feel like taking a real job in Russia, going to the local restaurant is out of the question. Thus: bottled calories.
  • The Gaiden OVAs explain why Hei started to drink: he became a drunken version of Don't You Dare Pity Me!.
  • There's also the fact that Hei, already a pretty sombre character, was originally notable for having the single comedic trait of eating a lot. By taking away this trait and replacing it with the much less humorous alcoholism, the show achieves a sort of Player Punch without having to kill anyone.
• It just bugs me that the second season has a plot outline that sounds like a bad fanfic. To whit: A completely new character joins the original protagonist, who is turned into an abusive jerkass to make us feel sorry for her. Then she becomes a Contractor, but her emotions don't change at all, with no explanation (and she gets a Transformation Sequence!). From that point on, most of the plot is about her, even though at the end it turns out she wasn't even directly involved in the scheme that got the whole mess started. A character who died is brought back with just a Hand Wave (presumably because the author liked him), and most characters who survived the original are reduced to a few scenes at best: Kirihara is mostly shoved offscreen despite her great story potential, and Yin spends the whole time either in a coma or possessed by her shiny new Super-Powered Evil Side, which seems almost like a Morality Pet version of Die for Our Ship. If this had been a story on fanfiction.net, I'd ask somebody to write a Protectors of the Plot Continuum mission for it! I actually don't think it was bad, but it still bothers me.
  • This troper skipped the entire second season really. The first season stands up on it's own and the ONLY plot hook is very transparent and was obviously added at the last second.
  • Good point. I was glad to have Mao there, but there's really no reason at all he should have been.
  • I'm going to disagree with Mao, mostly because his reappearance solved some Fridge Logic I had with his death. I wondered if they still had the backup of his brain still on the server somewhere, and could just turn it back on. Made sense to me.
  • This troper was always under the impression that Suou was a deconstruction of the self-insert Mary Sue. Given the nature of the show, it's entirely plausible.
    • When Suo is not transforming she is either mourning someone's death, stalked, beaten up or kidnapped. I don't think labeling her Mary Sue is justified.
• Tanya's abrupt personality change doesn't mesh with any previous precedent. Most Contractors seem to retain their personalities for the most part; they just don't mind killing people. In contrast, Tanya instantly became a pod person. In fact, it's even implied elsewhere that Contractors are becoming less sociopathic over time, which makes her personality shift even more confusing.
  • This bugged me too. Maybe when they turn into Contractors they start off emotionally blank, then they slowly redevelop over time?
    • This is very heavily implied. Heck, the original poster touched on it when he said that "Contractors are becoming less sociopathic."
  • This is in accord with episodes 3 and 4 in the first season. A character changed from a Muggle to a Contractor. As a Muggle, she was a normal girl with a full range of emotions. When she manifested Contractor powers, she suddenly became robotic and monotonous, both in the flashback and in the resurfacing.
• All the transformation sequences. Honestly, were they really that necessary? After just one of them, I think the animators would have realized that yes, the audience knows where Suou's rifles are coming from.
  • The same reasons a transformation sequence, or other stock footage, are EVER used.
• Why doesn't Wei turn his own hand into ribbons every time he uses his contractor ability? In a show focused on reality, Wei's the only one with a blatant secondary superpower. (The Russian McDonald's Flash didn't have any)
  • There are plenty of explanations for that: he could have the ability to decide which blood is affected, or he could be returning the blood to his own body when he does it, which would also explain why he doesn't pass out from blood loss.
  • Returning the blood to his body makes sense; his ability was described as matter teleportation at one point, after all.
• Why are Hei's fights so ambiguous in terms of who wins? For example, in episode 2,http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nE4h0w-IU 8&feature=relmf, it looks like Chiaki saved Hei during 19:28. But on closer inspection, Hei looks like he was able to dodge. Also, in episode 6, when November 11 freezes Hei's feet, it looks like Huang saves him with a smoke bomb. If you look closely, though, Hei unfreezes his feet with his knife at the last minute, leaving it up to interpretation who won. My point is, Hei's fights always look unclear as who the winner is, and it usually winds up with him being saved. My problem is that it's hard to take him seriously as "one of the best Contractors" when he seems to get his ass kicked every other episode.
• Why does everybody say that Genma was a pedophile? I never once got that vibe from him. The only things I can think of that even come close are the two instances in which he calls Suou a "cute little kid," and even then, he sounded more as if he were mocking her for seeming unthreatening. In fact, he's been labeled as a Complete Monster several times on this site, but the most evil I ever saw him commit was killing Yoko and nearly killing Suou, and while those are certainly evil actions, I don't see how they transform him from "villain" to "complete monster."