Revisiting Darling in the FranXX 5 Years Later is a podcast mini-series where I and Julian M. of THEM Anime Reviews discuss the rise and fall of the infamous TRIGGER/CloverWorks mecha series.
Due to the nature of this series, some of the material discussed is Not Safe For Work. Listen with discretion.
In the third part of our podcast mini-series, we cover Darling in the FranXX‘s strongest run of episodes yet. Hold on to that feeling, because it’s all downhill from here.
Listen below on Youtube.
Note: Due to persistent issues with Anchor, we are no longer offering an upload of the pure audio feed on their service, as of the time of this writing.
You can follow Jane on Twitterhereand Julian on Twitter here.
Revisiting Darling in the FranXX 5 Years Later is a podcast mini-series where I and Julian M. of THEM Anime Reviews discuss the rise and fall of the infamous TRIGGER/CloverWorks mecha series.
Due to the nature of this series, some of the material discussed is Not Safe For Work. Listen with discretion.
In the second episode of our Darling in the FranXX retrospective, we cover several of the show’s best episodes, but also more than one that emphasizes the cracks in the facade, which are already beginning to show as we approach the end of the first cour.
Listen below on Youtube, or via the Anchor service, either here directly, or on your podcasting platform of choice.
You can follow Jane on Twitterhereand Julian on Twitter here.
Revisiting Darling in the FranXX 5 Years Later is a podcast mini-series where I and Julian M. of THEM Anime Reviews discuss the rise and fall of the infamous TRIGGER/CloverWorks mecha series.
Due to the nature of this series, some of the material discussed is Not Safe For Work. Listen with discretion.
The DarliFra retrospective gets off to a rocky start through some technical difficulties. Along the way, Julian and I discuss the comparative merits of the opening episodes of the series, and talk about easily the worst thing about DarliFra: the fact that a decent chunk of it is actually pretty good. Listen below on Youtube, or via the Anchor service on your podcasting platform of choice.
You may listen to the Anchor upload directly, here, or on any service fed by the Anchor platform, such as Spotify.
You can follow Jane on Twitterhereand Julian on Twitter here.
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.
You can follow Jane on Twitterhereand Julian on Twitter here.
This review contains spoilers for the reviewed material. This is your only warning.
What is a “bad anime”, exactly? If it’s an anime that fails at being something it’s trying to be, I find it difficult to stick the label on Big Order. Because on the one hand, the 2016 manga adaption seems to know exactly what it wants to be. On the other hand, maybe a “bad anime” is an anime whose very aims are somehow defective. Being a case where “what it wants to be” is arguably somewhere between “bad for the medium” and “reprehensible”, Big Order‘s a bit of a hard one to evaluate. Too beholden to a wide slate of action-anime cliches to be truly unique. Too weird to be rightly called generic. Big Order largely succeeds in its aims, but that very same success makes the series impossible to defend. Speaking less roundaboutly; this show sucks and you probably shouldn’t watch it unless you have a fascination with shows that suck.
Very broadly, Big Order is about people who have superpowers based on “wishes” they had at the time a disaster called The Great Destruction (yes, really) hit, circa ten in-show years ago. This ostensibly-kinda-interesting premise means very little, because in practice these powers–called Orders–can just kind of Do Whatever in all but a few cases. Our protagonist is Eiji Hoshimiya, a chuuni’s dream. In a more self-aware show, the similarity of his first name to the word “edgy” might be deliberate. Eiji accidentally killed billions-with-a-B people when he got his Order, causing the Great Destruction in the first place.
If that seems like an odd fit for a protagonist, it’s here where we have to break out our critical lens. Because very little about Big Order makes much literal sense, and internal logic phases in and out at the story’s whim. However, considered through the prism of a wish-fulfillment fantasy for the stereotyped ideal anime-watcher (that is to say, a young straight man), everything clicks into place perfectly. In this way, Big Order is a bad anime, but an excellent peek into the mind of the kind of person who thinks good anime begins with Code Geass and ends with Darling in The FranXX. Which is to say it is also a ten-car-pileup of barely-disguised fetish plots, some more objectionable than others. A large chunk of Big Order revolves around Eiji’s desire to save his sister from her Incurable Anime Disease. If you guessed that they’re also hot for each other, put your chip on your bad anime bingo card.
Along its ten episodes, Big Order manages to hit stops that include Eiji accidentally (but only temporarily!) impregnating a girl by touching her fake bunny ears.
This is a real screencap.
