04.26
“It’s a knockoff of Evangelion!”
“They stole from Evangelion!”
“Ichigo, I mean, Trigger will pay for this!!!!”
As Trigger budded off from Gainax, the comparisons were inevitable from the very beginning. A two-cour mecha anime featuring heavy sexual imagery. A timid, teenage boy thrown into a cockpit and forced to fight giant monsters, while finding himself in a love triangle between a hot-blooded foreign girl in a red suit and a blue-haired girl whose feelings for said boy feel more familial than romantic. Even from the first episode, astute audiences took pictures, matched them up with screencaps from Evangelion, and went “See! See! Trigger are full of hacks!” While complaining about shows ripping off Eva has been an old game since the early 00s, all the parallels have left fans and critics curious. Is it because Darling in the Franxx might be a badly-written show, or because Evangelion is still that influential decades after its original airing? Or a combination of both?
As I specified earlier, accusing other anime of plagiarizing from Evangelion has been common since the original show’s ending. You could use the timid teenager in a love triangle example and apply it to many other shows like Gurren Lagann, or look at any show with a giant robot that makes even a scant mention of puberty and say that series is made by thieves. It’s depressingly easy to look at dozens of shows or movies from far away, and say they’re all the same based off of basic attributes. Some critics don’t like to dissect what makes works of media different, and only group everything together because that’s simply less effort than analyzing what makes X different from Y. Sure, there’s always the genuine knockoff like Space Thunder Kids, it’s funny to poke fun at shows for their similar plots and imagery, and many anime are indeed derivative from each other, but it undermines what the writers and directors want to do in Darling in the Franxx to say they’re just tracing Anno’s footprints. After all, Studio Khara has done animation work on several episodes, so it’s not as if Anno isn’t aware of this show’s existence.
But that’s not to say this series is safe from such criticism. For all its interesting ideas regarding youth culture and society’s view on sexuality, the show misses so goddamn much. So much of the imagery is too silly to take seriously. All of the forced innuendo turns what are meant to be dramatic scenes into laugh riots. Characters who have been in the show for over a dozen episodes have so little personality that I can only describe one as “the fat kid who eats bread a lot”. All this in mind, I’m wary as to whether Trigger knows what they’re doing with this series. And with an uneven path like this, maybe one could say it doesn’t know its own road but rather following someone else’s.
While Franxx has been going through a steady pace and started going through a series of eye-opening plot reveals during episode 13, was Evangelion not going through a similar phase at that part of its run? From Asuka’s introduction but right before the episode where Shinji is absorbed by Leliel and taken on an introspective journey, eight to fifteen, Eva had a more lighthearted tone than its latter batch of episodes would eventually deliver. There were still important episodes in this period that would serve as puzzle pieces for the end, but they were still more straightforward than what would come after. And perhaps that’s the similar case with Franxx. Franxx’s episodes from seven to eleven have been derided by viewers as episodes where nothing happened, where any intrigue was replaced by beach episodes and the boys peeking at the girls when they’re bathing. Not quite ‘thermal expansion’, but close. The plot structures as of this writing go like this: Hiro/Shinji become robot pilots who despite a success or two, feel inadequate at the job. Then they win a monster fight with the power of teamwork, leading to a run of episodes more lackadaisical than what came before. But after that period is over, plot twists start being chucked while Hiro/Shinji has a mental breakdown in the middle of a fight, and discovers that one of their co-pilots was actually an important figure in their childhood. And then the dysfunction spreads among the rest of the cast, while a giant monster pops up from nowhere and consumes several people. Though individual episodes are far from a complete match up, and several characters like Zero Two and Asuka don’t sync up beyond their superficial appearances, it does lead to curiosity as to how far these similarities will go. Maybe the last two episodes of Franxx will also be a clip show/introspective dialogue followed by a movie? Maybe Nine Alpha will offer to play piano with Hiro? Maybe Hiro will masturbate to a comatose Ichigo, and find out that Zero Two is actually a clone of his mother? Or they could feel lucky and rip off the ending of Gurren Lagann instead?