DARLING in the FRANXX - What the HFIL Happened?!

in about 30 seconds this video will be jumping into spoilers for the ending of darling in the Franks the first things I'm gonna show you aren't going to ruin this anime except in the sense that once you see them it's gonna be impossible for you to take it seriously anymore but I figure it's worth warning you anyway and from that point forward it will get increasingly spoilery later on I'll also be discussing a certain similar element from the ending of gurren lagaan that's not in itself a huge spoiler unless we're talking physically and is generally well known even to people who haven't watched the show but some of you may still want to avoid seeing it however I can't avoid talking about that element because well just [ __ ] look at this this trainwreck which I once thought would be one of the best shows this year didn't just go off the rails it's somehow d4 seed into an alternate reality where the rails never existed in the first place within the span of 24 episodes I went from being so emotionally invested that at the series peak it made me cry to being so emotionally detached that all of its attempts at serious drama had me crying with laughter I'm aware that some people made it through the comedic brilliance that is strelitzia true APIs with their respect and love for the series intact and that's great if you came away from darling in the Franks and think it's a 10 out of 10 flawless masterpiece made by Haruhi herself I'm happy for you I am glad that you could enjoy this anime and stay invested in the story straight to the end but I couldn't and this is my youtube channel so I'm gonna spend the next 20 minutes or so trying to figure out why that is buckle up it's time to figure out what the hell happened to darling in the Franks to be clear we're not gonna be playing blame the studio here because it's the individuals with creative control of the project not the company's involved in its creation who are ultimately most responsible for the direction that the series took particularly writer-director atsushi nishigori two big criticisms that I've seen levied at darling in the Frank so that one the last arc of the story is really rushed and - the series borrows pretty liberally from past gainax and trigger properties in shall we say less than original ways I think that both of these complaints are valid but they failed to get to the heart of what's really wrong with this show yes obviously three episodes is a bit of a tight squeeze for an anime to suddenly make the transition from mostly small-scale ground conflicts to the massive starship fleet battles of a full-blown space opera and cramming a full two years of space travel and sleepless endless war for the fate of the universe plus the gradual reformation of humanity and rebuilding of the earth into 23 minutes is ambitious to say the least I'd say on par with the last episode of Charlotte in that regard and it's definitely a problem that anyone who's seen a guy next show before can call every twist in the series a light year away including that sudden jump to space but it's not like the series suddenly started cribbing from dine axes playbook as it got bad and got to its gainax ending the good parts of the show also reuse and remix ideas that we've seen before in fact when it started the omage was kind of part of the appeal for a lot of viewers at least up to the point where it became obvious that the show was a little light on original ideas and many of the show's best episodes and arcs move at a breakneck pace I mean after episode 14 fans were ready to riot over developments in 0-2 and Hiro's relationship that were resolved in a very satisfying manner just one episode later now some might argue that the show could benefit from condensing some of its more dull slice-of-life Yepez ODEs to make room for more action but those slice-of-life bits are what give the show its heart and let us connect with the characters there as necessary as the fighting robot bits if not more so they could definitely have been better written especially from episode 16 to 19 and maybe spread out a bit more evenly but I think the ratio of drama to action in francs is at least on paper pretty well balanced and on paper if you break darling in the francs down to individual components basically all of it is really good the character designs an art direction are striking and memorable for the most part the animation is consistently strong the music is incredible the writing of individual episodes and bits of dialogue can be powerful poetic and genuinely funny yet cram all of these individual elements together and what you get is a mess that is less than the sum of its parts a lot like the other recent much hyped and much maligned mecha series all NOAA zero all of the teams working on darling in the francs clearly had a lot of passion for the project but it feels like all of them had slightly or sometimes wildly different ideas of what the show should be and nobody ever bothered to sit down and talk to everybody and actually figure out a coherent answer to that question if you step back and look at the product as a whole darling in the Franks is kind of all the [ __ ] over the place its designs and premise suggests that we're in for an over-the-top balls-to-the-wall cavalcade of fanservice and mecha action I mean zero - spends literally all of her time either naked or wearing a plug suit in the first couple episodes yet for a show about drift compatible teenagers piloting mechs doggy style it's surprisingly tame like yeah there's the one episode where the goop gets on the plug suits and makes them start melting and then the girls and boys go to war but the aggressive sexuality and in-your-face jig leanness of stuff like killa kill and gurren lagaan just isn't there in the same way the series makes an active effort to downplay the Gainax enos or i guess you could say trigger eNOS of everything making a statement early on that while we're gonna be having a bit of fun here we're gonna be looking at the themes of sexuality through a more serious lens this is an action drama not an action comedy which isn't the worst idea in the world to be honest it's neat to see someone take these distinctively trigger designs and ideas and use them to tell a more grounded subdued story and for the first 15 episodes the romantic tension between hero and 0-2 and drama that unfolds between them and their friends and the adults is legitimately gripping but if serious dramas what you're going for ah what the hell is this what in the ever-loving [ __ ] are you doing stop when I posted my reaction to this nonsense on Twitter a few weeks ago quite a few people brought up gurren lagaan in response some just making comparisons others using that series to defend the choices made in this one but I don't think that comparison is fair and I say that for two reasons firstly the whole design of