Darling in the FRANXX, written by Naotaki Hayashi, et al. Directed by Atsushi Nishigori. Starring Yûto Uemura, Kana Ichinose, and Nanami Yamashita. A-1 Pictures / Trigger, . 24 episodes of 24 minutes (approx. ). Not rated.
Available on Crunchyroll.
Darling in the FRANXX made a stir when it appeared in , though most of the buzz that reached my ears had little to do with the quality of the show itself. On the one hand, I saw people praising it because they regarded its heroine, a girl called Zero Two, as good waifu material—humorous, of course, but not serious criticism. On the other hand, and much more bizarre, I saw people attacking it because the show’s ultimate message is (gasp) that marrying and having children might be worthwhile things to do.
It is a strange world where such a message is controversial, yet here we are.
Introduction
It took me a while, but I have finally sat down with the show myself. The magical girl and I gave it a watch-through, and we both concluded that it has an intriguing concept and is overall quite good, though it stumbles in early episodes due to an excess of juvenile humor. It also goes off the rails at its climax when it pulls a collection of nearly unintelligible plot twists out of nowhere, but it ultimately comes to a satisfying ending.
Many have pointed out, sometimes derisively, that Darling in the FRANXX draws heavily on Neon Genesis Evangelion, which it clearly does, but it has enough fresh ideas or fresh takes on its material to avoid feeling derivative. I would also point out that it is not simply a retread of Evangelion but fits into a larger canon—if we can call it that—of Evangelion-influenced shows: It appears to me to draw on Eureka Seven and Gurren Lagann, and possibly even Pacific Rim.
Plot
The story takes place after most of the Earth has become a desert wasteland. Humanity now survives in mobile, fortress-like geodesic domes called plantations, which get their power from geothermal energy. They are constantly under siege from monstrous, bio-organic “klaxosaurs,” and their main defense against the monsters are teams of children who pilot “FRANXX,” giant robots that can only be operated by a male and female pair working together.
Also, for whatever reason, the giant robots have goofy cartoon faces, which seem at first like an unnecessary flourish but work well because we have to spend a lot of time looking at them. Basically, the FRANXX take on the personalities and voices of the girls riding them.
The child-pilots, called “parasites,” are artificially created and raised for the sole purpose of riding the giant robots. Watching over them is a Big Brother-like figure called “Papa,” who is head of the mysterious cabal that runs this futuristic dystopia. Also lurking in the background is Dr. Frank, an elderly scientist, now a cyborg, who originally designed the FRANXX and clearly has his own agenda. (And in case you don’t get it, “FRANXX” is a portmanteau of his name with XX, as in XX chromosomes.)
The children are given numbers, not names, but for our convenience, the ten who make up the main cast have assigned nicknames to one another. Our protagonist is Hiro; although formerly considered a prodigy, he has recently lost the ability to ride a FRANXX, regardless of which girl he teams up with. That changes, however, when he encounters Zero Two, an antisocial, pink-haired girl with klaxosaur blood: Herself a prodigy being closely studied by the cabal in charge of the world, Zero Two has “devoured” all of the previous males she’s piloted with, sucking out their energy and leaving them dead.
Following a standard setup used in mythology and love stories, Hiro first glimpses Zero Two when she’s bathing outdoors—though in keeping with her animalistic nature, she’s catching a fish in her mouth at the same time. Apparently on a whim, Zero Two selects Hiro as her “darling,” by which she means the latest in the string of male pilots she intends to kill. For mysterious reasons, however, Hiro is able to survive riding with her, and the two become highly effective FRANXX pilots as they gradually develop a close relationship.
As an aside, Zero Two’s personality, appearance, and disgusting dietary habits (she dumps honey on everything), as well as her backstory, are reminiscent of the character Anemone from Eureka Seven, which is why I suspect the influence—and I’m not the only one who’s noticed.
Criticism
Like much of anime, Darling in the FRANXX is a coming-of-age story, but it stumbles in its first handful of episodes because it can’t manage any subtlety. Riding a FRANXX has sexual connotations made ridiculous by the way they’re depicted: Basically, the girl kneels on a platform while the boy sits upright behind her and holds onto controls that come out of the back of her hips. The effect is more ludicrous than kinky.
There is at least a halfway decent in-world explanation: The girl merges, in a sense, with the robot while the boy does the piloting. Why this is necessary gets revealed toward the end. The problem is simply that the analogy with sex is too overt and thus looks stupid; I hereby sentence the creators of this show to watch Alien repeatedly until they learn how to deploy sexual symbolism with some amount of subtlety.
Although we learn that these teenaged characters, on account of their selective education and brainwashing, know nothing whatsoever of sex, their dialogue is fraught with double entendres: A girl says “come to me” to her male counterpart in the cockpit, and the other boys mock Hiro for “cranking one out by himself in a training unit.” These kinds of childish jokes are distracting, and they might incline a viewer to look more closely for plot holes—or at least they did in my case, though I must admit that, by the time it’s finished, the show has done an above-average job of accounting for its peculiarities and apparent gaps in worldbuilding.
Quality
Overall production quality on the show looks to be very high. A moody and sometimes impressive soundtrack is provided by Asami Tachibana. The character designs and robot designs are distinctive, and the animation is smooth. The action sequences, courtesy of Studio Trigger, are manic and energetic. Some are impressive, though there is an obvious dependence on CGI. For most of its run, the story builds at a good pace, and the relationships and conflicts between the characters are engaging. It only falls apart at its climax, which I’ll discuss below.
