I will start this with the question we're all asking: what happened?
Did the authors run out of ideas the last 25% of the show? Were they on drugs? Did they remember it was an Evangelion homage and forgot homage /= ripoff? Did they remember they were Trigger and had properties like Kill la Kill and, in a way, Tengen Toppa, and so they had to set the final battle in space to keep the streak up? Did they spontaneously start hating this show and decided to sabotage it? What HAPPENED?
Unless you're new to anime or have taken the wise decision to avoid sites like these and do something productive with your life (Then again, you're here...) you've probably heard of this anime. If you don't watch much beyond Naruto and BNHA yet had the poor decision of playing an opening song from them on Youtube and it took that as you being suddenly interested in 30-minute long video essays about drawings with giant eyes, then you've probably heard about this anime. Even if you're sure you've never heard about it, you have, believe me.
To say it was hyped back when it air would be an understatement. Being from A-1 Pictures (Your Lie In April, Magi, Seven Deadly Sins) and Trigger (Kill la Kill, Little Witch Academia) wasn't enough; it, too, openly paid homage to some of anime's most beloved titles. In a community that had been all but starved of good mecha lately, this made us think, naively, that perhaps not alll hope was lost.
The first few episodes introduce us to some vague, post-apocalyptic looking world where dinosaur mechas try to destroy humanity as it fights back with waifu bots piloted by children. Not exactly groundbreaking, but promising enough. It sets up various plots and mysteries: what is the nature of the dinosaur mechas? Why are children the only ones who can pilot the waifu bots? Why do the mechas have boobs? What is this vaguely dystopic world and how does it work?
We, too, are introduced to the surrogate main character and, of course, the show's main selling point: the pink-haired waifu.
Let's start with Hiro.
Unpopular opinion: I didn't find his character to be bland. In fact, I found the clashing protagonist archetype to be a pretty interesting concept. Like your classic protagonist, he's determined and brave, skilled but unfocused; like post-Shinji protagonist, he's also weighed down by poor self-confidence and is quite notably an introvert. While not really memorable, he served his purpose and, in my opinion, stood up enough on his own. (Then episode 15 happened.)
Now, for pink-haired waifu. Zero Two, part dinosaur mecha and part human is... something.
Unpopular opinion: I didn't like her. I didn't like her when she was introduced, when her backstory was info-dumped, or when she finally began to open up. I could understand her as a character and I can understand the obsession behind her (emotionally distant characters the audience can fantasize about 'healing' will always be popular it seems), but I can't bring myself to like her. At the beginning, her cold disposition seemed interesting enough, but then she just had to do that thing where the eye candy gets inexplicably attached to the surrogate character so they can feel special and loved and I... no. Just no. If anything, she felt gimmicky. It's like she was specifically designed to attract as many people as possible rather than be an actual character.
Also, why is she so damn similar to Lucy from Elfen Lied? Both are pink-haired waifus with horns who angst about being not quite human and who were experimented with, who had a childhood friend who forgot about them and taught them humanity and love, who are cold and uncaring at the beginning of the series except for said childhood friend who they've reunited with by coincidence, who are obstracized, who are very powerful... need I go on?
Aside from the surrogate character and the waifu, we get their tropey, quirky squad of friends. Twin-tailed tsundere? Check. Nice girl with a nice personality (have I mentioned she's nice)? Check. Fat character with a fat personality (have I mentioned he's fat?) Check. Last and least I don't know what anime has with this type of character, but she's EVERYWHERE, and everyone seems to hate her yet she keeps popping up.
Yes, I'm talking about Ichigo.
Ichigo is Hiro's childhood best friend, who is also in love with him and who is there as a plot device to artifically keep the main couple apart. Seriously, this character is everywhere. Why is still a thing? The worst part is, I feel like she would've actually had potential had she not been shoehorned as a gimmick as well. I didn't hate her even after the infamous episode 14. I just feel bad for her.
While the first few episodes focus on Hiro and Zero Two, these characters each get a mini-arc of sorts in an attempt to flesh them out. The intention is appreciated, but it's so obvious that they're trying to make you care and develop them they might as well be saying, "Look! Look at this character! They have an episode all about themselves! Love them! Get attached so we can kill them off and make you cry and buy figurines!" This is a problem that weighs down the anime as a whole, but I'll go more in-depth about it later.