strelitzia true APIs is inherently ridiculous and stupid this is not parts of a robot rearranging themselves to look more like the person piloting it this is a metal shell transforming into a human with flesh blood hair and makeup somehow and like goddamn the tiny bottles that yazi buys from Sephora are already crazy expensive I don't even want to imagine what a few hundred meters worth of lipstick and eyeshadow would cost you can't just blow a regular ass human up to planetary scale without it looking either super goofy or super creepy I mean that's almost half the concept of attack on Titan on a fundamental level this just looks an order of magnitude dumber than super tengen toppa gurren lagaan which benefits from being made out of spiral energy and not you know a hundred square miles of human skin with titties the size of literal mountains but even if true APIs didn't have a god-awful character design darling in the Franks was simply not equipped to make this concept work not in the same way that gurren lagaan pulled it off anyway because the idea of an absurdly massive transforming robot taking out thousands of spaceships at once with a barrage of lasers fueled by the power of love is right at home in an ever-escalating balls-to-the-wall action series like Guren but it feels about as alien as well sudden aliens in a moody coming-of-age teen romance story darling in the Franks is not a show about pointy-haired kids and rad sunglasses making bold declarations about digging equipment with anime bravado it's about sad teenagers arguing and crying and in bracing each other and most of what happens in the last few episodes is totally incongruous with that tone which makes it hilarious not moving not exciting hilarious when during the show's big emotional climax the comatose girl on earth turns to stone and reappears as a half mechanical giant s orbiting Mars I wasn't crying I was laughing my ass off when everyone on earth decided to spend hours holding hands with a rock prompted only by a little girl saying the word darling in order to somehow help hero thousands of light-years away escape space hypnosis all so that he can commit mass genocide for peace and justice that goofiness stopped me from appreciating the moments of the show's epilogue like showing all of squad 13 grown up with kids that are pretty well executed and have the potential to be really powerful there were a few moments in the last couple episodes that almost certainly would have been really emotional for me if I was still able to care but every time that I was about to be moved by something I was seeing I'd remember this heck sometimes the show would cut directly from a potentially affecting scene to this and immediately all of the emotional energy that the show had been working to build up was released through laughter instead I've banged on for a while about this disaster and I don't think I can overstate how stupid true apus is or how badly it damages the integrity of the show's narrative on its own but even before it warp jumped over all the sharks in existence darling in the Franks was in trouble because as big a problem as true apus is literally and figuratively the show has a much bigger one the script is poorly planned and fails to follow through on just about everything potentially interesting that it sets up I've been over the messy world building and storytelling in episode 19 in depth so I won't repeat what I said there here but subsequent episodes of this show do nothing to remedy these problems not only are the reveals that follow about the true nature of Frank's robots magma energy and ape all painfully derivative of other better works of sci-fi they're also super bare-bones examples of those tropes that don't really explain anything help some of the reveals just create bigger plot holes like magma energy is really the lifestream of sorry clack so Sarju s-- and it provides life energy that allows the earth to be fertile alright but then like how did clack so sapiens evolve and develop their civilization without already having magma energy in the earth to allow plants to grow what did they use to fuel their incredible impossible technologies like the clack so czars themselves you know the giant robots that humanity at the height of its magma energy fueled development still had a lot of trouble reverse engineering into Frank's where'd they get the energy to make those the answer is don't think about it seeing huge gaps in world building like this is frustrating but I guess it's not super important to the narrative overall you know it is though the main villains of the whole story the verm you guys kind of just forgot to give them a backstory motivation or personality aliens showed up out of nowhere thousands of years ago and we're bad now thousands of years later they're back and they're still bad that's literally it I mean their stated motivation is bringing immortal hivemind peace to the universe but if a species turns them down they then immediately go to war with them which is the opposite of peace there's no philosophical consistency there and we're never shown any reason why they'd endanger themselves or the peace that they've worked so hard to create and they say that they want in order to achieve more peace may be the verm aren't even as fleshed out as the anti spirals they're really just evil for the sake of being evil because the plot needs that even though they have dialogue you can barely call them characters let alone villains their plot devices ultimately they have about as much personality and drive as the tsunami or earthquake in a roland emmerich film and because the verm are responsible for the clock so czars being violent as well that kind of leaves the story without a real antagonist and without a real to fight the sole driving force of darling ends up having to be the interpersonal drama of squad 13 particularly the romance between hero and 0-2 and the conflicting feelings of Goro and Ichigo and until episode 15 that does keep the show going but after that point zero 2 basically loses her whole personality like in Prior episodes when she's hanging out with squad 13 she is clearly a [ __ ] disturber poking fun and prodding at others for her own amusement and generally being very haughty and full of herself but after reuniting with hero she's just nice to everyone all the time and doesn't stir up any conflict ever it's like the writers think that being in a relationship somehow magically solves all of your emotional hang-ups and personality quirks that's uh that's not how organic character growth works and that lazy writing leaves the series spinning its wheels from that point forward forcing it to focus on weaker characters who just can't carry an episode as the primary focus like Mitsu rouge sole defining characteristic is his man crush on Hiro which is already basically resolved and three out of the four paragraphs on the series wiki