At the beginning of quarantine I watched Evangelion which is what got me back into my anime phase. For a solid month I acted like a crack addict in rehab as I searched for shows that were similar to Evangelion. When I saw former Gainax employees made a spiritual successor to Evangelion I shit my pants a little. Then I watched the first episode and just became sad after realizing that it was basically Evangelion if it was written by a 12 year old. After that episode I continued watching the entire show desperately hoping it would get better but it just never did. One of the cool things about Evangelion is how they were able to utilize a lot of symbolism and remained subtle with the meaning of it. The writers for Darling in the Franxx never seemed to have learned "show don't tell" and it led to a bunch of the symbolism being laughably heavy handed. No where is this more blatant than the pilots. The most obvious one was how they literally had the kids be in a sex position while piloting the mechs and there's also the fact that the pilots are called pistils and stamens. My other big complaint is Zero Two. It feels like Zero Two is basically what happens when a kid who just learned what sex was watches evangelion and then got pissed off because Asuka wouldn't fuck Shinji. This also just leads to a bunch of really uncomfortable scenes because all the main characters are like 15 and believe it or not I'm not the biggest fan of knowing that fully grown men made one of the key characteristics of a main character is how much they love licking the other main character. The other concerning part of the show is its portrayal of gender. Whether or not it was intentional the show kinda was really fucking problematic with how it portrays gender. They kinda just shit on members of the LGBT community by not portraying actual fleshed out queer interactions. I'm not trying to say that queer representation is mandatory for something to not be problematic but if your show is literally about sex it is kinda a problem if you just act like gay people don't exist especially if you make it so that all of the pilots are automatically straight even after being raised in a literal fucking forest that doesn't have any social norms regarding sex and gender. It also pretty much says that only straight sex is natural. When two chicks try to pilot a mech together they almost fucking die which made me burst out laughing because of just how blatantly homophobic it was. Even the Nines which was supposed to be a group that ditched the idea of gender still had all the pilots that look like dudes get paired up with pilots that look like girls. At this point everyone has already dunked on the second half of the show so I'm just gonna be lazy and not talk about it. Normally I'd recommend a show like this for being so bad its good but I can't even do that because of how fucking long and boring it is. If you really want to watch a show about sex just watch Evangelion.