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What is Trigger's best previous anime
Kill La Kill
When Supernatural Battles become commenplace
Kiznaiver
Little Witch Academia
Gurren Lagann*
Panty and Stocking*
Space Patrol Luluculo
Goku
View Results
 
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Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
Remember that these kids are explicitly part of a martyr-cult where uselessness is worse than death - that big ceremony the klaxosaur interrupted spelled it out. It’s not a surprise that their attitude towards their comrades dying is a little strange.

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Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Lurking Haro posted:

Fuuuuuck.
I did notice the pilot suits look like wedding garments, though.


So the XX in FRANXX refers to the female look of the robots?

Now the cockpit just has to become a womb.

They’re heavily modelled on NGE entry plugs already. That’s probably close enough.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
Come to think of it, they really went all-in on making 002 an explicit hybrid of Rei and Asuka, didn’t they? I mean they even gave her pink hair and named her after zero (rei) and Unit 02.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Droyer posted:

I found a collection of character and mecha profiles https://imgur.com/a/7fGR0

I'm looking forward to the purple kickrobot.

Interesting how they all fight with those orange blades. Makes me wonder if Strelizia’s ‘hair’ is entirely decorative.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
Hiro’s interesting because he’s the only character who’s been set up so far to question and eventually come into conflict with this hosed-up society. In contrast, Zero-Two is basically an avatar of everything that makes said society so destructive - callous hedonism masking a terror of being found useless that exceeds anything as mundane as a fear of death.

Hiro so far looks like the only person who is likely to push for these kids to live, have fun, and be kids, which is a worthy contribution to the show, and could result in some entertaining friction with Zero-Two.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
I’m really not sure that Zero-Two is Hiro’s enabler, though, except in the most negative sense. She’s giving him the tools and motive to succeed as a member of the death-cult, whereas he seems like the person most primed for the true victory of rejecting the death-cult altogether. If anything, I feel like he exists to be her salvation and a challenge to her perspective (assuming, of course, that he succeeds).

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

AnacondaHL posted:

He's just a generic kid bully, he has time to grow out of it. If it helps you can imagine him coming from an abusive single parent household or something, rather than wishing a kid death.

I mean, he kind of literally does come from one of those.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
Hey, there’s always the chance that Ichigo hooks up with Miku.

Every magical mecha girl needs a Miku.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
Probably a helpful thread for future show discussion - long story short, Trigger isn’t heavily involved in this show outside of design and animation, and all the writing is from A1’s end. So at the very least, predicting how this will go based on Trigger’s past output is unlikely to be too useful.

https://twitter.com/vermillionair3/status/955077081414668289

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

AnacondaHL posted:

1) In what way is this twitter person a reliable source?
2) The tweet itself contradicts what you said, regarding design.

Yeah, somewhat poor phrasing on my part. The mechanical design is by someone who works with Trigger, but isn’t a Trigger employee.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Ibram Gaunt posted:

weird that people tripped over themselves to defend the fanservice in KLK yet treat the stuff here like the most heinous crime imaginable...general internet discourse observation

Of course, it could simply be that KLK burnt a whole bunch of goodwill - though that’s not hugely relevant, of course, because Imaishi’s just the animation guy this time round.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Endorph posted:

the best girl in klk (nonon) was the one who had the least amount of fanservice relative to all the other female characters. thoughts?

We counting the Nudist Beach stuff later on?

dogsicle posted:

i'm certain klk already had takes defending the nudity as empowering/subversive within the first two eps so yeah this show inspiring such strong disgust elsewhere online seems pretty weird to me, and the only thing i can really chalk it up to is the Trigger association bringing that bad blood? or maybe in a short few years the bar of tolerance has drastically dropped to where something like this is incredibly offensive idk

It got pretty hard to defend the repeated incestuous rape as empowering and subversive.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

tsob posted:

I can certainly see why someone would argue that Gym exudes those qualities, but I don't recall anything to imply he's obsessed with them. His motivation for instance isn't having power, but, at least from his own perspective wanting to break free from the Moonrace's taboos because he thinks that those taboos have limited the Moonrace culturally and fighting is what will free them. That's not really anything to do with power, dominance or displays of strength. He seems content to be Dianna's subordinate until she orders him to hand over the Turn-X too. By the finale he's decided to use the Moonlight Butterfly to wipe out of all civilization on both the Moon and Earth and then restart it to his preference, but again, he wants to do so because he thinks the civilizations that are there are stagnant because they suppress the instinct to fight, not because they're necessarily weak.

