Collection Darling in the Franxx

Darling in the FranXX is a mecha series from Studio Trigger and A-1 about children raised to pilot enormous machines in pairs, in a world where adults have engineered away most of what makes people people.

Zero Two is why the show broke out. Horns, a pink bob, an appetite, and a total disregard for the rules of the facility she's kept in - she arrives as a force of chaos in a system built on obedience, and the series is largely about whether that system can survive her.

The two-pilot mechanic is deliberately uncomfortable and thematically loaded, which the show is well aware of. It's a series about intimacy in a society that has removed the vocabulary for it, and the mechs are the metaphor rather than the subject.

Visually it's superb. Trigger's animation gives the fights a weight and colour that most mecha of the era didn't attempt.

This collection covers Zero Two and Hiro.