Such a weird, weird anime.

Spoiler

It's not so often than an anime is truly finished after its first season. This one . . . well, one cannot say that they left any threads open. That's as finite a conclusion one can get.

Also one of those don't watch with your family animes though.

 

Spoiler

Manga has a two alternate continuations even.

 

Anyone else watching Darling in the Franxx? 7 eps in... am I the only one thinking it's garbage?

 

Why do you feel that way?

 

I'm hearing that Darling in the Franxxx is good actually. Probably going to try it once cour 1 is over, and then following cour 2 as it airs.

 

Uninteresting characters. Bland setting. Cringey premise. Poor mech combat. And most damning, I'm seven episodes in and I couldn't care less about the story. I could elaborate on each point, but frankly? I don't care enough to. The whole show is one big 'meh' to me... I feel like I've seen it all before.

The best thing about the show is how serious they are while firing off sexual innuendo after sexual innuendo while piloting.

Interesting that I'm seemingly the only one that feels this way.

 

Franxx is pretty good. It's got a clear story going on, established characters that are developing over time, and some awesome action that goes along with it in the battles. Feels like a really strange mix of Evangelion, Kiznaiver, Gurren Lagann, and E7. Maybe some FLCL if you take all the puberty stuff into consideration.

There's a bit too much fanservice for my taste, but I generally don't enjoy fanservice stuff in general, so your mileage may vary on that.

With episode 7 I feel like we've gotten past the introduction and we're really starting to dig into the setting of the world. Figures that the Standard Beach Episode would have the most world-building hidden in it.

 

Episode 7 was definitely one of the most interesting when it comes to world-building. Franxx is a show that hides a surprising amount of depth under a veneer of mindless sexual mecha fun, with a lot of very subtle details that are very easily missed at first glance.

One of my favourites is

Spoiler: Early season spoilers

the white butterfly that flies in the foreground when Ichigo states that Naomi survived the crushing of the travel pod. This echoes an old japanese folk tale about the soul of a young woman becoming a white butterfly after her death, suggesting that Naomi died, and that the adults have consciously hidden this from the Parasites. Knowing Trigger's history with this kind of thing, I have no doubt that it was completely intentional.

There's also some very sinister undertones that have cropped up in recent episodes, which has me thinking that the show is probably going to take a pretty dark twist sometime towards the end of the first cour, leading into the second.

The series gets better and more fleshed out with every episode. Definitely worth a watch (and a rewatch while you wait for new episodes to come out T_T)

 

I can't get into it simply due to the anime girl faces on the mechs. Derpiest shit I've ever seen.

 

I wouldn't say "garbage", it's just weak. Nishigori seems to try to channel Enokido's writing but fails pretty hard. At least despite what I expected after hearing about it being moved forward a season, it hasn't yet crashed production-wise (well, Trigger episodes sort of did).

 

Franxx looks like an anime torn between being an artistic work and a quick cash grab. It can't decide what it wants to be.

 

Seven episodes into a twenty four episode series. I'd say it's definitely too early to be forming concrete judgements. That being said, I feel like DITF is a series that will probably be best appreciated holistically after it ends, rather than fragmented week to week. I really don't think I'm going to be disappointed though.

 

I mean, it's not week to week, I judged after seven episodes.

The plot being 'rescued' won't change my major issues with it either...

 

I really don't see anything artistic about it. I also wouldn't call it "quick cash grab", original series like that are a riskier investment that something that is used largely to market existing product.

 

Yet another example of the absolutely fabulous slowburn worldbuilding in Darling in the Franxx:



This particular shot is a direct reference to an art piece called 'Blossom', situated in the Brooklyn Museum in New York.



This particular installation has the piano playing the tune to 'Strange Fruit', a song famously performed by Billy Holiday in 1939, written in protest of the lynching of African-Americans. This is especially poignant when considering with previous implications surrounding the children and the society for which they were born to serve and die.





I wholeheartedly stand by my previous statement. Just because not everything is explicitly spelled out like a bloody Isekai doesn't mean that there isn't a richness of detail and metaphor just waiting to be extracted.

Anyone that says that the setting in Franxx is lacklustre can fight me.

 

And yet they pilot mechs by grabbing on to ass handles of the women who are prostrate in the doggy position before them.

Do me a favour...

 

To be fair, not like NGE was original either, it drew heavy inspiration from Raideen. And I'm sure that drew inspiration from another source.

 

It seems to be trying to chanel old Gainax in general. NGE-like premise, Enokido-like writing (he wrote FLCL and Diebuster), some TTGL inspirations in term of style, and Trigger being this show's Korea.

Raideen was RahXephon. NGE was inspired by Ideon and Devilman.

Yoshiyuki Sadamoto

 

Definitely can see that too, and of course they pull from some other sources as well.