Darling in the Franxx key visual

I just feel so personally betrayed by Darling in the Franxx.

( Alternative title: “You played yourself.” )

I know this is kinda my fault for getting excited about my headcanon before the show demonstrated it wouldn’t shit the bed I was in, but good christ it was ticking so many of my boxes and then fucked up so hard. I feel about DitF the way you feel about a regrettable ex.

(“I see how I ignored the warning signs, but I just wanted it to work out so badly…”)

Lemme introduce you to the show I thought I was watching:

The year is 2180. A century ago, humans discovered the wreckage of an old, old civilization beneath the earth’s crust. It had advanced technology, powered by a novel power source—which we can just call “magic”. It seems that, in defiance of all heretofore understood physics and common sense, there’s just…magic, right there, deep in the earth, this neat glowing orange gel that can be harvested and used for fuel.

(Not burned like fuel, exactly, but sequestered, because it constantly emits energy. Kind of like plutonium.)

So they immediately start grabbing tech and bootstrapping their civilization with all this shit they don’t really know how to use. They start retrofitting all of their existing tech to use magic, because oh man this fuel is so, so much better than every other power source and all other sources are obsoleted at once.

They discover another weird property of magic; holy shit, an infusion of it into a human will make them immortal?! (And asexual and infertile, but whatever, acceptable price to pay for immortality.)

This becomes the new default. The overwhelming majority of the population becomes immortal. It does…odd things to human motivation and cognition, seeming to sap it. Unclear whether that’s a byproduct, or just because magic immortality seems to stop the biological clock at age 60.

A hundred years go by. Since the immortals are the dominant cultural force, their preferences wax ascendant. Having children is now seen as a weird and gross thing to do. Sex is considered unsanitary and pointless. Directly magically stimulating the pleasure centers of the brain is seen as a Reasonable And Fun thing to spend most your time doing.

Harvesting magic from the Earth at no point stops…

Whoops! It turns out that extracting magic from the Earth leads to widespread desertification; all life was apparently sustained partially by magic. Guess we need to put all the humans in biodome cities.

Double whoops! It appears some kind of…ancient primordial guardians of the earth(?!) are emerging from the depths to seek out the magic and claim it back. These look like giant angry blue robot dinosaurs, and they wreck house.

They immediately destroy most cities and human settlements.

Now, at this point, the earth is an uninhabitable wasteland. All surviving humans live in giant roaming cities—literally roaming, they have giant legs—and each of these Arcadias is completely dependent on magic. They can’t give any back without sacrificing human lives—because recall that in addition to powering the Walker City, the magic is also inside humans, sustaining their immortality.

Now (and bear with me as I drop some admittedly frown-inducing mecha-anime tropes) humans discover that conventional weapons do nothing against these robot dinosaurs. What’s more, even magic-assisted weaponry does very little. Why, the only thing that could stand against them, is…

Enter Doctor Franxx.

He’s sifting through the old magitech collected from the ruins of that advanced civilization, and he finds these ancient weapons. They’re not guns; they’re, well…battle mechs.

Each battle mech is piloted by two people at a time. Or, strictly speaking, it doesn’t have to be, it’s just that you usually will want to have two pilots. And they should be, um, a boy-girl pair. Because the mechs are powered by, um…sexual energies.

Doctor Franxx says, sorry, what the fuck?

He’s thinking, what even is going on with this…planet? Magic makes you asexual, removal of magic kills all life by stopping sexual reproduction, these mechs are powered by sexual impulses…

I’m getting a lot of strong signals here and they’re only sort of consistent. Did we just, uh, fuck up the chi of the planet real real bad, or what? What was this ancient civilization even DOING to end up with mecha that are LITERALLY POWERED BY SEX.

He pauses, and then another revelation hits him.

He considered, with a pinwheeling terror-feel of humanity surviving by gross luck: Would anyone but me have even realized how these work?

Because quick note about Doc Franxx: this crotchety weirdo is from one of the very small sects of humans who still reproduce the normal way—fucking. He doesn’t have immortality, and has extended his lifespan via minimal use of magic and by becoming a cool cyborg.

He thinks, is there some kind of guiding hand bailing out humanity, here?

But he doesn’t have much time to think about that Season Two revelation because holy shit there are robot dinosaurs up Humanity’s collective ass right now and the lusty gonads we’d need to save the species are currently shriveled with immortality.

So he calls up the ruling council of Humanity, and says:

“Guys, I have a weird, weird request, but…I need you to genetically engineer me a soldier caste of humans who are…perpetually horny teenagers. And I need them to pilot these ancient sex-battle mecha to fight off the dinosaurs.”

Humanity, who is pretty short on options at this point, says,

“Deal.”

And this is how we end up in the Darling in the Franxx world.

With scientists researching the genegineering of a literal succubus.

With the impotence metaphors when you can’t get your mech up.

With the most elite soldiers being a depraved bisexual corps.

With squadmates desperately trying to do relationship counseling for each other mid-battle, so they can find that spark again.