There’s also a man with a sword that can cut through time and space. A final episode plastered with an awful-looking monochrome filter in what I dearly hope is not a misguided attempt to homage Gunbuster. And the entire character arc of Rin; who enters the series in episode one trying to murder Eiji for killing her parents, and by the tenth minute of episode two has been mind controlled by Eiji’s ill-defined powers and wants to hatefuck him. I’m not normally this crass when writing on this blog, but no other language exists for Big Order. It is a crass anime.
This is to say nothing of the anime’s ugly thematic heart. Much ink has been spilled over the otaku persecution complex, a phenomenon that has given us many of the worst light novels, manga, and anime of recent years. It feels fair to say that it’d be hard to top Big Order, though. Eiji’s responsibility for the Great Destruction becomes public knowledge early on, and by consequence, the entire world hates him. Combined with his near-omnipotent powers and you have a character who has both the ability and moral license to do whatever he wants. He uses it, too. The above example with Rin is just one of several. The show’s entire premise reeks of repressed straightboy nerd “I’ll show them for making fun of me!” rage. This kind of dynamic has sexist echoes throughout the entirety of art, and it’s certainly no knock on anyone if they’re plainly sick of it.
You are at this point probably not surprised by there being a harem in this show.
Yet, I remained strangely fascinated with the show as I watched. All of this would ruin Big Order if there were anything to ruin. What prevents Big Order from falling into the lowest rung of mainstream TV anime is that it is a bizarre combination of astoundingly incompetent, yet tightly-edited. Things just kind of happen, but often in very entertaining ways. Episode four remains the show’s most infamous, featuring the aforementioned plot point of ear-pregnancy combined with Eiji and co. running to and ‘fro throughout a war-torn city and trying to come up with a way to stop it from being nuked. The entire series is this level of unintentionally hilarious. In a more self-aware show, it would seem deliberate, but Big Order‘s full-tilt commitment to its own inane thematic core makes it impossible to believe it’s anything but accidental. In this way, the show is enjoyable if you like seeing an anime fall apart at the seams when its premise and plot are put under the slightest bit of scrutiny. For whatever reason, I kind of do.
On the whole, Big Order is the rare series I’d say has fully earned the term “guilty pleasure”. It’s a kind of bitterly ironic that despite Big Order being a financial flop, the only project animating studio Asread has worked on recently is the similarly-reviled Arifutera. I’d say “you reap what you sow”, but the complex dynamics of how a studio picks up a show to work on render that moot. Besides, no one deserves to work on Big Order-quality projects forever, it’s simply too cruel.
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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.
Twenty Perfect Minutes is an irregular column series where I take a look at single specific anime that shaped my experience with the medium, were important to me in some other way, or that I just really, really like.
“It has to be you.”
Whatever happened to Darling in The FranXX? Rarely are anime-originals as popular as it was, but in 2020, just two years after it aired, there is a vague sense of embarrassment associated with the series. I won’t pretend to hate DarliFra, myself: I enjoyed watching it at the time even if, with hindsight, I greatly overestimated its cleverness. It is though hard to argue that it’s particularly well-put-together. If you want an anime that’s easy to rag on, DarliFra lines up neatly, it’s almost a microcosm of everything wrong with the TV anime mainstream. Shaky writing that leans on cliche and borrows from better shows, loads of unnecessary cheesecake-style fanservice-centric pandering, and most infamously, a thematic “Get Yourself A Wife, Otaku-san” core so comically conservative, out-of-step with wider cultural trends, and patriarchal that it inspired an endless outpouring of memes and general ribbing even at the time, and even from peoplewho enjoyed it. It’s often pegged as the single most divisive entry in Studio TRIGGER‘s filmography, a descriptor that only isn’t true by the arguable technicality of it being made by a purpose-built split committee called Code 000 (which effectively consisted of TRIGGER staff plus staff from a just-pre-CloverWorks A-1 Pictures, but DarliFra’s odd production history is too long of a tangent to go on here).
Yet, all of this said and meant, DarliFra is certainly a watchable show on a moment-to-moment level, and there are a few times when it almost actually realizes the vision it’s striving toward. I would argue however, that in terms of genuinely reaching that vision? That happened just once, almost exactly halfway through its run. Thus, on this Twenty Perfect Minutes column, we cover the one and only truly great episode of one of the most contentious hit anime of the 10’s.
This episode, centering around the grand mid-show plot point of storming the Gran Crevasse, is a winning one for two big reasons. One: it’s impeccably-directed. Much of the episode is action setpiece after action setpiece, and those were always DarliFra’s strongest moments. That said, the kinetic action is intercut with various other things. Most prominently, Hiro, our protagonist, who is emotionally reeling from the absence of Zero Two. There’s a neat little trick deployed here (and sparsely in other places in the series) where instead of having Hiro voice his feelings, either aloud or in voiceover, they’re actually written on-screen. These more tense, dramatic shots are arguably just as important as the fights. Throughout, this episode is the rare moment where DarliFra’s running subplot about the romance triangle between Hiro, Zero Two, and Ichigo actually seems to tick the way the series wants it to, and the direction does a lot to sell that.
