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As I write this opening paragraph, it is May 11th, 2022. By the time you read it, more than six months will have passed, and it will be winter of the following year. Such is the magnitude of this endeavor.

“This endeavor,” as you’ve probably gathered, is an investigation into the rise and fall of Darling in the FranXX. DarliFra; a 2018 split production between Studio TRIGGER and A-1 Pictures‘ Koenji Studio, who rebranded as CloverWorks during the project, was an extremely polarizing series even when it was new. Five years later, it has been solidly placed on history’s pile of Bad artistic endeavors. When it is remembered, it’s often as an embarrassment. (A random sampling of paraphrased scathing comments I’ve heard over the years; a fundamentally bad idea that should never have been made at all. A piece of pigheaded conservative propaganda, twelve hours of animated bioessentialism, late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s secret plan to get the otaku of Japan to have some kids, damn it. A total waste of time, when considered as either a piece of entertainment or a serious artistic statement.)

Depending on who you ask, it is either a rare black mark on Studio TRIGGER’s strong 2010s run, or the moment where they lost the plot for good and never recovered. On a personal level, its very existence indirectly led to the dismantling of a TRIGGER Discord server I used to moderate, and I know for a fact we were not unique in that regard. To hear some tell it, Darling in the FranXX is straight-up digi-paint poison. Nothing less than the whole anime industry’s recurring sexism given form and doled out in 24-minute installments over six months.

And yet, it’s not really gone away either. Winter of 2018 was not exactly stuffed with great anime premieres. We did get some good stuff, including A Place Further Than the Universe, my favorite anime of the 2010s full stop, but notable shows were few and far between. Most of that season was stuff like Katana Maidens or Killing Bites, or the ill-fated Marchen Madchen. Shows basically no one remembers and rather few people were excited for even at the time. (I’ll stick up for Katana Maidens, myself, though it only really picked up in its second cour.) DarliFra, though? That was a different story. People were invested in Darling in the FranXX. It was an event. As I write this, it’s still the 40th most popular anime on Anilist, outstripping fellow bonkers mecha anime Code Geass by several places, and TRIGGER’s own Kill la Kill by several more. It’s been catalogued by more people than such disparate hits as KonoSuba, Angel Beats!, Bleach, and even one of its own primary inspirations, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and well outstrips one of its others, Eureka Seven. Some of this can be chalked up to the age of the average Anilist user (and the age of the site itself, it was just starting to gain a foothold as a viable alternative to MyAnimeList back in 2018), but it does reveal the fact that DarliFra had an iron grip on the western anime fandom for a little while. Even just five years later, it can be hard to believe that! But it’s true, and the proof remains in the numbers. And beyond that particular subculture, it’s inspired everything from celebrity hair styles to New York Times-bestselling fantasy novels. Not only is it remembered, it has reach.

The question, at least to me, is of course, why? What was it about this show specifically that made so many people, even those who would normally be skeptical of its very premise, willing to at least give it a chance? How did it so badly lose all that goodwill? To me, a simple case of a series failing to live up to expectations does not explain it, especially since our third question must be; why has it lingered on in the popular imagination, even when many other anime that once had similar reputations have faded?

Well, as we’ll learn over the course of this project, there are a lot of answers to that first question. But the first part of the answer is just that it made sense at the time. TRIGGER were hot off the heels of the TV version of Little Witch Academia, and the now cult classic Space Patrol Luluco was only just reaching two years since release. People did not really talk about A-1/CloverWorks’ involvement in DarliFra quite as much at the time, although it did become the subject of some discussion once the show reached its halfway mark, as we’ll get to.

Those in the know were also interested in the director, Atsushi Nishigori, and to be fair, he’s an interesting figure. The public loves an auteur, someone who can put their personal stamp on a project and have it be instantly recognizable as their own. There are a fair few of these in the realm of anime, but Nishigori wasn’t quite one yet. Some ten years prior to DarliFra, he’d left behind a position at the flagging Studio Gainax to join A-1. There, he directed 2011’s The Idol Master, apparently out of personal passion for the franchise. It paid off; the series was extremely successful, and today, Idol Master stands as one of the best idol anime of all time, and the template for the girl group anime boom that followed. That series and DarliFra itself make up the sum total of his leading roles on TV anime projects. I have my guesses as to why this might be, but I’ll hold my tongue for the moment.

As for what form this investigation will take, well, I couldn’t do something like this alone. Instead, I’ve conscripted KeyFrames Forgotten co-host Julian M. Together, we’re tackling this in the only format we really know how—a podcast, which will be available here on Magic Planet Anime via Youtube uploads and hopefully a few other outlets starting this coming Tuesday, on January 10th. We’ll be covering the series in chunks; five episodes of DarliFra for each episode of the podcast. If you want to keep pace with us, you have until then to catch up. The podcast should be enjoyable even if you’re not actively rewatching (or watching for the first time, god forbid) the series, but that is how it’s “intended” to be enjoyed, so I do hope at least some of you will join us on this deeply silly endeavor.

You’ll hear from us again on the 10th.

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You can follow Jane on Twitter here and Julian on Twitter here.