Moments when a piece of entertainment completely rocked you.

[DSMatticus]

It is captivatingly stupid enough to almost bring you back for a small dose every week. You would have to pay me to get me to sit down and struggle through it if I hadn't been staying on top of it. Don't really recommend, no.

[shinimasu]

Whether you can enjoy Darling in the Franxx despite all the stupid depends so much on your own personal preferences and what specific kinds of bullshit you can tolerate.

I continue watching new episodes as they air but I still couldn't tell you if I'm enjoying myself or if I feel obligated to finish it to see what the final train wreck is. I feel like my ability to recommend it will depend on where the inane baby subplot actually goes.

If you want a good puberty coming of age dystopian anime, Shin Sekai Yori is much much better. It is also depressing as fuck.

[Longes]

Evil Bad Guy Man: "Disgusting. You're absolutely disgusting. This is ridiculous. Humans have evolved and cast their reproductive functions aside in the process. Reject that, and we'll all have to go back to conforming to one gender."

[Blonde One frightened murmurings.]

Evil Bad Guy Man: "Doesn't the thought often cross your mind? That gender is a pain, an annoyance that's only tolerated to operate the Franxx? And that's all it really is."

How could I forget that sexuality is a choice. Pffft, those Parasites should just choose to be genderless pansexuals, amirite?

DSMatticus, I can't believe that you unironically support the side that spouts this and engages in book burning and censorship of sexual education. Seriously dude?

[Kaelik]

Longes.... stop being a fucking idiot?

The point is that if you write a story about how the evil gay empire is oppressing the straights, that's pretty anti gay.

So when the evil gender critical pans are the evil empire, and the cishets are the good guys, that's also bad for the same reason.

He's not defending being bigoted, he's saying that portraying cishets as not bigots and gender critical pans as super bigotted is the problem.

[Mask_De_H]

Longes.... stop being a fucking idiot?

The point is that if you write a story about how the evil gay empire is oppressing the straights, that's pretty anti gay.

So when the evil gender critical pans are the evil empire, and the cishets are the good guys, that's also bad for the same reason.

He's not defending being bigoted, he's saying that portraying cishets as not bigots and gender critical pans as super bigotted is the problem.

But that's a specific interpretation. Another interpretation is; that dude finds humanity in general distasteful, as do the secret masters who cast aside their humanity. It's gendered thinking inasmuch as anything having to do with procreation is gendered by default. It is also assuming that blondie is a gender critical pan because he's shown in the "female" piloting role, while doing coded "masculine" things like flirting with Ichigo. It's denigrating one series of arbitrary symbols while placing another set of arbitrary symbols that happen to be good.

But if we're talking about the Nines, that dude's specific malfunction is being heavily indoctrinated by the transhumanist rulers. He's the biggest suckup next to Zorome, whose belief in Papa is a sign of his childishness. Being cishet is a crime only in regards that independent thought/disobeying the sexless transhumanists is a crime, which is why Ikuno was the one to stick up for Kokoro there. Unless you want to argue that it "doesn't count" or she's "selling out", which is frustrating. The baby book can be seen as a cipher for romance in general, Kokoro happens to be cishet because that's still biological standard. .

DarliFra brings out a lot of gender politics related counting coup, which makes sense when it has romance elements and characters that can be considered (or straight are, in Ikuno's case) LGBTQ. Also there's the whole geek rapture transhumanists being painted as bad people thing.

E: I'm starting to feel that people on the Internet wheel towards the anti-straight LGBTQ bad guy interpretation of APE because the technoutopian reading is too close to home. Like, you have the adults amusing themselves to Sameness and exalting themselves above the lumpenproles, but because Alpha and Papa don't like making babies it's an attack on non-heteronormative lifestyles? When one of the most fervently anti-Papa characters is the only confirmed LGBTQ person in the show?

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I've never been so glad to not be into chinese cartoons. The only thing I've determined from reading both sides of this debate is that Darling in the Franxx sounds like it's so far up its own ass it's in danger of collapsing into a neutron star.

