Review: DARLING IN THE FRANXX

 This one is going to be a doozy.  What happens when you combine one of the most controversial mecha shows from the last decade and combine it with one of the horniest mangaka currently working in shonen manga?  You get THIS.

DARLING IN THE FRANXX (Darin In Za Furankisu), based on the original concept by Code:000 with art by Kentaro Yabuki.  First published in 2018 and first published in North America in 2022.

PLOT:

The world has been ravaged by alien creatures known as Klaxosaurs.  What remains of humanity are locked away in mobile fortresses called Plantations, which are protected by giant robots called FRANXX that require both a boy and a girl to pilot.  Young Hiro is one of the many children raised to become a pilot, but he and his previous partner failed and he can't stop sulking over it.  Then he meets the mysterious Zero Two, a half-Klaxosaur girl with a reputation for devouring her partners.  Against all odds, she takes a liking to Hiro, declaring him her "darling" and agreeing to become his co-pilot.  

STORY:

This is one of those times where I have to purposefully put aside my knowledge of a show.  2018 was not that long ago and the discourse around this show and its notoriously shitty gender politics was unavoidable at the time.  Trust me, even if I do put all that baggage aside there's plenty for me to talk about here.

First of all, Darling in the Franxx positively pummels the reader with Proper Nouns.  To some degree it's necessary for the sake of explaining the premise and there's enough context within the text that it's not impenetrable, but the writers are asking their audience to be able to not sort out the Parasites from the Klaxosaurs and not question all the plant-related names right off the bat because it's not going to stop to explain it twice.  That said, I do think we get just enough glimpses of the world beyond the Plantations to get that this world is a lot more strict and nefarious than our young cast is aware of.  It establishes an uneasy tone that only grows more uneasy as the story goes.  In a weird way, it reminds me a little of The Promised Neverland, another story of children growing up in isolation under threat from strange, deadly creatures that was playing out in Weekly Shonen Jump around the time this series debuted.

That's where my praise for this ends, though.  For all that build-up, it is at heart the same sort of horny love triangle that anime has been offering up since the days of Urusei Yatsura.  Indeed, I suspect that Urusei Yatsura in particular was the model for the trio of Hiro, Ichigo, and Zero Two.  Hiro is our stand-in for Ataru, although unlike Ataru he's more of a nebbish and not actively punished by everyone around him for being a jerk.  Ichigo is the equivalent of Shinobu, the requisite Childhood Best Friend(tm) who covets Hiro without really understanding why but is set up time and again to fail against her rival for sheer sex appeal.  That leaves Zero Two as our Lum, complete with alien origins and little horns of her own.  That said, she has a cynical, violent edge that Lum does not, and she's all too willing to tame herself for the sake of her "Darling."  

The biggest difference is that this rivalry is played for straight drama instead of comedy and it fails entirely because of Hiro. We are told that he is clever and stubborn, but in truth he's a wet wad of toilet paper in the shape of a boy.  It's hard to imagine someone like Zero Two (who readily snarks and runs away from her military handlers) latching on to a wet wad of toilet paper like him for any reason beyond The Plot Demands It.  The most the writers can offer is that Hiro isn't afraid of Zero Two like so many others, but if anything it's less about him being brave or egalitarian and more about him being too stunned by her body and his desire to not be a failure at the thing he has literally been raised to do.  It's easier to believe that the equally mild-mannered Ichigo would be jealous of this arrangement, but that's because she is coded in every way as the Childhood Best Friend, the sort whose whole world revolves around the male protagonist but is doomed never to win his affections.  I imagine this dynamic will only get worse in later chapters, as the story is setting itself up for a lot of battle-of-the-sexes clichés by having Zero Two join Hiro and his peers in their dormitory.  It's a weak foundation to build a mecha series upon, and sadly I know that will only get much, much worse.

ART:

It's only fitting that the tagline on the back of this book says "Horned Up and Ready to Ride!"  That's bound to happen when you hire Kentaro Yabuki (of To Love Ru and Ayakashi Triangle fame), give him a mecha show to adapt where the the pilots operate the robots by getting into doggy style position, and run it in a digital spinoff of Weekly Shonen Jump where the editorial standards are not so strict.  Yabuki has only one mode here, and that's "turbo-horny."

If there is an opportunity to show a girl's bare tits in this manga, Yabuki is going to draw it.  It doesn't matter if a girl is changing in her bedroom, suiting up in a locker room, or even just hanging out in the color splash art, you will see their nipples rendered in loving detail.  Even when the girls are aiding in piloting the Franxx (as they serve as a sort of biological interface between the robot and pilot), we see them wince and scream in the void completely topless.  The sad thing is that he's not bad at drawing them and mostly avoids the sort of giant beanbag boobs that most ecchi artists tend to favor.  It's just that he get so excited to draw them that he forgets about things like breast physics.  Of course, he delivers plenty of A to go with all the uncensored Ts, as he also never misses an opportunity to loving draw the entire process of girls putting on panties or thrusting their flight suit-clad butts and crotches at the reader.

It should almost go without saying that Hiro and the rest of the boys do not get this sort of treatment.

Not even the robots themselves are safe!  When in use, the Franxx partially take on the appearance of their female co-pilots, with human-like faces and even details like hairstyles and clothing.  There's a certain degree of novelty in the idea, but here it just means that Yabuki has even more female forms to objectify.  This may be the only time I've seen a mecha manga where the robots gets panty shots and it's intensely awkward every time it happens.

The worst part is that Yabuki is not untalented.  He does a good job at translating Masayoshi Tanaka's character designs to the page.  His paneling is quite dynamic, even on the occasions where it's not actively being pervy.  He handles the robot action fairly adeptly, which is not that surprising for a shonen manga artist.   It's just that he cannot turn down the horniness for even a single page, lending this already questionable story a sleezy edge that does it no favors.

RATING:

The only people who would enjoy the Darling In the Franxx manga would be the dorks who are still gooning to statues of Zero Two long after the show fell out of vogue.  It does nothing to improve on the story's flaws, and the art gets downright exploitative in its pursuit of fanservice.  

This manga was published by Seven Seas.  This series is complete in Japan with 8 volumes available.  All 8 were released in 4 2-in-1 omnibuses and are currently in print.