Gym is basically toxicmasculinity.jpg. He’s this posturing, swaggering, entitled loudmouth who makes the screen bigger when he talks to people so he can loom over them, waves his authentic Hanzo steel around at the slightest provocation, and tries to rape Kihel because he’s bored and wants some fun. Even his appearance becomes ridiculous once you find out his backstory - he’s this gigantic muscleman covered in scars who goes on and on about resurrecting his people’s legacy of warfare, but his entire life has consisted of playing video games with his buddies in cold-sleep and sponging off his family’s reputation. Not only that, but he ends up having that phallic sword snapped in half when his delicate, feminine arch-enemy goes apeshit on him.

In fact, toxic masculinity being awful is one of Turn A’s most consistent themes. Agrippa is a lecherous idiot who wastes most of his time on ridiculous power-plays (like installing sliding platforms in his throne-room so that he can tower over his guests) and gets transparently manipulated thanks to his desire to prove himself as a proper, powerful leader. Phil is an arrogant, dick-waving warmonger who constantly talks down to the women he works with. Guin can’t handle his crush on another man, and his attempts to overcompensate as an ultra-manly captain of industry lead to him signing up with genocidal lunatics, getting replaced by a women who wisecracks at him about his unthinking acceptance of gender roles, and ends up alone, penniless, and entirely dependent on another woman. Even on the women’s side of things, the three tomboys in the cast - Sochie, Poe, and Cancer - are depicted as bloodthirsty, unreliable glory-hounds. Even one of the first villains in the show is a brutish, constantly-flexing manchild with a great big ‘male’ symbol on his crotch.

The most effective players in the show are three traditionally feminine women (Dianna, Kihel, and Lily) and two men who are comfortable enough in themselves to not be too fussed about sticking to strict gender roles (Harry, with his girly pyjamas, lacy sleeves, and pink sweaters, and Loran, whose androgyny needs no further elaboration).

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

DisDisDis posted:

Cancer's different in looks from the "feminine women" is that she has big muscles I guess and the other two are massively more complex than that. And this dynamic you're constructing between them and the "feminine women" as a burn on toxic masculinity actually just makes the show sound incredibly sexist

I’ll admit that I’m considering it in context of Tomino’s other works - the dude is, indeed, a bit weird about women. He’s got better since Victory, but that still sure was a show he did where women abandoning their femininity was presented as one of war’s greater tragedies.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

tsob posted:

In Victory definitely, maybe Brain Powerd too going from what I've heard about it, but I don't think there's anything particularly egregious about his portrayal of women in 0079, Ideon, Zeta, Xabungle, F91, King Gainer or G-Reco. Even in Victory there's also Uso losing his innocence and possibly his values because of the war, and women like Katejina or Faula who were never notably compassionate that drive conflict.

Fuala and Katejina not being compassionate was exactly the tragedy I referred to. There are several late-game conversations in Victory where the cast all about how women are especially valuable because only they can create life, so a woman dying (or worse, choosing to be a killer) is especially horrific. So you have stuff like Fuala stopping her murderous rampage after being reminded that women can get pregnant, and the tragedy of Katejina going from Uso’s supportive big sis to a literal predatory backstabber who cynically uses femininity as a weapon.

Like I said, Tomino’s gender politics get fuckin’ weird.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

tsob posted:

Neither Katejina or Fuala started out as compassionate though. One of Katejina's first thoughts is that the residents of Kasseralia deserved to die for some petty reason. Again, Victory definitely is odd about women, but Turn-A isn't Victory.