No offense intended if you enjoy it, carry on.

[Starmaker]

I've never been so glad to not be into chinese cartoons. The only thing I've determined from reading both sides of this debate is that Darling in the Franxx sounds like it's so far up its own ass it's in danger of collapsing into a neutron star.

No offense intended if you enjoy it, carry on.

Dude, you literally have a chinese cartoon body pillow on your fucking avatar.

[DSMatticus]

What in the sweet fuck is happening in my life lately? Have idiots' brains always been so much mush? Is there something in the water? Was my patience a finite resource that ran out sometime in 2017? ... Am I getting too dumb to parse dumb?

I miss tussock. Tussock was simple. He'd say something super obviously factually wrong. He'd stumble over some basic, elementary fallacy. I'd call him on it, throw in a zinger, move on. I didn't have to fucking teach him the process of abstract thought before I could explain how stupid he was. He was 100% with the rest of humanity on how to string thoughts together, he was just stupendously bad at it and his priors were all egregious bullshit. The absolute weirdest it ever got was the infinitely efficient electric motor, and even that eventually turned out to be a bizarre hybridization of two different measurements of efficiency. It was a stupid and embarrassing mistake for him to make, yes, but the mistake made sense! Once you were wrong in the exact particular way that he was wrong, the rest of the ridiculous shit he said followed. The process was sound, the inputs gibberish.

I don't even know how to engage with some of this shit anymore. I mean, look at Longes' post. What the fuck is that? I can't hold that in my brain and spin it around until I find the process and follow it back to the gibberish input. It's all fucking gibberish! We're arguing about whether or not the antagonists are a conservative strawman of left-leaning gender politics, and he... processes that as me defending the exact conservative strawman of left-leaning gender politics I'm complaining about? It's like calling foul on how creepy and bullshit conservative Christians' persecution fantasies are, and the rebuttal being "oh, so you're an advocate for the genocide of Christians, huh?"

But that's a specific interpretation. Another interpretation is; that dude finds humanity in general distasteful, as do the secret masters who cast aside their humanity. It's gendered thinking inasmuch as anything having to do with procreation is gendered by default. It is also assuming that blondie is a gender critical pan because he's shown in the "female" piloting role, while doing coded "masculine" things like flirting with Ichigo. It's denigrating one series of arbitrary symbols while placing another set of arbitrary symbols that happen to be good.

You have no idea what anyone is talking about right now. No offense, I don't think you're a Longes-esque dumbfuck, but you are honestly lost in the goddamn woods. You are not even remotely anywhere near the vicinity of the conversation that's happening. You are going to have to start over. No one is assuming that the Nines are gender critical because they do gender-coded things 'wrong'. People are assuming that the Nines are gender critical because their leader has lines of dialogue which are explicitly gender critical. I quoted the entire scene in which this is explicitly established (though not first hinted/suggested) in response to Maglag. I bolded part of it. How did you not read that? Did you not understand which characters were which? If you didn't, how? Did you not watch the show? It was like two episodes ago, and it was a super important scene. You are really not doing due diligence here.

But if we're talking about the Nines, that dude's specific malfunction is being heavily indoctrinated by the transhumanist rulers. He's the biggest suckup next to Zorome, whose belief in Papa is a sign of his childishness. Being cishet is a crime only in regards that independent thought/disobeying the sexless transhumanists is a crime, which is why Ikuno was the one to stick up for Kokoro there. Unless you want to argue that it "doesn't count" or she's "selling out", which is frustrating. The baby book can be seen as a cipher for romance in general, Kokoro happens to be cishet because that's still biological standard. .

But this? This is not being lost. This is just vacuous.

"The baby book as a general cipher for romance" is addressed as above; the antagonists making an issue of the baby book explicitly frame it in the context of gender-conforming, which means gender-conforming is an issue they care about. Specifically, they don't care for it. This is unambiguous. Those are the words that come out of their mouth. You just need to refamiliarize yourself with the source material.