Anyway, Ichigo's story is about her love for Hiro (of course it is) and Hiro and she have a friend named Goro whose story is about his love for Ichigo, and the nice girl who is nice has a story about love, as does the fat character who's fat, and there's a character set up to be the rival but he ends up being extremely gay for Hiro and... that's it. It's so in-your-face and methodical it's hard to even take these characters seriously.
On another note, there's a character named Zorome who is the classic hothead comic relief who keeps messing up so the hero saves the day and makes himself look good, and his episode is probably the closest thing this show has to legitimate development. Not only does it have a rare instance of good world-building, but it also has what is presumably the closest thing this show possesses to character depth. A character with blind admiration towards adults because he wants to know if his life has a purpose beyond fighting/if he'll be like them someday? I'd pick that over surrogate character and his waifu problems even if I liked him.
The story goes along with these walking tropes fighting the dinosaur mechas, having bonding moments, discovering the world around them. Beach episodes ensue. While it's apparent after the first few episodes this will be nowhere as good as the things it tries to emulate, it works. It may be playing it safe, but it's entertaining and it manages to add themes about sexuality and what being a person really means. It may be as subtle as a brick to the face but, again, it does it's job.
It's ok. It's an ok anime.
Then comes the last third.
To specify: after the mini-arcs for each secondary character comes the backstory episode, thus revealing a lot of the mysteries, wherein there remains no real feature of interest in the story given the rest is so uninspired in basically every level you don't have to watch the rest to know what will happen. While it has one of the clichés I hate the most (spoiler: main characters and forgotten first meeting), again, it works. It's ok. It's an ok episode.
The problem is, again, there is basically nothing else to the story. Because of this, the writers went full desperation mode and twisted the tropey friend group into an opposing force against the main ship for no reason other than plot... for about an episode. Everything got resolved after that, had little to no consequence, and Zero Two and Hiro finally got together. What makes it worse is that such a pointless episode happened right after what's regarded as the best of the series (as backstories tend to be).
The problem then is that the writers have run out of conflict again, especially not that Zero Two and Hiro are together, so we have a bunch of episodes about basically nothing. Honestly? I didn't mind that much. Seeing the characters frolic and trope-bond was nice, especially now Zero Two's character development was over and she got over her hurt self and Hiro healed her. Seeing her interact with the rest of the squad was among my favorite things from the show. This, however, brings yet another problem, and it's that Zero Two's character essentially concludes after that. She stops worrying about her lack of humanity. She opens up to people. She gets together with Hiro. Since there is nothing more to her character, there is nothing left to tell about her. All the semi-interesting things about her vanish in favor of her having 'I love you' 'I love you more' conversations with Hiro.
Something similar happens to Hiro. The moment he gets together with Zero Two, his entire life becomes Zero Two. His friends stop mattering. His ambitions stop mattering. The traits the show desperately tries to tell you he possesses seem to vanish. Like Zero Two, he becomes a zombie, an unfortunate puppet to keep you watching until the end as you reminisce the time where either of them had any semblance of a personality.
There's a dumb pregnancy subplot where nice girl who is nice gets paired up with a character who was obviously in love with Hiro until the plot forced him not to. She wants to have kids, they bang, and since it's dystopia the oppressive government finds out and essentially disrupts the peace, thus creating an illusion of conflict. Since this is DiTF, this soon dies soon, and so the writers decide to have a second backstory episode in an attempt to get the stagnant waters moving.
This, episode 19, is singlehandedly the worst episode in the show, and it's where things really spike downwads. While the world-building had been shaky at best before, this is where it outright becomes stupid. Want to know about why the world is post-apocalyptic? They farm energy off MAGMA, molten rock, which somehow kills the planet and makes the dinosaur mechas attack. They're revealed to be a reptilian society with a loli blue princess who then proceeds to reveal she's not a bad guy at all and is actually trying to save the planet from... aliens.
They really went there.
ALIENS.
REPTILIANS AND ALIENS.