Discussion
Darling in the FRANXX really gets into its groove about midway through episode six. Once it’s got all the sex jokes out of the way, it focuses on some well-handled character development and love triangles punctuated by action. The characters develop conflicts and jealousies and pair off in couples as they’re motivated by their hormones, but without a clear understanding of what they’re doing. Things come to a head after they explore some ruins and one of the girls discovers a book that explains where babies come from.
Themes
As we see more and more of this future society, we learn—unsurprisingly—that it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The children are taught unswerving loyalty to “Papa,” and they are barred from entering the plantation, being limited to the “Birdcage” on its pinnacle. They do manage a short stint in the city anyway, however, and we learn something about life there: It is sterile in every sense of the word, and tedious. The “adults” in the plantations are effectively immortal, and they have nothing to do with their lives except use machines to artificially stimulate their pleasure centers. Although the children naïvely hope to join this world, it does not appear preferable to their own world of fighting and romantic fumbling. Like an episode of the original Star Trek, Darling in the FRANXX indicates that pleasure without struggle is pointless.
Controversy
Probably the reason this show peeved off some people is that it skewers certain ideals that are currently in vogue. The story begins driving toward its climax when one of the girls—and not the one you might expect—decides she wants to try conceiving a child with her male counterpart but is opposed by Papa’s agents.
At that point, it becomes clear who the villains of the story are: They are antinatalists, feminists, gender-studies professors, transhumanists—in short, utopians. This is a staunchly anti-utopian show, rejecting the notion that human nature can be tweaked or fiddled with or replaced. It specifically skewers the beliefs that genders are not biological or that there are other than two of them. It depicts having children as something desirable. It also shows sympathy for people who experience homosexual attraction but states flatly that homosexuality is sterile.
So it is well-calculated to piss Postmoderns off.
For an example, see this post by Caitlin Moore at Anime Feminist. According to Moore, Darling in the FRANXX “has shown absolutely no interest in challenging viewer expectations or gender norms.” The unintended irony of that statement is that, of course, the show has challenged expectations—it’s just that Moore’s expectations are the ones being challenged, and she doesn’t like it.
I might go further and say it’s just possible this is the reason for the crass humor and imagery in the early episodes: Darling in the FRANXX starts out acting like an ecchi show but then twists that around and becomes deeply conservative. When all is said and done, it has a clear and profound message: Marry, have children, live simply, and work with your hands—the recipe for right living propounded by every serious thinker from Plato to St. Paul to Confucius. For that reason, although I was skeptical at first on account of the cheesecake and juvenile sex jokes, I came away with the opinion that this deserves watching. If nothing else, it makes a strong counterpoint to much of the other fare currently shown on television.
Fridge Logic
Although the worldbuilding is overall good, some elements might make a skeptical viewer blink. While watching it, I repeatedly asked myself whether it was realistic for a group of teenagers living in a co-ed dormitory with minimal adult supervision to know nothing whatsoever about sex. It seems to me that’s something they’d figure out on their own. On top of that, the show’s creators apparently wanted to have their cake and eat it too: Although the characters are allegedly sexually innocent, the boys are always trying to catch glimpses of the girls in little or no clothing, just as in a typical anime rom-com. This seems strange if they don’t know what they’re looking for or why.
Also, the kids, despite the brainwashing and rigorous upbringing, have access to a massive amount of reading material. They have a library in their dorm, and we see Hiro, as a small child, reading The Golden Bough. It’s hard to believe a kid could get through a book like that and have no inkling of where babies come from. Some of the dialogue on this subject also seems inconsistent, as if they know all about reproduction one moment and nothing about it the next.
Some of this is partly explained, though: It’s not heavily emphasized, but a closely attentive viewer will note that the children’s growth is accelerated, so though they have teenaged bodies, they are apparently only a few years old. Also, it’s probable that their reading material has been heavily censored.
The Finale
For its symbolism, the show draws on the Chinese myth of the Jiān, a bird that has only one wing and one eye, and so is dependent on another bird to fly, thus representing marriage. Also referenced throughout the show is a fairy tale loosely based on “The Little Mermaid,” with a “beast princess” seeking to become human out of love for a human prince. These underpin the coming-of-age themes throughout.
Right around episode 20, however, the series unsuccessfully takes a twist. New plot elements get introduced at a rapid pace with little explanation, with the result that the show feels simultaneously hasty and slow: Too much happens at once, but then the story continues for about four episodes after what already seemed to be the climax.
I suspect it was trying to imitate the plot swerves from Gurren Lagann but flubbed it. Alternatively, the problem may stem partly from Darling in the FRANXX’s roots in Neon Genesis Evangelion. Evangelion drew some of its most important concepts probably from Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End or maybe from the philosophy of Teilhard de Chardin, who believed humanity was evolving toward a sort of meta-consciousness and would become a collective organism. Evangelion took this idea seriously and wrestled with it, especially in the movie End of Evangelion.
Although I am one of those who think Evangelion turned into an incoherent mess, it handled some of its themes well, most of all because it was content with ambiguity: The question of whether “Third Impact,” the evolution to this meta-consciousness, is a bad thing or a good thing, is one the story never answers definitively. By contrast, by the time it introduces this plot twist, Darling in the FRANXX has already come down opposed to any and all utopian visions, so when the final boss turns out to be, more or less, the “Overmind” from Clarke, this final villain has nothing compelling to say or worthwhile to offer. It merely stretches out the climax needlessly.
That being said, the final two episodes do much to redeem the saggy climax. It’s not perfect, but Darling in the FRANXX is well worth watching.
Darling in the FRANXX
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