But the part that's vacuous is the "being cishet is a crime only in regards that disobeying the sexless transhumanists is a crime" bit. No shit, Sherlock? What hair do you think you're splitting here, exactly? The sexless transhumanists of DitF ban gender. If you disobey them by engaging in sufficiently gendered thinking, they'll fucking mindwipe you. If you don't disobey them by engaging in sufficiently agendered thinking, they won't fucking mindwipe you. Yes, they are punishing you for disobedience - specifically, the disobedience of their mandates on gender. I'm sure they also have other things they'll mindwipe you for, like "talking lots of mad shit about Papa" or "finding out we're secretly alien overlords" or whatever. But gendered thinking is on the "punish" list and agendered thinking isn't.

But framing it as punishing disobedience instead of punishing gendered thinking is just... goddamn vacuous. They're punishing disobedience w.r.t. to gendered thinking. You can't punish disobedience in a vacuum - disobedience of what? What was the act of disobedience, and what principle did it disobey?

[Iduno]

What in the sweet fuck is happening in my life lately? Have idiots' brains always been so much mush? Is there something in the water? Was my patience a finite resource that ran out sometime in 2017? ... Am I getting too dumb to parse dumb?

Or they're being intentionally illogical to prevent having to deal with logical arguments.

You can't punish disobedience in a vacuum - disobedience of what? What was the act of disobedience, and what principle did it disobey?

You haven't dealt with police then, have you? You can still get shot for resisting arrest, even if there was no crime other than "resisting arrest" for them to arrest you for.

[shinimasu]

I think, and this is the charitable interpretation, that since banning procreative sex is a thing a lot of dystopias do without the gender-politics backdrop they are having trouble seeing why this is a gender-politics thing and not a Brave New World situation.

That doesn't entirely explain how Mask missed the bit where you quoted lines of dialogue in which one of the main antagonists explicitly states that babies = bad because they don't want to have to conform to a binary and gender is a drag. But that seems to be what he's getting at in his response. That dystopias being authoritarian about babies isn't new and of course they punish you for not doing the things they want you to do.

The rub is of course that a functional dystopia is a commentary on something. Franxx is not a functional dystopia because it fails to meaningfully comment on anything, even the things it thinks it's commenting on, but the ideas it seems to be trying to have are... kind of terrible.

Like ok lets break down this confusing mess:

- Kokoro is framed as being in the right for wanting to have a baby, because the evil dystopia is anti-baby and anti-gender and since we're not supposed to like the evil dystopia we're generally supposed to disagree with them. The same way we're supposed to be horrified by double think or souma.

- HOWEVER Kokoro is at most what, 14? These are kids playing at relationships complete with bed sheet wedding dresses and trying to reverse engineer what feelings are from a medical pamphlet and one (1!) person who knows what kissing is. It would also be reasonable to assume that we're suppose to be horrified by their naivety and to disagree that children should be having children. In which case we're meant to agree with the nines?

- The latter interpretation could be supported by Ikuno's agreement with the nines that gender is a pain and she hates being forced into piloting with dudes, but has to because it's the only way the Franxx work. This could have led into something about how the obligation to have children (which is also kind of what the Franxx represent, the klaxosaur princess even calls them their children) is unfair to those who do not want to or can't. However her development basically ends with a bro hug from Ichigo and a 'that's rough buddy.'

- Ikuno being the sympathetic lesbian is also kind of undercut by the fact that she seems to have no problems piloting with futoshi. Is this ever actually addressed? Kokoro and Mitsuru get an episode dedicated to him getting over Hiro and connecting with someone else, but there's no explanation for why the canon lesbian is doing just fine with a new male partner (who is still very hung up on his old partner) after suffering constant connection issues with her old one?


Like can you see how this is all nonsense that doesn't really say anything meaningful, but the things it seems to be trying to say are iffy?

[DSMatticus]

Or they're being intentionally illogical to prevent having to deal with logical arguments.

