Spoilers ahead.

Darling in the FranXX is a mecha romance anime, and from that genre descriptor alone I was interested. I like mechas, I like romance, I should like this show. And I did! ... Sort of. It's complicated. I've thought a lot about this show. This will be rambley.

Let's start with its most obvious characteristic. To say this show is heavily influenced by Evangelion and Elfen Lied would be a bit like saying that the car that appeared in my neighbor's driveway with a hastily applied paint job is "heavily influenced" by the car of the exact same make and model that went missing from my driveway a couple days ago. On the one hand, you have a small group of traumatized teenagers who have been modified against their will to fight for a group of old fogies using mechs whose piloting method is a metaphor for human reproduction, against ancient life forms that humanity unjustly displaced as the dominant species, whose only weak point is a brightly primary-colored translucent sphere called a "core". On the other hand, you have romantic tension between a blank-slate protagonist and a serial killer deuter who is a member of said species and possesses pink hair and horns, who said protagonist has a secret tragic history with that is inaccessible to the both of them due to memory loss, which involves them being broken out of a torturous testing facility dedicated to pacifying their species. I do like these two shows a lot, and unoriginality isn't the worst thing in the world, but there is something to be said about being able to map almost every single plot point onto two classics. I would call it distracting.

I say almost every plot point, but there are quite a few I'm missing with that almost, and those can be summed up by saying that this show desperately wants you to breed. Trigger desperately want you to have vanilla heterosexual sex in the missionary position and multiply. An important plot point in the show's second act involves a couple expecting and getting married, only for their wedding to be crashed by the government and them being brainwashed into thinking they've never met, which I imagine was a fascinating scene for any queer person living under the Abe Shinzo administration to watch. It is later revealed that the old farts they're protecting were sterilized in order to become immortal, and that the children's ability to breed makes them uniquely able to pilot the mechs because the mechs were based on that ancient species's technology and that ancient species built mechs that way because the writers of this show want you to breed. That's really all it comes down to. Be fruitful and multiply.

So the show is unoriginal and is propaganda for the policies of a far right prime minister (inadvertently or not? you decide!), but for some reason i found myself enjoying this show a lot and getting really invested in it. So let's talk about that.

The show is gorgeous, like astonishingly so. The paintings it has are incredibly impressive, but most of the locations aren't really painting material, and in these cases it's not really the intricacy that impressed me, but rather the use of color. The palettes are impeccable and bold, each frame set within the heart of the plantation blasting you into your seat like a Mondrian painting. I took a lot of screenshots while watching it.

The characters, also, are incredibly well-written. While the dialogue isn't particularly poetic (though it isn't anything to sneeze at either), the characters themselves are complex and realistic, and their arcs feel distinctly human. Ichigo is by far my favorite character -- her character arc put her through a lot of complex emotions that were portrayed respectfully and near-flawlessly. I give my sincere congratulations to the script writers.

And honestly? That's kind of it for my pros, and yet I found myself liking the show a lot. A lot more than I've let on here, I think. I suppose you could call it a guilty pleasure, but I don't really believe in those. It's just... god, this show sucks. But I liked it. I liked it a lot, even. But it's not good. I don't have many nice things to say about it, but I thought it was great. If you asked me what I thought about the show halfway through, I would have said I loved it. If you had asked me what I thought right after I finished it, I would have said I hated it. Now that it's been a couple months... I keep going back and forth between listening to my heart and listening to my mind. How fitting.

I have a lot more to say about this show, and I will say those things eventually, but likely in a different medium from this one. As it stands I'm kinda pumping this out in a sudden burst of energy brought on by caffeine and pain meds, so I apologize if this is incomprehensible. I've never been good at conclusions, so just imagine there's a good one here. Peace.

Oh also, pay no attention to the score number. I don't like assigning numerical scores to things -- particularly something I have as complex feelings on as this one -- so I've left it at its default value.