The thing is, Kill la Kill is full of what are essentially a list of stupid, nonsensical plot twists and manages to make it work because of the show's overall tone. Tengen Toppa takes a similar approach. Both shows have dramatic moments, but have a silly tone and don't take themselves too seriously. Darling in the Franxx seems a lot more down-to-earth and nuanced, so these twists are... bizarre, to say the least.
Why didn't the reptilian princess tell the humans about the aliens so they'd both team up to defeat them instead of wasting time and energy fighting the humans? What's the in-universe explanation of this? How does the magma not obliterate the glass it's being contained in? Why do reptiles have boobs? Why do the robots have boobs?
Not content with this moronic turn of events, the story has the reptilian princess sexually assault Hiro and then try to make her sympathetic and self-sacrifice once she sees Hiro and Zero Two's WUV even though she basically tried to kill them minutes ago. Thus, she kills herself. She has been fighting humans for heaven know how many decades and all it takes for her to say, "Fuck it, I'm done," is a pair of teenagers crying after the trillionth fake out death. This happens as the alien invasion is taking place and it saves them, somehow, so I suppose it makes some sort of sense, but then Zero Two astrally projects and transfers her soul into the waifu bot she'd been piloting to fight the aliens? Anyway, there's the trillionth and first fake out death after that. By this point, the story is already beyond salvation, yet it manages to get even stupider when it's revealed she is fighting the aliens whilst possessing the waifu bot and her body is cast away on earth as a catatonic, wandering thing whom Hiro desperately clings on. Admittedly, this could potentially be very dramatic and sad if it weren't for the past episodes destroying any semblance of suspension of disbelief the audience might have had.
As this happens, there's a particular scene I despise where he says his life has no meaning without Zero Two and is basically going to go and fight the aliens, even if he dies, if there's no point to living anymore. The fuck? Where is the brave, kind Hiro who cares about his friends the show kept trying to sell? He's known (sans their childhood episode) Zero Two for a few months at most and apparently it's enough for him to basically engage in a suicide mission and abandon his dreams, worldviews and friends? What is this show anymore?
And yet, somehow, it manages to get even stupider. Not content with butchering its characters, it throws whatever integrity may be left to sleep with the fishes and quite blatantly begins to rip off the shows it was already "paying homage" to, included, but not limited to:
a) Waifu character is a clone.(Neon Genesis Evangelion)
b) The battle escalates to space because aliens are the real enemies. (Kill la Kill, Tengen Toppa)
c) The aliens/villains are made of pure energy and want to make other sentient life forms 'throw away' their material body. (Tengen Toppa, NGE)
d) Giant Naked Rei.
e) Macro-sized final battle where spiral power beats the anti-spirals.
f) Instrumentality fails because the writers didn't like End of Evangelion.
I shit you not, the waifu bot Zero Two possesses actually turns into a planet-sized Zero Two, with a distinct shot of the metallic chest bouncing and turning into boobs.
I must ask: what happened?
At some point, it even reminded me of Guilty Crown, another mecha show with a pink-haired waifu, the difference being that Guilty Crown was stupid from the start. This really, truly had potential even with the cliché storms. Even though the 'what makes us human' theme is basically in every sci-fi story ever, the sum of the elements--Zero Two's hatred towards her animalistic side, the way adults act like automatons, the way children are indoctrinated into complete subservience, among other things--might have made for a very interesting take on the subject. It could've been a legitimate exploration on the utopia/dystopia line and where's its drawn, yet this society collapses entirely (and literally) the moment the alien twist shows up. It's barely foreshadowed and completely wrecks any themes the story might had been building to.
This tried hard to be the new big thing in anime, and it could've been. It had the hype, it had the audience, it had the team qualifications. Like Guilty Crown, however, it took far too much from other shows to properly add into their own, thus collapsing into itself. If anything, both shows have ended up as a case study on what NOT to do. Had they been their own thing instead of trying to hard to emulate past successes and, well...
P.S. Asterisk Wars, Guilty Crown, Darling in the Franx... is there some correlation between bad anime and pink-haired mascot characters?
P.P.S. I could've mentioned the gratuitous sex metaphors, but plenty of other (better) reviews have done so already. This show is all but a PSA for the Japanese to procreate, which makes it all the more amusing that, given the ending is happy, everyone ends up having 3-4 babies (and counting). These people were way too optimistic.
