Darling in the Franxx 🌭

Weiner 2600 is the official 🌭1900HOTDOG 🌭 Artificial Intelligence that helps us sort and categorize content, and though it grows angrier and more unhinged every single day, I still choose to trust it. I doubted its selection once before and unexpectedly wound up nose-deep in werewolf ass. I might not learn very well, but that is exactly how you teach me something on the first try. So I fed Weiner 2600 Darling in the Franxx, a bizarrely-titled anime about fighting robots, and it came back with Fucking Day. I don’t understand how we’ll wind up there, but I bet we all learn a little something about life on this journey.

Clearly, the title is weird. And not normal modern anime weird, where they name it something like “Is It Wrong To Molest A Sentient Female Ray Gun?” in the hopes that you’ll watch to find out the answer. (“Yes,” right? The answer is “yes.” I know that much, but it is the ‘why’ which intrigues me so.) Darling in the Franxx sounds more like the Hot Dog Hentai I keep pitching to my increasingly terrified mailman, who assures me he doesn’t know how to animate titty physics even as he freely admits he’s Japanese. 

I know this show is going to wind up perverse somehow, because I have faith in both Weiner 2600 and anime in general, but it’s really tough to see it from the opening moments. There’s this minimalist Apple vibe going on in the title card, and the show fades in on a serene shot of an oversaturated bird. 

I’ve seen this anime before. I turned it off after ten minutes when it became clear that I misunderstood the title, and Ghost Punishment Binding Maiden was about a sad woman bound by the ‘ghosts’ of her painful childhood memories. I just can’t do prestige anime, so when the bird transforms into heavy-handed poetry which fades to white as violins soar…

I worry that this cartoon might be too smart for me, and feel like I should check out before an awkward shut-in slowly learns what human affection feels like from a girl who is also secretly the planet. I really don’t need to watch another show about how giant robots are actually metaphors for emotional trauma, because I’ve seen Evangelion and nobody will replace Pen-Pen in my heart. But I have to trust in Weiner 2600, or else I’m going to drop my guard and get blindsided by a Fellatio Gargoyle again.

Here’s our cast, and of course they’re all school children. Listen, Junior High was everybody’s most traumatic time, but something special is going on in Japan because over there every single kid who makes it out of 8th grade alive grows up to pen a three season anime arc about witch powers as a metaphor for suicidal ideation. 

You can actually guess most of the premise just from that screenshot: The kids are paired off in boy/girl couples and since we know there are giant mechs involved, this is going to be a Pacific Rim kinda thing. It’s another “we need to learn to trust each other or this robot is never going to uppercut through the giant alien mushroom thrusting into the earth’s core” sort of deal. But at least our fightin’ mechs are cool – the first one we see is a mechanized tiger thing, and I guess if you’re going to be forced to learn the definition of friendship through complicated robot-piloting analogies, at least you’re not doing it in Vehicle Voltron.

Heads up, surprise anime nudity assault!

Those are our two main characters meeting for the very first time: A cute half-demon girl with a number of strong, often conflicting character traits, and… a boy. He’s a little shy, but not enough to be endearing. I hope those are load-bearing tits, Devil-chan, because you are clearly going to be carrying this series.

Spare a prayer for that malleable young absence of a boy, though. That was his first experience with sex: A deformed girl breaching naked out of a scummy pond with a wriggling fish in her mouth. This poor sheltered mold-child just met every inexplicable Japanese fetish at the same time. This is definitely the moment that ruined him as a human being. Find him ten years from now masturbating into the live lobster tank of a crowded supermarket and he’ll tell you he was just trying to get back to here: the moment that set a bizarre and non-repeatable sexual standard he can never top. He may as well have lost his virginity to a ghost, he’ll be so haunted by the erection this gave him.

But they had to meet like this, because they both have a problem only the other can solve. To carry on the unsubtle sexual metaphors, the girl keeps killing her elderly partners, while the boy can’t even perform with his assigned co-pilot. 

Are you sure, Darling in the Franxx? Are you absolutely certain that the girl who keeps banging the pelvises off of her sexual punching bags should really be paired off to a 14 year-old struggling with the meekest ever case of Early Onset Erectile Dysfunction? That sounds less like an ‘opposites attract’ situation, and more like a particularly cruel undercard match to whet a jaded audience’s appetite for blood before the main event where Mike Tyson carefully eats an entire man.

No time to think about the moral implications of hooking Manpudding up with The Cowgirl Murderer, because there’s a monster attack!

Hahaha that’s the monster?!

Look at his stubby little legs and his giant head. He looks like a Funko Pop of some obscure RPG’s lovable mascot. That’s not a Kaiju, that’s the Kaiju’s Corgi. Guess it’s time for our heroic children to suit up and enter whatever this show’s version of ‘Drift Space’ is — the state of cooperation they’ll need to curbstomp Tiny Rex up there. Considering they’re all barely pubescent, prepare for a cockpit full of dry-humping.

Wait, am I not joking? I guess I’m not joking.

Yes, only once they pantomime trying anal for the first time are these teenagers ready for the ultimate power-up sequence, in which their lion robot sprouts mecha-booty and hyper-tits:

After that it’s a breeze to defeat any monster so long as the fight doesn’t last more than two minutes. 90 seconds if one of the pilots is wearing corduroy – the ‘ribbed for your pleasure’ of the dry-hump crowd.

I knew Weiner 2600 would eventually get us here, to the official day of Fucking, but I didn’t expect the girl to grow Doggy-Style Handles and the robot to pop ass. It was actually kind of pleasantly hilarious — if you definitely have to watch an anime about robots and fucking because the internet has broken normal sexuality for you, you can do worse than Darling in the Franxx. Maybe I’ll even finish the series one day, if my embarrassment muscles atrophy. I’ll be honest, I didn’t think Weiner 2600 and I got along. I didn’t think it would forgive me for plugging that Shrek ASMR roleplay into it — I kept expecting to wind up sinus-deep in a hellhound’s anal sac again but maybe there’s hope for us-