EDIT: I totally misread a pronoun in this and was an ass to you, oops. Disregard.

You haven't dealt with police then, have you? You can still get shot for resisting arrest, even if there was no crime other than "resisting arrest" for them to arrest you for.

When police beat the shit out of black people for "resisting arrest," the act of disobedience they're punishing is "being black and thinking you have rights." The cops you're referring to aren't violent schizophrenics tied to an RNG who just explode or not at random, they're racist sociopaths. And sometimes it's not racist sociopathy, sometimes it's anti-"hippy" (or today, anti-"liberal") sociopathy. Like that time the national guard opened fire into a crowd of anti-war protesters. And so forth and so on. The cruelty of our institutions is very obviously not random or purposeless. Sometimes it is petty and individualistic (you were mildly unpleasant to a police officer in a bad mood, so he ruins your life for shits and giggles), sometimes it is institutional and organized (white celebrities go to rehab for cocaine, poor minorities go to prison for years for crack), but in the grand scheme of things it's always punishing some perceived slight against authority - even if it is often so monstrous and inhumane and petty it is incomprehensible from the outside.

[Ancient History]

Bad movie, great vlog: Book Club is a Made-For-TV-Movie: A Vlog.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I've never been so glad to not be into chinese cartoons. The only thing I've determined from reading both sides of this debate is that Darling in the Franxx sounds like it's so far up its own ass it's in danger of collapsing into a neutron star.

No offense intended if you enjoy it, carry on.

Dude, you literally have a chinese cartoon body pillow on your fucking avatar.

Your mom.

[Starmaker]

I've never been so glad to not be into chinese cartoons. The only thing I've determined from reading both sides of this debate is that Darling in the Franxx sounds like it's so far up its own ass it's in danger of collapsing into a neutron star.

No offense intended if you enjoy it, carry on.

Dude, you literally have a chinese cartoon body pillow on your fucking avatar.

Your mom.

My mom is a classy lady. I'm sure yours is, too, and the thalidomide she took during pregnancy was medically prescribed.

[maglag]

I really gotta love the whole "I've raised myself above such obsolete things as gender and traditional families, but YOU SHALL ALL CALL ME PAPA! Totally not a gendered term nor one used by traditional families. Also all the girls shall dress in skirts and all the boys shall dress in shorts. NO YOUNG LADY YOU CAN'T WEAR PANTS BESIDES YOUR PILOT SUIT AS LONG AS I RULE THIS CLEARLY POST-GENDER SOCIETY WHERE GIRLS STILL NEED TO WEAR SKIRTS!"

[Mask_De_H]

But framing it as punishing disobedience instead of punishing gendered thinking is just... goddamn vacuous. They're punishing disobedience w.r.t. to gendered thinking. You can't punish disobedience in a vacuum - disobedience of what? What was the act of disobedience, and what principle did it disobey?

My post was vacuous because I was tiptoeing around the issue as much as I could so this didn't turn into a flaming wreckage like that godforsaken "is Rey a Sue" debacle. I also have no idea how to even tackle what shinimasu is presenting without stepping on a landmine. I did miss your post, so I apologize about that. Your highlighted text is dead to rights gender critical, and I feel dumb for missing it. Given how Alpha's other interactions go in the show, however, I'd argue that Alpha's more rival than evil and going through something like 002's callous Manic Pixie Dream Girl act. The narrative reflection those two have makes me think that's a thing.

I read it as they're punishing the disobedience for learning any sort of forbidden knowledge as much as punishing it for being deliberate gendered thinking. It's generic "Dad says no rock" stuff, but it's rock in the classic, euphemism for fucking sense. Given how the entire Kokoro/Mitsuru/Futoshi thing (and pilot assignments in general) comes off as arranged marriage, the fact that a union is happening outside the FranXX is also a problem.

