Baccano

Baccano

"Depending on who you place in the same situation, the characteristics of said incident change kaleidoscopically. In other words, there is one incident. However, there are as many stories explaining it as there are people involved in it."

—Gustav St. Germain

"What's next on Baccano!"

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This show provides examples of:

• Above Good And Evil: Szilard and Huey would both argue this in the name of science.
• Actually I Am Him: Played straight in one of the early novels where it is revealed that Firo is the narrator.
• Adorkable Jacuzzi definitely, and even Claire has his moments, especially around Chane
• Aerith And Bob: Eve, Rachel, Isaac? Meet Luck, Firo, Chane, and Jacuzzi Splot.
• A God Am I: Several examples, at least one of whom isn't even immortal.
• Always Someone Better: Ladd gets schooled in this concept by Claire.
  • And Ladd himself did this to Graham Specter.
• Aloof Big Brother: Tack feels this way about Tick. Tick thinks it's the other way around.
• Ambition Is Evil: Szilard and Huey can be argued under this to explain why they turned out to be complete monsters.
• Angst What Angst: Several characters have good reason to have a bit of angst in their lives but don't. Doesn't mean they necessarily are all there mentally.
• Anti Hero: Majority of characters.
  • Sliding Scale Of Anti Heroes: Baccano! characters seem to more or less run the gamut between Type I or Type II (arguably, Isaac and Miria) through to Type V (the Rail tracer). The most common types seem to be Types III-V, however.
• Apologises A Lot: Jacuzzi offers apologies for things including being run into and introducing himself.
• Baddie Flattery: the more Ladd employs this with you, the more he wants to kill you.
• Be All My Sins Remembered: Czeslaw has these moments as he questions if what happened to him on the Flying Pussyfoot was justice for him having killed his abusive guardian after a couple hundred years of torture. Nearly eighty years later he still questions if he is evil or if he is worthy of love.
• Maiza has a little of this due to guilt over his dead little brother.
• Beast And Beauty: Ladd and Lua. Of course, with Ladd being... well, Ladd, love is usually professed through gratuitous death threats.
• Because Im Jonesy: One of the members of the white suit gang is unfortunate enough to get caught with this with the young conductor. It doesn't end well.
• Berserk Button: In a cast chock full of Ax Crazy homicidal psychopaths, this is a no brainer. Even the nice ones are prone to have one.
• Beware The Nice Ones: That crybaby Jacuzzi, who nearly breaks down in tears just trying to introduce himself? Don't fuck with him. We should also warn you against pissing off that one redheaded conductor. 
• 
  Also Eve Genoard, our resident Ingenue, when she finds out who killed her father and older brother.
• Black And Gray Morality: Essentially, Szilard, the Lemures, and Ladd's gang are the only real antagonists of the series and every other character is a protagonist even if they are a mobster, thief, liquor bootlegger,Psycho For Hire and/or Torture Technician. 
• 
  Given the whole setting of the story, it could be argued that nearly every character is a Pro- and An- tagonist at exactly the same time, depending on who is the current "main character" of the story.
• Brick Joke: What Happened To The Mouse in episode three, you ask? It escaped the fire and is now enjoying its immortal, mousy life like any mouse would.
• Brooklyn Rage: Considering that many of the characters come from New York, and they're all badasses...
• Click Hello: Not surprisingly there are several instances. Luck Gandor pulls a classic one on Dallas Genoard, and the entire staff of the Daily Days newspaper do one en masse to a pair of Runorata goons who try to threaten Nicholas.
• Closed Circle: the Flying Pussyfoot is effectively this while in transit. And filled with Xanatos SpeedChessmasters and Xanatos Gilligans who sometimes switch roles.
• Cloud Cuckoo Lander: Isaac and Miria. This is the source of their Refuge In Audacity plans: it makes perfect sense to them to steal a museum's door while dressed up as mummies.
  • Elmer and Claire have their moments floating in this trope.
• Crazy Prepared: The Daily Days newspaper company designed its front room for trench warfare, and makes sure that every single employee has a loaded gun under their desk, as some Runorata mooks have the misfortune to discover.
• Cultural Cross Reference: Issac and Miria tend to do this. Unfortunately because they are potential Most Triumphant Example candidates of The Ditz and Cloud Cuckoo Lander tropes, they are often Beyond The Impossible in their inaccuracy and leads to frequent CMOF. 
• 
  Firo is a half Italian member of the Cammorra living in New York City. By 2001, he has mastered Japanese on his own through reading manga.
• Dirty Business: Most of this cast consists of occupations such as The Mafia, Liquor Bootleggers, Psycho For Hire and the like.
• Dumb Is Good: Invoked by Firo in the light novels, who convinces Ennis to trust him on the basis that he's too dumb to actually think of betraying her. Then there's Isaac and Miria...
• Even Evil Has Standards: The organized crime families that the protagonists are a part of usually have lines that they will not cross. Mafioso Keith Gandor, for example, absolutely loathes drug trafficking and has forbidden it entirely from his clan's territory. His brothers are less fierce about it, but they still don't like it.
• Everyone Calls Him Barkeep: The long-faced Gandor Family enforcer turned Daily Days flunky with the ever-present box of sugar cubes is never referred to by name until the last episode - when the Daily Days editor refers to him as Kakuzatou-kun (Mr. Sugarcube).
• Evil Tastes Good: Bound to show up when you kill immortals by "devouring" them.
• Exactly What It Says On The Tin: Most episode titles are pretty clear concerning what they're about, such as "The Rail Tracer Maneuvers Through the Train Slaughtering Many." 
  
