Darling in the FranXX is a fine example of what modern anime have become and why they are throwaway trash. They are doing nothing but reusing older ideas, instead of having new ones. And on top of that, they don’t even do a good job at rehashing the same ideas. They are not trying to improve or refine them. They just make them more creepy, sexual, and edgy. They also ride on the name of who made them, instead of how good they are on their own, and do their best to keep you interested with how absurd they are by constantly making up memes and crazy situations, without actually caring about the quality of the script or good characterization. The show does its best to make hate everything from the very beginning. You get the scene where they establish the main character, and all you get is a bland self-insert who recited emo poetry and there is an injured bird that symbolizes something. First impressions are crucial for getting to like a character, and instead of giving you an interesting personality, or a cool design, or a sad backdrop, they throw in stolen quotes and symbolism, which have nothing to do with him as a person you are supposed to like for being a person. This is all nothing but pretentious overthinking replacing characterization. How can you still care after that? Same thing with the main female character. The establishing scene is about her being naked and crazy. What is there to care about her after that, besides the doujin you will look for when you want to masturbate?The funny part is that the majority of modern anime fans are fine with this trash, because they gave up on expecting to watch something good. Most of the community was calling this abomination the best title of the year, just so they can be part of the seasonal hype, write essays about symbolism, make theories about what might happen, only to lose interest as soon as it’s over, so they can move to the next trash that is about to come out. But until that happens, they will be kept preoccupied with two seasons of boring one-dimensional characters, each one defined by type rather than an interesting personality, as they spend their time trying to understand sex. Just by this set-up, you know this is bad from the get-go, since everything is defined by numbers and percentages instead of, you know, personalities.The characters have nothing to do outside of piloting waifubots by doing doggy style sex. This gets old very fast, since you don’t give a shit about action scenes that involve awful mecha designs and sex metaphors. Plus, the characters have no backdrop story since they haven’t done anything interesting in their whole lives. Their social interaction is limited to talking to equally flat people like themselves. Also, there are so many of them it becomes a snorefest to tolerate an episode dedicated to each of them; especially when you know only the main two characters matter in the story. Most others don’t contribute to the plot in any way; they are just there to waste episodes on sexual innuendos. It could have been a decent watch if it stayed that way and didn’t try to have a plot or deeper meanings, but it did and it backfired horribly. For most of the episodes, there were no explanations for why they are fighting monsters or why the world looks like a huge desert. The writers were constantly teasing an answer to all that, and to the most part did nothing to prepare the audience for it, since most of the episodes were wasted on the sexual frustrations of inept waifubot pilots. All the emphasis was placed on vapid love triangles, cheating, cuckholding, and shameless references to older mecha. That became the only thing the audience of this abomination was caring for. Evidence for how little thought was placed into the making of a cast, can be found when observing what happens to them once they manage to resolve the conflict they were written with during their inception. The single trait that was defining them ceases to exist, and they become black pieces of paper, since whatever specs of personality they had was defined by their conflict. Essentially, the moment their emotional baggage is lifted, they stop having a personality. Eventually the explanations for the mystery arrived in a rushed and retarded way, completely changing the atmosphere of the show, and as if by magic made everybody to realize the show was crap all along, despite that being obvious from the very beginning. After that, everybody was calling it a trainwreck and left them wondering how did Trigger, the savior of anime, ruined the potentially best anime of the year (lol). Some tried to defend this horseshit by saying previous Trigger and Gainax series were also becoming bizarre as time went on, and that it’s unfair to hate Darling when it was constantly reusing ideas from them. Those defenders are of course idiots who don’t see how said older anime had far fewer characters, with far more personality and backdrop stories, and had much smoother transitions by not wasting as many episodes on worthless characters, thus being left with enough duration to work things through a lot better. But hey, this is a modern anime, so who gives a shit about any of that? The point is to forget it the moment is over and move to the next trainwreck.