She mentions that her social class probably had it coming for their callousness in the face of an existential threat, after going out of her way to help the civilian victims (abandoning the safety that her status offered in the process) and shortly before making sure that the children in their refugee caravan couldn’t see the carnage so they wouldn’t be traumatised. She also calls out the League Militaire for using child soldiers, and risks her life by going out in the middle of an apocalyptic space battle to let Uso know that his girlfriend is alive and safe. Early-series Katejina is blunt and cynical, but very compassionate. Fuala, meanwhile, has a couple of scenes where she’s nice to kids that underline that maternal instincts are the greatest redeeming features of a woman, and set up her weird-not-quite-redemption at the end where being reminded of the concept of motherhood briefly restores her sanity.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
Darling in the FranXX: The robot loving. :getin:.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

DisDisDis posted:

What's the reason the guys are gay and which guys? didnt pick up on it

Mitsuru’s flashback to when they were kids combined with his behaviour in Episode 3 read pretty heavily as ‘gently caress you, Hiro, I can’t believe I used to have a crush on you’.

Maybe he and Goro will hook up if Ichigo and Ikuno try to give all-female piloting a go?

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Ibram Gaunt posted:

I don't get exactly why this show has people praying for a gay pairing over anything else. Why this in particular? It's kinda weird.

Because the entire setting is about enforced (symbolic) heterosexuality, so ‘where do gay people fit into this?’ is an obvious and interesting question.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Caphi posted:

The show does not need to gay pair to move along for 26 episodes. The first two Aquarions, apart from like one episode each, spent their two-cours pushing boys and girls together, and Aquarion doesn't even start with both a technological premise and an underlying metaphor about how boys and girls need each other. And there's already a het love triangle at the center of FranXX.

I'm not saying this is what I personally think should happen, but the argument that they have to start doing gay pairs to sustain drama for 26 episodes is not a strong one. Lots of shows have done many more episodes with one het pair.

I think part of it is that FranXX has a far more up-front dystopian vibe than Aquarion, so we’re much more encouraged to question the core assumptions of the setting, and enforced heterosexuality is one of the biggest core assumptions.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Mister Olympus posted:

Right, that plus wanting 02 is ultimately what it was, but in the moment before that all resolved it legit looked like he had a babycrush.

I don’t think we’ve yet ruled out Mitsuru having a babycrush, though. His whole thing was rooted in rage and disappointment in Hiro after a downright worshipful flashback.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

gimme the GOD drat candy posted:

i just assume that all the dudes are loving each other whenever they are off-screen

It’d be kind of hilarious if an episode opens with Hiro and Goro in bed together and then they just go back to work like nothing happened.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Kanos posted:

I'm actually curious what "running away" means in the context of this setting. From what we've seen so far most of Japan seems to be a lovely blasted wasteland desert and the plantations are the only habitations, so even if there weren't giant dinosaur monsters running around there wouldn't really be anywhere to run to. I guess the intro in the first ep had some trees in a snowfield?

Depends how far and how fast the Strellizia can fly, I guess. Maybe the rest of the world is less poo poo than Japan?

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Kanos posted:

A blasted hellscape wasteland world infested with giant monsters that can only barely be beaten by advanced giant robots doesn't seem like a world where you'd kind of just have a town up in the mountains doing their own thing. If there were theoretical safe havens from the dinosaurs or places that weren't lovely blasted hellscapes, why wouldn't the council just use their advanced military technology to take those and live there?

An obsessive, cultish reverence for their homeland? They’re already ticking off a bunch of other weird theocracy tropes.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Kanos posted:

This reminds me of the part in Knights of Sidonia where a bunch of pacifists believed that they were being pursued by the space monsters because of their weapons tech so they splintered off from the main fleet without said weapons and then all of them got devoured by space monsters that they couldn't defend themselves against because they had no weapons.

Though to be honest, living in an agrarian society where you have to live in fear of the colossal roaming nightmare dinosaurs and hope they don't naturally migrate through your territory and also you're never allowed to technologically advance because it might attract more colossal nightmare dinosaurs doesn't sound much more appealing than living in the technocratic totalitarian dystopia.

But enough about Blue Gender.

... come to think of it, this does have a surprising number of parallels with that show, doesn’t it?

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Brought To You By posted:

It's mostly just talking about mech shows that have a sexual focus on some level like Aquarion Evol, Stardriver, Captain Earth; and comparing it to FranXX's presentation. Then the writers (rightfully) pointing out the absurdity of the cockpit designs and some other aspects of the shows visual presentation, and then the last stuff is about representation and the expectation of the writers. Also some concern over 002 representing a "taming" type female character given she has the most energy of the entire cast and is obviously assertive in the relationship's she has with other mech pilots.