  The fourth episode title describes one of the show's lovable psychopaths: "Ladd Russo Enjoys Talking A Lot and Slaughtering A Lot." 
  
  The author's preferred translation of baccano is "stupid commotion" which is an adequate summary of the plot. The semi-interlacing plot lines do look a lot like a "stupid commotion" for the first few episodes before all the pieces start falling into place.
• Excited Show Title: Baccano!
• Genre Busting: The Mafia + Immortality + Alchemy by way of Quentin Tarantino. Then consider that this was done by a Japanese author.
• Improbable Age: Firo is a relatively realistic example, as his Camorrista ranking at age eighteen is usually treated with varying levels of disbelief. Luck is more of a stretch, becoming a mafioso anywhere between thirteen and fifteen years of age, but it was mostly through family connections.
• Incoming Ham: "Thank you! Fuck you! The villain has arrived!"
• Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain: Dallas and his gang border on this, being low on the sympathetic factor but high on the ineffectual part.
• Innocent Cohabitation: At the end of The Grand Punk Station, the Gandors mention that Firo and Ennis have been living together for about a year without so much as a close-mouthed kiss. Claire briefly wonders if Firo's even human after hearing about it.
• Knowledge Broker: The Daily Days.
• Large Ham: Isaac and Miria, so much. Also, Ladd. Gra "ham" Spector?
• Love At First Sight: Subverted — Firo professes falling in love with Ennis at first sight... and then ends up going through the longest courtship process ever because she's all but asexual. And then there's Claire's bizarre flirting tactics of immediately proposing marriage to just about every girl ever until one of them says yes, which ends up working, much to the disbelief of his stepbrothers
• Male Gaze: The first book has at least a paragraph lingering on Ennis's appearance, which is probably the first sign that the man telling the story isn't Maiza, but rather Ennis's eventual husband Firo. The anime is a bit more subtle about it, but Firo's first look at Ennis also starts with a shot of her chest.
• Mouthy Kid: Firo isn't technically one, being almost nineteen, but he still gives everyone the impression of onethanks to his appearance.
• Nice Hat: Hat shopping is Serious Business in Firo and Maiza's Camorra.
• Noble Demon Luck Gandor, according to Firo, at the start of Drugs and Dominoes.
• Firo: He definitely knows he's not cut out to be a Mafioso, so he persists in forcing himself, intentionally pretending to be a "ruthless person" to trick himself. But don't get me wrong, I don't really hate him for it...
• Only Sane Man: Firo's sometimes convinced he is. Of course, given some of his friends, he might be right.
• Our Hero Is Dead: "Firo and the Three Gandor Brothers Are Felled by Assassins' Bullets". Technically speaking, it's completely true — they just don't stay dead.
• Papa Wolf: Never hurt any of Luck's men. If you do, and he ever finds you, you are completely, totally, fucked.
• Parental Substitute: Firo was pretty much picked up off the street and brought up by the Camorra. It's not especially clear who in the Martillo family raised him specifically, but fans usually pick Maiza for the position.
• Peek A Bangs: Graham.
• Power Trio: The Gandor brothers. Berga's the one prone to rages and violent physical/emotional outbursts,Keith doesn't talk at all, and Luck serves as the sociable, intelligent middle-ground.
