Red Horns at the End of the World
Somewhere around the forty-third prestige American drama about upper-middle-class misery I hit a wall and couldn’t watch any more US television. I needed something that would actually use my brain. So I decided to watch the first episode of every new anime this season and see what sticks—I’ve been away from the medium long enough that the landscape has shifted, and this felt like the right way back in.
The first one is Darling in the FranXX, the new series from Trigger, and I’ll be honest: I barely understand what’s happening yet, but I already need more. If I had to describe it quickly, I’d say it sits somewhere in the collision zone between Neon Genesis Evangelion, Mobile Suit Gundam, and Kill la Kill—that general neighborhood, which for a Trigger production makes complete sense.
The setup: a dystopian future where a handful of chosen children are paired up to pilot enormous mechs called Franxx, defending the remnants of humanity against creatures called Klaxosaurs. In the military desert city of Plantation, the shy and slightly washed-up Hiro meets Zero Two—impulsive, strange, wired differently than everyone else—and the two of them are thrust into partnership by circumstances involving monster attacks and apparent destiny. So far, so familiar.
But the surface-level synopsis undersells what’s actually going on. Even in a single episode, the show stacks mysteries with some confidence. There’s a professor who thinks nothing of swatting his female assistants on the ass in passing. There’s a masked, untouchable leader figure who reads as something close to divine authority. And there’s a whole crew of young pilots who couldn’t be more different from one another—except that none of them seem particularly glad to be alive. Their entire justification for existing, as far as anyone can tell, is to operate the Franxx in pairs and keep the human species from going extinct. It should be enough. It clearly isn’t.
That’s where the show gets interesting. The kids don’t celebrate their purpose; they barely acknowledge it. They go through the motions of military life in a world that has already decided what they’re for, and you get the sense that the series is going to spend a lot of time pulling that apart. That’s the NGE shadow—the mech as symptom, not solution. Children in machines, fighting a war they didn’t start, for a civilization that mostly treats them as instruments.
Trigger hasn’t made a series that didn’t leave some mark on the industry. Kill la Kill was chaotic and gorgeous and completely deranged. Little Witch Academia was warm in ways that anime rarely allows itself to be. I don’t know yet what Darling in the FranXX is going to become, but the first episode makes a strong enough case to keep watching. Zero Two alone is worth it—unstable, magnetic, those small red horns that shouldn’t work but absolutely do.
If dystopias and broken kids in giant robots and the ghost of Evangelion floating over everything sounds like your evening, start with episode one and go from there.