Honestly if the piece didn't include the word heteronormative the related forum discussion wouldn't have been as populated it seems. The article is nothing really offensive, just two people talking about tits, sex, and desired representation in mech shows. Why the format is like two people texting is beyond me though. It's easy to read but not really preferable to just a regular text document.

I'm still trying to justify the combat benefit of twin-tails on a battle mech. I'm hoping for a scissor or pincer mode at some point if the robots start utilizing this beast mode we've seen.

The format is literally two separate writers talking about the show. It’s the text equivalent of their discussion podcasts. Courtesy link.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Endorph posted:

I don't think they'd really do anything like 'tame' 02 considering how positively her wilder aspects are framed and how her confidence and assertiveness is directly contrasted with ichigo, the girl shown as literally incapable of working with hiro

I mean, IIRC, creator interviews have described Hiro and 02’s thing as a ‘dark romance’, she’s offering the chance to escape at the cost of abandoning his friends, and she’s spent a not-inconsiderable amount of time robot-loving people to death, so it’s not all sunshine and rainbows.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

GorfZaplen posted:

002's original partner at least looked like an adult.

I believe it was mentioned in passing that she normally causes hyperaccelerated aging in her partners. So that’s what Mitsuru probably would have looked like after Round 2.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Zark the Damned posted:

Hyperaccelerated aging probably wouldn't cause a person to grow to adult size, it'd just kill off their cells.

Maybe the kid she ate in the first episode was just big?

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
The 13th is an experimental unit. It’s plausible that they assigned a veteran FranXX team to supervise them.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

UchihaHirou posted:

Is there a chance that this anime is playing the stamen and pistil thing straight rather than symbolism? That these kids are literal plant people, like Vash the Stampede? Looking at the other unit's lack of diversity in appearance (similar color hair vs. the variety of hair colors in the protagonists), could the protagonists be a different species of flowers that father is growing to see if they are better at piloting FranXX than the mooks?

I thought the aliens in Trigun were called plants because power plants, not because of their chlorophyll content?

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Diabetes Forecast posted:

Anemone is a character that's well animated and comes across as smug and a bit on the crazy side, but by the end of the show her whole arc devolves to she's upset she's not like renton and eureka (or something I haven't watched the show since it first aired on adult swim) and all of a sudden she just sorta changes tone to realizing that's not all she cares about and jumps out of her robot into a deadfall to meet up with that one boy and the sheepcat, then her robot dies and she does nothing else for the next two episodes.
Also the poo poo with the coral alien things is loving stupid, because from what I was told the mvie hints that the coral in that alternate history are the same ones from the main series and they learned literally nothing from how bad they hosed up things the first go-around.

Honestly Bones' good shows are when they sorta wander like stray dogs, which is majority of their work. Eureka tries to be focused and doesn't do a good job of it.

It does? I remember it kinda meandering for forty episodes (give or take the Beams arc) and then squeezing the vast majority of its plot into the last ten.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
The To-Love-Ru artist is apparently already drawing NSFW fanart of them. Then again, that may be true for literally every character in every show in every season for all I know.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

DisDisDis posted:

This post is useless without links

:nws: Oh, fine. :nws:

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

DisDisDis posted:

I dunno by the Sarcophallus' toxx rules of what's gay I don't think this is gay

Just friends undressing friends in an extremely heterosexual manner.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012
Only just realised that Squad 13 are basically a more-dysfunctional-than-usual Monster Hunter team, right down to the lancer being seriously OP.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Astro Ambulance posted:

I like that the two DEFINITELY gay kids got paired up together. The smug dude's look of vague academic interest is so good.

I mean, it’s not implausible that Mitsuru’s gay, but I’m also not ruling out him reciprocating Kokoro’s interest (if not necessarily in the way she might hope). He did try to nick her ‘where do babies come from’ book, after all.

Or he’s just bi. That’s an option.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Dick Spacious CPA posted:

in cahpter 9 of the darling in the franxxx manga you dont get to see any of the characters bare breasts, but you do get to see this robot butt



Please, Mr. Spacious, the term is ‘robutt’.

Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

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Darth Walrus
Feb 13, 2012

Diabetes Forecast posted:

Which of the robot girls should I draw next?

Chlorophytum doesn’t get much focus and has an interestingly strange design.

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