describing cocoros personality are literally just about how she wants to [ __ ] Matt suru and have a baby while the other one just says that she's really nice not exactly the most complex characters in the world yet our investment in their interactions and eventual wedding has to fuel the a plot of three whole episodes with zero action when the series does eventually try to get back on track with the war against the clock so SARS the writers to their credit realized that they've given us zero reason to care about the outcome so their solution for injecting some emotional drama into these final battles is to tear Hiro away from 0to again so that they can reprise episode 15s fight to bring them back together only this time it's her saving him and then because they have three episodes to go and zero ideas left they do the exact same thing again but in space this time and if you strip those repetitive elements away there is next to nothing in these episodes that we can be reasonably expected to give a [ __ ] about because all of the surrounding casts basically does nothing and nothing really happens to them the entire time that darling in the Franks was running viewers were shouting incessantly about death flags left and right and eagerly anticipating the [ __ ] just got real moment when a member of squad 13 would finally get killed off and it really makes sense with such a huge cast of untrained kids fighting giant monsters one of them has to die at some point right well apparently not the writers clearly felt that someone had to die to raise the emotional stakes in these final episodes because for significant established characters do die across these last two battles but the thing is none of the deaths our main characters not even any of the useless ones instead of taking characters who we've spent a lot of time growing to like and that our heroes have an emotional attachment to darling and the Franks tries to wring some cheap unearned tears out of the audience by killing minor villains a big blue snake a small blue lolly a barely developed mad scientist and a blonde kid who's literally never been anything but an [ __ ] every last one of these characters follows the same pattern they're introduced as some kind of threat early on in the series that 0 - and hero will have to overcome and characterized in such a way that you look forward to seeing them get their asses kicked but then the show needs to meet a death quota so all of a sudden they do one good thing and immediately die afterwards and we're just expected to be sad about it because [ __ ] if I know dr. Franks is the only character out of any of them who's had more than 5 seconds of screen time where he has any chance to appear sympathetic but his death is too hilarious to be sad this Boulder crushing him has the framing and timing of an actual roadrunner gag look just replaced the sound effects this all smacks of last-minute rewrites to me I mean in episode 18 the nines are displaying fanatical devotion to Papa after he reveals that he's an evil alien and plans to blow up the whole planet they were clearly intended at some stage to be the final bosses faced by squad 13 and give us some mekin mech action before the finale yet instead of following through on that the show backs down having nine alpha gets sick and turned good for basically no reason and it simultaneously uses the deaths of these villains to back down from killing off any members of its main cast who we actually might care about all in order to give them a happy ending like if I had to wager I'd be willing to bet that in an earlier draft of this script it's Mitsu supposed to take the role of heroes male pistol leaving Kokoro back home on earth and he's the one who ultimately sacrifices himself to help Hiro reach zero - not only would that pay off the earlier set up when Mitsuru says that he wants to be hero's partner it would be a lot more meaningful and emotionally satisfying for the audience than the death of this random [ __ ] and it would make for a much more powerful moment in both his and cocoros character arcs than just having him stay back at home and be a happy dad seriously killing off at least some of the squad members this late in the game would give these episodes the emotional weight they so desperately need to work as the climax to this kind of melodrama it would also shape up the cast dynamics in a way that would make these otherwise bland episode plots a little bit more interesting instead the series takes cop outs at every turn to preserve the dynamic that the writers are comfortable with on the way to an unambiguously happy and totally uninteresting conclusion okay so some people are gonna argue that hero and zero to dying makes this ending bittersweet but come on all of their friends live long happy lives without them and they get to go off for two years doing exactly what they've wanted to do from moment one of the series just be alone together they die at exactly the same time so neither has two more than the other and to top it all off there incarnated Souls are apparently cosmically intertwined so that they can be together in a time completely free of conflict in the future without that reincarnation scene it would be a little ambiguously sad but with it you literally couldn't write a happier ending for these characters without I don't know making them immortal gods who get to spend all of eternity in love with each other or something and to be clear there's nothing wrong with ending a show what they all lived happily ever after and reincarnated happily ever after but it's not really in line with the tone of the rest of the series and I don't think it really says much of substance at the end of the day the only message that darling in the Franks really puts out there despite all of its philosophical meandering is love's good have babies and that's a shame because when it started it seemed like a show with a lot more to say but maybe that's just because it borrowed so much from series that actually had something to say either way darling in the Franks feels like a compromised and poorly planned work one with no idea of how to pay off the plot points that sets up or how to effectively use the characters and concepts that it develops in lieu of that the writers chose to fall back on old cliches and cop outs which only exacerbate those issues still while the last stretch of it sucks the first 15 episodes provide a satisfying enough emotional journey and while it doesn't have much in the way of concrete meaning if you stopped watching at that episode hey it doesn't if you finish the whole series either so if you're interested in darling in the Franks I do recommend riding it out to that point for the great animation and pretty good romance but just make sure that you disembark before the train turns into a wreck I'm Geoff thew professional [ __ ] signing out from my mother's basement [Music]

