A Look at Darling in the FranXX Episode 2

My impressions from the first episode were negative, so it's important to see where that leads us for the second episode.

This episode focuses on Hiro's piloting skills that are doubted by his peers. Hiro conveniently remembers nothing from piloting the FranXX with 002 so it is required of him to have a mock battle to determine whether he is suitable or not to actually be a pilot. It was good that there was some form of procedure involved in Hiro's promotion from useless beta male to pilot, however, Hiro has not been promoted yet and that will probably take an episode or two to resolve. It makes sense that in order to prove piloting skills that Hiro should prove his worth in combat.

002 does nothing except flirt with Hiro and act all smug when other pilot are worse than her. This is at least consistent with her varying personalities in the first episode, but she's not any less of a thirsty waifu. The issues come along with Ichigo, one of the better peers in Hiro's unit.

Ichigo has obvious romantic interest in Hiro for no reason other than wish fulfillment and to be waifubait. She acts somewhat responsibly at the beginning to warn Hiro that since 002's partners seem to die quite often that he should stay away from her. Unfortunately, she takes this responsibility way too far and comes off as clingy. When 002 flirts with Hiro, Ichigo is visibly annoyed and doesn't respond well to jokes in the girls' locker room about 002 and Hiro getting it on.

When Hiro is required to prove himself in combat, Ichigo steps in to stop 002 from partnering with him and offers herself as the partner. This is self-serving and doesn't do much good for Hiro. As the mock battle begins, Hiro and Ichigo have a strong start but falter almost immediately. Hiro's solution to this sudden breakdown is for him and Ichigo to kiss to get a plot convenience and fanservice power up. Since Ichigo doesn't have dinosaur blood or supreme waifu powers, the kiss didn't work so she suggests they do it again, which is totally not because she enjoyed it. Ichigo and Hiro's mech piloting also raised some interesting questions.

What are they doing in this scene? Why was Ichigo swaying back and forth? Mechs are sex imagery and it's very obvious. The fanservice is clearly pandering to degenerates and teenage boys. There's a scene in the girls' locker room with emphasised shots of teenage girls putting on skimpy, skin-tight, latex-looking "underwear" before getting their suits magicked on by a machine. This scene also has some good old fashioned breast groping. It's distasteful and boob size jokes are not funny. To make matters worse, it is shown that the controls for the male pilots are attached to the rear ends of the female pilots. See below for reference.

The episode ends on a pseudo-cliffhanger with nobody winning the mock battle. Continuing the trend from the first episode of bad fanservice, which is worse this episode because it gets in the way of the action, Hiro has pretentious and emo self-pitying dialogue that "depressed" teenagers might think is deep, and blatant waifu bait, otaku pandering and compromising quality for mass appeal. Unlike the last episode, this one didn't copy Evangelion too much. That's a move in the right direction for originality, but two steps in the wrong direction for having an insufferable and pretentious protagonist and bad fanservice. Other than some brief scuffling between mechs, nothing important or compelling happened in this episode, and so it fails as an introductory episode. The first episode, while mediocre at best, at least had things that happened to keep interest.

My expectations are low for the next episode and it's possible that love triangle could become a crave-Hiro's-Johnson waifu fight. We have still not seen any good action since the robots stopped functioning. So far, this show is evidence of why you shouldn't buy into the Trigger meme. They're not good.

If you're looking for a mech show with action the action this show lacks at the moment, Gurren Lagann is up your alley. Far more exciting and an actually good show. Fanservice can be obnoxious at times in that one, but it's at least used for the purpose of showing how teenage boys approach sexuality.

Evangelion, as mentioned last week, is a better character study if you want that. Darling in the FranXX doesn't seem to understand how to write characters. Evangelion does a better job at that.

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