The second reason: This is an (again, rare) episode where DarliFra knows to get out of its own way. The reductive, laughably conservative gender politics of the rest of the series are thankfully absent for the majority of “Jian”, and it’s the rare episode where the heavily genderqueer-coded Nines get almost as much shine as Squad 13.
I’m actually kind of cool in this episode!
Almost everyone gets at least a little bit of the limelight, in fact. Even the redshirt Squad 26, who reappear here for just the second time in the series only to have a wonderfully wrenching moment where they’re promptly forced to sacrifice themselves after watching a klaxosaur crush their home. Another thing this episode does right is really hammering home the flat-out cruelty of APE as an organization.
You’d sweat if you were assigned to “blow up your robot to hopefully inconvenience the kaiju” duty, too.
Zero Two is used to great effect here as well. Effectively “feral” from the events of the prior arc at the episode’s start, she gets the “inner thoughts written on-screen” treatment, too, arguably to even better effect. Aside from the fact that we get to see the Strelizia in its alt-mode here (which is always nice), the girl herself is drawn, in interior shots from the first half of the episode, in a way that really emphasizes her bloodlust. This is Zero Two off the deep end, at her worst, and at her most convinced that she’s irredeemable, inhuman, and fundamentally unlovable.
Then, halfway through the episode, Hiro hijacks a training pod and rushes out onto the battlefield to reunite with his beloved. Against orders and against all common sense. The scene that follows, in which Hiro and Ichigo co-pilot the Delphinium while the latter must directly reckon with the fact that Hiro loves Zero Two and not her, is both sincerely affecting and the closest that a shot framed inside one the mech’s cockpits comes to not looking fundamentally ridiculous.
There’s tons of great touches in the couple minutes that follow, aside from just the animation itself (which is gorgeous). Ichigo’s fury at Zero Two’s actions translating to a mech-on-mech dope slap is one, the Delphinium turning out to have “hair” under its helmet is another.
But more importantly, it lets Ichigo, one of the many characters the series at large is guilty of under-writing, express herself in an immediate, visceral way, even as she inarguably “loses” the love triangle. She’d never be this much of a firecracker again.
Of course, fundamentally, this is Hiro and Zero’s story. The two’s reunion here stands out against the rest of the episode. I’m of the opinion that Hiro and Zero Two’s chemistry is among the better things in the show, but this scene is one of the very few where it’s tied together in a way that’s truly emotionally resonant instead of merely cute. The imagery is mixed-up and messy, but the feeling remains. Through cutaways to elsewhere and flashbacks to the characters’ own convoluted intertwined history, through the offputting and arresting images of a young Zero Two being experimented on, and eating the fairy tale storybook DarliFra often attempted to use as thematic thread, it somehow all works. It’s immediate. It hits you in the heart.
The episode caps with the Strelizia transforming back into its humanoid form (in a visual homage to the henshin sequence from Kill la Kill, no less) with a new all-red look and a powerup, and ripping the remaining klaxosaur horde to shreds nearly single-handedly. All the while, Hiro and Zero Two shout out their love for each other at the top of their lungs, behind them blasts the show’s opening theme “Kiss of Death”. Gently teasing them for not cutting the comms are their squadmates. Watching from afar, scheming, is APE. It is the only moment in the entire series where the show’s attempted core thesis of first love as a delirious, rapturous high, depicted by the wonderfully camp visual metaphor of a mecha tearing through an army of monsters, completely makes sense. This is Darling in The FranXX‘s peak. If we are to remember art as it is at its best, this is how we should remember DarliFra.
Execution aside; this is all still pretty, to put it politely, “traditional”, as far as resolutions to a love triangle (and just general “romance problems” plots) go, a larger writing issue that would just a few episodes after this rapidly erode the show’s potential. But, this episode, watched in isolation, is almost good enough to make those criticisms seem irrelevant. It’s not an exaggeration to say that whatever flaws the rest of the series may have, this episode can go toe-to-toe with anime that live and breathe this kind of stuff. Symphogear, its own spiritual predecessors Kill La Kill, Gurren Lagann and Diebuster, you name it.
One of the reasons I love anime is that it has a nearly-infinite capacity, despite the medium’s limitations, to surprise and inspire wonder. Sometimes, that wonder and surprise just happen to occur only in fleeting bursts. Thus it is with Darling in The FranXX.
All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations.
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