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 1,114,518

Rating: 4.8595471 out of 5

Keywords: darling in the franxx review, gurren lagann, franxx anime, giant zero two apus, Darling in the Franxx, Darling in the Franxx Sucks, Jumping The Shark, video essay, anime (tv genre), zero two, darling in the franxx episode 24, darling in the frankxx, episode 21, darling in the franxx episode 23, zero two true apus strelizia, Anime, Mother's Basement, anime analysis, What the HFIL Happened, super tengen toppa gurren lagann, Bad anime, Bad Ending, Trigger, A-1 Pictures

Id: 6WiMGIKjmjM

Length: 21min 4sec (1264 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 21 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/KeyWarthog]

Zorome's episode was the best in my opinion, the city was really mysterious, and that smiling adult inside the tank was scary.

[u/Carbon48]

Watched the whole video and pretty much agree. Show was amazing the first 15, then it was okay-ish until 18. I have no idea what happened after then.

[u/Daniel_Is_I]

I'm surprised Geoff didn't mention the whole YOU DIDN'T WIN that VIRM pulled in the finale. Hiro and Zero Two sacrifice themselves to destroy VIRM's homeworld but the aliens in question still manage to get away with little more to say than "You think you've won, but we cannot be beaten! I'll get you next time, Gadget!"

I mean sure, all of the characters we cared about were able to live happy, conflict-free lives, and the sacrifice didn't actually mean anything because lol reincarnation, but VIRM escaping means the only lasting impact the ending could have had (the villains' defeat) turned into merely delaying the inevitable by a few thousand years.

Unless they intend for Hiro, Zero Two, and VIRM to literally be Link, Zelda, and Ganon, locked in an eternal struggle of reincarnation and near-victories. But that'd just be stupid.

[u/phased417]

I've never seen a community turn on a show faster in my life. Like the show did something so horrible that it was the pariah of the anime community.

[u/MrGameandCrotch]

There’s a spoiler warning right at the start of the video if anyone’s cautious

Edit: okay I’m getting downvoted, my bad boys sorry for the heads up I’ll go fuck myself

[u/ilkei]

Pretty much hit the nail on the head for me. Not surprising, considering I generally find myself agreeing with his videos.

I did have more issues Geoff with how Hiro-02 drama was solved in episodes 14-15(?). Show spends the first 13 episodes laying the foundations for a love triangle(or more) that it abandon after like 10 minutes after it raises the stakes. Them reuniting should have been a several episode arc.

[u/Jryou]

*pre video comment

Oh boy this is gonna be gud

*post video comment

Yup, agree with Jeff on the most part (I've had problems with the series since the start), the series was a massive cop-out and an embarrassing misuse of potential.

[u/MartinIssac1995]

The Anime started to show problems on episode 6. Episode 15 was rushed as hell and the revelation of aliens finally killed any chances of DITF being good.

[u/G-0ff]

On the off chance anyone here wants to use it for something, here's Super Galaxy Dai Zero Two in convenient PNG form.