The first order symbolism of the gender stuff is supposed to all be sublimated into piloting the sex robots because something something power of love. The robot piloting stuff is heavily gendered/sexualized already (pistil and stamen, partners, kissing, the endless metaphors earlier in the series), but it's sex washed of its sexiness and turned into workmanlike production for the elites (read: your parents). Actually doing it because you want to do it is the badwrongfun thing. Wanting to live for something other than your parents' wishes being a sin is very Japan, and that's a narrative the show pushes very hard.

[nockermensch]

I've never been so glad to not be into chinese cartoons. The only thing I've determined from reading both sides of this debate is that Darling in the Franxx sounds like it's so far up its own ass it's in danger of collapsing into a neutron star.

No offense intended if you enjoy it, carry on.

Dude, you literally have a chinese cartoon body pillow on your fucking avatar.

Your mom.

*You're

---

Also, I'm now compelled to watch Darling in the FranXX just to see what the fuck is this trainwreck about. This discussion is giving me flashbacks about KLK, with in turn makes me remember Gurren Lagann, and then all the way back to FLCL and Evangelion. GainaxTrigger is really into loading their shows with symbolism mostly for the visual impact and seemingly, for the forum drama/fan theories it creates. It's like they grok how fandom works and then they pepper the shows with stuff that will get people obsessively argueing about later.

[MGuy]

Incredibles 2 really satisfying to watch. 14 years of waiting and I was not disappointed. This movie was clearly written for adults like the last on. They definitely were speaking to fellow parents in this one.

[Hiram McDaniels]

Atomic Blonde. Just caught this on VOD. I mean the plot is kind of like someone took a John LeCarre book and wrote in a bunch of arbitrary plot twists in colored pencil, but here's what I liked:

The film was gorgeous to look at: everything from the sets to the colors, to the music and costumes, were absolutely beautiful - but all of the actual violence in the movie was ugly and brutal, which was an interesting dichotomy. Except for that bit at the end, which didn't fit the tone of the movie, didn't need to be there, and feels like studio intervention.

[Prak]

Incredibles 2 really satisfying to watch. 14 years of waiting and I was not disappointed. This movie was clearly written for adults like the last on. They definitely were speaking to fellow parents in this one.

....

I can only wonder what your expectations were that you weren't disappointed.

[Mask_De_H]

Dude, you literally have a chinese cartoon body pillow on your fucking avatar.

Your mom.

*You're

---

Also, I'm now compelled to watch Darling in the FranXX just to see what the fuck is this trainwreck about. This discussion is giving me flashbacks about KLK, with in turn makes me remember Gurren Lagann, and then all the way back to FLCL and Evangelion. GainaxTrigger is really into loading their shows with symbolism mostly for the visual impact and seemingly, for the forum drama/fan theories it creates. It's like they grok how fandom works and then they pepper the shows with stuff that will get people obsessively argueing about later.

GAINAX was an entirely fan-created company that got its start making reference kitchen sink shorts for anime conventions. Everyone was super deep into 80s otakudom.

[MGuy]

Incredibles 2 really satisfying to watch. 14 years of waiting and I was not disappointed. This movie was clearly written for adults like the last on. They definitely were speaking to fellow parents in this one.

....

I can only wonder what your expectations were that you weren't disappointed.

I can only wonder what you're trying to get at. I assume you were disappointed but couldn't be fucked to just say that.

[Prak]

I didn't want to bitch about it in the "Rocked" thread when I already did so in the "Lost" thread.

[MGuy]

I didn't want to bitch about it in the "Rocked" thread when I already did so in the "Lost" thread.

all you did was agree with (someone else's) minor complaint about some pacing issues. That isn't exactly disappointment territory for most people. Certainly not for me.

Edit: that's with me dismissing your I guess disagreement with the Supers powers being the focus again not being a real complaint in my eyes since it follows right after the last film. Just to be clear.

[Prak]

Did you see this post? (Honest question)

My problem was that it was basically the same story as the first movie, just with shittier mouthpieces for a slight variation of the old argument.

Honestly, it was entertaining, and Elasti-Girl's supering scenes were awesome. I just thought the movie as a whole was really disappointing.