Darling In The Franxx | The Art (Or Lack Thereof) Of Subversion & Deconstruction In Anime
I don't like wasting my time, especially when it comes to consuming entertainment. Why bother spending two hours watching a bad movie or ten hours watching a middling game when I could have done something so much worthwhile?
It's been over a month now since mecha anime Darling in the Franxx ended its 24 episode run. The ride that show took me through was so bumpy that I really needed to sit and rest and recollect myself. It took me a while fully formulate my thoughts on it aside from, "Wow, that was a rough time." But let me try and turn a negative into a positive here by writing a discourse on a particular facet of anime that has become much more prominent in the past five years or so - the use of subversion to critique and oftentimes deconstruct elements of anime.
I find it pertinent to start off this discussion by getting a firm grasp on what I'm trying to get at here. To do that let's travel all the way back to the 80s and 90s era of anime. A major recurring theme in many popular shows at the time revolved around one or more protagonists (often teens) tasked with piloting robots the size of buildings in order to save mankind. Macross, Gundam, Patlabor, Voltron; the list can go on and on and on, but the point is that the market was over-saturated. As the genre started to grow stale and rote with tropes, a man by the name of Hideki Anno came along and created an anime that would firmly place its stake in not just the history of mecha, but anime in general.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is a subversion of mecha by first making it appear that you're going to get standard fare a la Gundam, where our protagonist Shinji is brought in as a young teen to pilot the illusive "Eva" mech created by his father as a desperate final attempt to save humanity. While that premise may make you quick to dismiss it, for the first few episodes you slowly feel this depressing undertone beneath the surface, billowing with each frame that's different from other mechas for the period. It creates an unsettling feeling in your stomach, and you quickly realize why the further you watch.
Evangelion puts on a face at first not too dissimilar from Gundam and Macross and the like, but it's actually a much more serious and self-reflective look at the genre as a whole. It subverts your expectations with tact to provide a show capable of providing the viewer with a fresh new take on the genre through deconstruction.
Going by Merriam-Webster's explanation of the term, deconstruction is "the analytic examination of something (such as a theory) often in order to reveal its inadequacy". To put it a little more simply, when you are deconstructing anything you are essentially analyzing that piece of work, usually to find the faults that lie within. Going back to Evangelion, deconstruction is apparent throughout the show's run whether it be giving scenes ripe with tropes a more realistic outcome or creating characters like the protagonist who handle the situations they find themselves in a more traumatic light.
We can see that Studio Trigger tried to replicate their success of Kill La Kill and Gurren Lagann using the same methodology as before. In Kill La Kill's case, the studio created a subversion of expectations by laying an icing of over-the-top fanservice on top of a plot and cast that are meant to embolden female empowerment. Gurren Lagann echoes similar thematic elements, but to deconstruct toxic masculinity in anime. Darling in the Franxx tries to replicate the formula that made these shows so successful by providing commentary on adolescence and puberty over a skin of fetishized co-piloting, but fails in very key ways.
First, Darling suffers from its pacing. For the first 17 or 18 episodes of the series, the plot progresses at a fairly slow pace with certain aspects of world building being set up very subtly. World building that relates to how the society operates, the roles of the adults, and what is kept from the children are granted to the viewer piece by piece. Sometimes these things are more explicitly stated, while others are subtly hinted at.
However, once we get to the 19th episode we are almost immediately overloaded with information concerning various aspects of the world and some key characters in it. You almost have to wonder why things like Dr. Franxx and the origin of the Klaxxosaurs arriving on Earth weren't properly revealed at a similar pace to previous pieces of lore earlier in the season, or why things weren't revealed at a quicker pace to make this episode feel less jarring. Things only accelerate from here, and we're even shown a new omniscient entity called VIRM. To this day, I still don't quite understand what advantage their existence has on the story over just having Papa and the council of elders be the series' main antagonist. Being only 4 episodes away from the finale, who at the helm thought it was a good idea to introduce a new villain?
Segueing into my next issue is this additional twist of our late-game villain being introduced into the story. What purpose does VIRM really serve that the adults on Earth couldn't have done? To me, this screams of adding a final twist to the plot just to serve as another "gotcha" moment. I feel like this was done to mimic the twists in Gurren Lagann, but the issue here is that in Gurren; 1) the twists are paced out in a way that is consistent and 2) narratively make sense. You see, there is an art to subversion. Subversion for the sake of subversion brings us to series such as School Days, where the attempt to subvert harem tropes by the series' finale felt more like a cheap way to shock and awe the audience rather than provide truly insightful deconstruction of the genre itself.
I don't want you to just take my word for all the arguments I'm making. So, let's look at an interview with Koyama Shigeto, Mechanical Designer for Darling. In it, he answers a question regarding his time working with Series Director Nishigori Atsushi's, revealing the following:
“Well, first off, Nishigori’s ideas were all over the place. He knew he wanted stuff like a girl born with horns and mechs that required male/female combo pilots, so we had to go through them one by one and figure out why and how they connected.”
He also touches on how Tsurumaki Kazuya (Assistant Director to Hideki Anno for Neon Genesis Evangelion) and his influence stuck with them as they grew in their careers, especially so for Nishigori.
“To put it bluntly, the age of Anno Hideaki was out, and the age of Imaishi Hiroyuki (Gurren Lagann: director, FRANXX: action director) was taking its place. It also felt like our mentor Tsurumaki Kazuya’s presence had followed along with us. Even though Nishigori was part of the new Imaishi age, Tsurumaki’s style coursed prominently through his veins.”
I mention Evangelion once more because, for those unfamiliar, the history of its development hits a personal spot for its director Hideki Anno. Prior to and during the anime's creation, Hideki was dealing with severe depression. Being in this state helped to shape the show into the defining mecha of the 90s we eventually got. Let me be certainly not the first in believing that Evangelion was a special kind of anime, a once-in-a-lifetime type of show that simply can't be replicated because of that personal component to it. It takes a specific set of circumstances to create such a story, one where without a creator finding themselves at perhaps their darkest state might not ever be made.
It's clear that Nishigori was heavily inspired by both Neon Genesis Evangelion and Studio Trigger's previous works, but wanting to create inspired works doesn't always equate to a great product. While he might have had his spirits in the right place when creating Darling, he seemed to lack a comprehensive understanding of what was so successful about those shows past the surface. Whether it be ongoing personal struggles, having a writer with impeccable wit, or just creating something at the opportune moment when it seems that the industry has been oversaturated with certain elements you may take umbrage with, Darling in the Franxx suffered from all of it. It's a shame too because the series started off really promising, who knows where it could have gone had it not been chasing the shows that were all about not chasing what had come before it.