• Punch Punch Punch Uh Oh: When Graham Spector slams a wrench into Ladd's torso at about 50mph, Ladd stands there and smiles at him. This is when Graham decides he's met his new daddy.
• Punctuated Pounding: Ladd gives one of the black suits a lesson in boxing history with words and fists.
• Redheaded Stepchild: Claire Stanfield, the literal Redheaded Stepchild of the Gandor family, no less.
• Scars Are Forever: Nice, After her rather disastrous experiments with explosives as a child.
• Senseless Violins: How the Lemures got their weapons aboard the Flying Pussyfoot.
• Slasher Smile: Ladd Russo's perpetual expression.
• Smoking Is Cool: Subverted. Yeah, Ronnie does look pretty damn cool with that cigarette, but then he accidentally swallows it after a surprise greeting by Elmer and spends the next ten minutes uncharismatically hacking his lungs out.
• Street Urchin: Firo, before joining the Camorra. He actually stumbled into the organization attempting to pickpocket the organization's primo voto.
• Strong Family Resemblance/Identical Grandson: Huey Laforet apparently has the strongest genes ever, given that his kids and even his great-great-grandson looks nearly identical to him. The exception is his great-great-granddaughter Claudia, who instead has a noticeable resemblance to her great-grandfather, Claire.)
• Super Stoic Shopkeeper: The clerk in the hat store.
• That Came Out Wrong: A conversation between Nice and Jacuzzi —
  Nice: This is the very last cherry bomb I got. It doesn't have that much force, all right?
  Jacuzzi: ...Thank you, Nice. I'll hold it tight, and let it blow with love.
  Nice: Don't be such a naughty boy.
• Thirty Xanatos Pileup: The train storyline includes a group of terrorists who wanted to hold a train and two important passengers hostage, not knowing that one of their number intends to sabotage this scheme (he in turn doesn't know that they were waiting for a chance to off him), a bunch of mafia-affiliated psychos who want to kill half the passengers and get the railroad to pay a ransom for the rest, a small but armed gang of delinquents who plan to rob the passengers, an immortal who decides the only way to protect himself is to have enough people killed that he can figure out who else on the train is immortal and kill them first, a pair of robbers making their getaway, and of course, the murderous Rail Tracer. Oh, and a reporter. Unfortunately for them, all of them chose the same train.
• Tranquil Fury: Mastered by Luck Gandor.
• Unpopular Popular Character: Ladd is not very well liked by most of the cast in Baccano for good reason. Even his own family think's he's out of his gourd and they are The Mafia. Most viewers of Baccano though categorize him as Crazy Awesome.
  • Even Narita admits that Ladd is his favorite character.
• White Shirt Of Death: Ladd and his pals decided it would be totally awesome to dress in bright white tuxedos for the sole purpose of getting them soaked in other people's blood. The first episode shows that this didn't go quite as planned...
• The Windy City
• Wouldn't Hit A Girl: Goose, thinking of himself as something as a gentleman, isn't comfortable with having his men give a rebelling female passenger, Nice, a full body search upon capture. This comes to bite him in the ass (which he admits) when it turns out that Nice was hiding fireworks under her clothes. Also, the Gandor brothers in Drugs & Dominos.