I have thoughts on Darling in The FranXX

I decided to binge the show as soon as all of the Simuldub went up.

There will be Spoilers in this Post, but not super in depth ones.

I enjoyed it, as a psychosexual Mech show I like it more then Evangelion but not as much as RahXephon.  (By the way, the fans turning on it and spreading narratives about how it's production self-deconstructed is part of paralleling Eva, but people try to forget that part of Eva's legacy.)

It's interesting to me personally to compare it to Katana Maidens.  Katana Maidens was a two core show airing over the same two seasons that FranXX aired, but with Katana Maidens I watched the Simuldub as it was released.  Katana Maidens was a show I was/am hoping would prove to be my personal AOTY.  And it does still appeal to me more then FranXX in terms of the kind of content I want from Anime.

However Katana Maidens did something I prefer two core shows not do.  And that is structure itself so that it basically seems like two seasons of a 12 episode show.  If you're gonna structure it that way I think it would be better to just do it as two seasons and let a brief hiatus between help build hype.

FranXX doesn't follow what I consider the ideal two core structure embodied by Noir and Witch Hunter Robin.  But it does feel more like an actual two core show by not being so easy to split in half.  The episodes that could have worked as mid season or full season finales if the show had been structured differently were episodes 15 and 21.  And perhaps criticism of the ending could have been fixed by stopping at episode 21 and allowing more room for a season 2, but that's another issue. I still preferred this ending to Romeo+Juliette or YuriKuma Arashi when it comes to romance Anime giving the main couple a more mystical happy ending.

So basically Katana Maidens is a more appealing story to me then FranXX, but FranXX is better as a 24 episode show.

I'm conflicted on how much I even want to try to talk about the perceptions of the show's politics.  I don't want to say what others are saying is completely wrong... but...

I feel like it's mostly an American perspective (not even Western, specifically American) that is labeling it Right Wing propaganda.  But I'm not exactly the best person to explain why as someone who's never actually left America. But as a student of the history of post-Revolutionary Western politics, I've ranted before on my other blogs about how America's ideas of what's Right and Left are distorted.  The perspective I can give you is as a Communist with Socialist leanings who views Karl Marx as a Capitalist in sheep's clothing.

I also feel like a lot of people jumped to conclusions about the show's message on gender (which I think is the only aspect of it's ideology that is even close to being conservative), after the end of episode 18.

Take Zeria's video,
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKl60Qn_3co&t
I respect her perspective as a Lesbian Trans Woman, but maybe what she is seeing as the show failing to justify it's own logic about gender is actually evidence it's message was more nuanced then she assumed.  What's left out of the video is that the 9s do not remain card carrying villains to the end, they do make a face turn and fight along side out heroes at the final battle, their leader makes a heroic sacrifice, I didn't catch whether or not any survived however.

So the show does see value in people who don't conform to the Binary, it's Conformity the show was against, and it's only in America that conformity is viewed as being Liberal. 

Labeling Ikuno an example of "bury your gays" I feel is a bit unfair.  The Yuri Nation blog gave a different perspective on it, I can't 100% agree with theirs.  But it is disingenuous to to simply slap that label on FranXX when said character never dies on screen and the last time we see her is right before jumping forward to everyone being long dead.  Plus again this trope's history in Japan has been different then in America so we need to keep that in mind.

What American Anime Fans do seem to know about Japanese politics is that apparently Shinzo Abe is obsessed with trying to fix Japan's declining birth rate.  However I think the assumption that only conservatives are concerned about that may be a flawed assumption here.  (Just as there are plenty of Left Wing supporters of Brexit the American Media likes to ignore).  After all the creator of Gundam was a pretty Left Wing guy and he was expressing the same concerns much more aggressively in 1998 with Brain Powered.

Update September 26th 2018: In fact there is one very good reason for The Left to be concerned about declining birth rates (Japan is not the only country facing this problem). Younger people tend to vote Liberal and older people tend to vote Conservative.  There are multiple factors in why, many people become more Conservative in age because of Toxic Nostalgia, also poor people have a shorter life expectancy on average.  But whatever the reason a large part of why Japan remains so conservative is that their population is so old.

And to anyone who still thinks Liberals are supposed to be concerned about "overpopulation", I suggest you watch Peter Coffin's video on that subject on YouTube.  That myth is an inherently Fascist one.  All these Liberals are doing when they encourage people to reproduce less is further hurting their own agendas chance to win in future Elections.  If only Millennials could vote in 2016 Trump would have only been able to win Wyoming.  And the tendency for the old people of the future to be right leaning is only amplified when the very people who would raise their kids with liberal values are the ones refusing to have any.

I'm not saying we should feel a moral obligation to breed like jack rabbits.  Simply that we certainly shouldn't be treating reproduction like it's a bad thing. Each individual should do what they want to do.