DARLING in the FRANXX / Fridge

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Fridge Brilliance

Every pilot's name is a Goroawase Number reading of their numerical designation, save for 002, who is simply called Zero Two. Applying goroawase to her, though, gives "O Ni"; Oni. Now, take another look at her horns and see if it doesn't fit. Then we find out that's exactly how Hiro named her.
It's mentioned that the lower the parasite's number, the higher the Franxx amplitude. Now look at our protagonists numbers: 016, who used to be the ace, and 002 who IS The Ace. No surprise they get special treatment.
Why is the piloting position for the Franxx so... suggestive? Excluding the omnipresent sexual metaphors in this series, they were designed by their namesake, Doctor Franxx, and within his first two minutes on screen he proves himself a Dirty Old Man. It's probably all on purpose!
The very fact that Doctor Franxx is a Dirty Old Man in the first place has interesting implication once it's revealed that human society has evolved into utter utilitarianism devoid of emotional motivations where even procreation is a merely means to an end. In other words, being a perv unexpectedly makes Dr. Franxx one of the most human adult in the series. Whether this is a good thing or not is left to be seen.
Why are the Klaxosaurs blue? Well, What is the color of Viagra again?
The very first thing Zero Two said to Hiro in the first episode was "Oh. And here I thought you were dead." In context it seems she's snarking that he totally froze from seeing her naked, but twelve episodes later it's revealed that they met as children and were forcefully separated by the adults, thus making it reasonable for Zero Two to assume he was killed right afterwards. Not that Zero Two consciously recognized Hiro at the time because of their altered memories, but still that's one hell of a Foreshadowing moment right there.
Episode 13 features a great many call-backs to previous episodes. Some are symbolic, but in hindsight, many of them were deliberate on the part of the characters. Specifically, many of Zero Two's quirks were shaped by that experience, and she is recreating those moments for her own enjoyment, rather than for any particular interest in Hiro. Treating him like this, in hindsight, fills her with tremendous guilt once she learns who he is to her.
The fact the Franxx models for Plantation 13 are noted to be custom is something that becomes notable when considering the fact Hiro and Naomi didn't have a Franxx. One could chalk it up to the fact Hiro was already failing at being a pilot and thus there was no need to prepare one for the pair. But upon revelations later on, the deeper reason may have been Dr. Franxx knew Hiro being tainted would mean he never be able to pilot with anyone other then Zero Two, and Strelizia's uniqueness and his comment implies it was designed with Zero Two and Hiro in mind.
More Goroawase brilliance: adding the code numbers of Kokoro (556) and Mitsuru (326) gives 882, or ha ha ni. "Haha ni naru" is Japanese for "become a mother".
Zero Two trying so vehemently to protect Kokoro and Mitsuru from the Nines turns even more meaningful and heartbreaking when you realise she has already experienced the pain of being torn from the one she loves.
The Love Triangle gets started in episode 2, and ends in episode 15. The code numbers of the two legs of the triangle.
- If you subtract 002 from 016 you get 014, which is the number of the Episode where Zero Two and Hiro get separated.
Ami Koshimizu plays both Naomi and child Hiro. In Episode 1, Hiro and Naomi's departure is most likely Hiro saying farewell to his childhood and maturing.
Episode 20 reveals that APE are not humans at all, but rather belong to a hostile alien race known as VIRM. Once the two names are combined, it becomes quickly apparent that it's an anagram for VAMPIRE. This makes sense, especially once you realize how far APE is willing to go to suck up all the Magma on Earth.
During the flashbacks in Episode 19, we see the members of APE's council before the Klaxosaurs appeared. While they all wore their iconic masks, only Papa, the Vice-Chairman, and Tarsier are wearing hoods. This contrasts with Gorilla, Marmoset, Lemur, and Mandrill, who only wear the masks, revealing their true true appearance. This foreshadows APE's true nature, as Papa, the Vice-Chairman, and presumably Tarsier are the only non-humans of APE. They probably wore those hoods to better blend into human society.
- Going with this is that, when Lemur, Tarsier, and the soldiers they brought meet the Klaxosaur Princess, when she sends out the physic call to them, all of them are clearly in pain... except for Tarsier. In fact he seems more confused about the whole thing, and the moment he learned that the princess were having a unknown conversation with Lemur, he went straight for the kill. Even the Dramatic Unmask hints at his turn nature, since, while there was some blood, there was nothing underneath those robes
In the second opening, there's a point where the pilots of Delphinium, Argentea, Chlorophytum, and Genista are shown alongside each other. The last pair, Mitsuru and Kokoro, is notable in that they drift further apart with their hands stretched out towards one another before they dissolve into water. Mitsuru and Kokoro, though initially close, eventually get their memories erased by APE and as a result are further apart from each other than ever before.
How could horn contact with Zero Two give Hiro a vision of her consciousness fighting on in Strelizia Apus? Klaxo sapiens, as the Princess demonstrated, are telepaths. This is simply a natural extension of that ability.
- For that matter, klaxosaur telepathy explains a great deal about how Franxx are operated, why the Mind Meld is a thing, and why Parasites need to be infused with klaxosaur cells in order to be able to interface with them at all. The link is a telepathic one.
The Reveal that the Nines are derivative clones of Zero Two might go a long way towards explaining their need for "maintenance", and their deteriorating condition in Episode 22. Being "lesser" clones/hybrids, it's possible that their human bodies are rejecting their klaxosaur-derived cells, which can only be suppressed with medication. Effectively, they suffer from an autoimmune disease, their bodies tearing themselves up, resulting in pallor, weakness, loss of appetite and - quite probably - death if left untreated. By extension, this explains the phenomenon of Child Fever in ordinary Parasites.
Putting their respective backstories together in retrospect, Hiro and Zero Two were meant to be together so much that even their Goroawase Number names combined makes a perfect metaphor for their lives before and after they met: Zero to Hero.
The Jian is a bird used to symbolize Hiro and Zero Two. Look at Strelitzia’s design; she has a shield on one arm that’s shaped like a bird’s wing!
In the finale, the Klaxosaurs return from orbit and become one with the earth, returning it to life and giving homo sapiens a chance at a future. The kids are left to just speculate on why. The motive behind this becomes obvious when you remember their backstory as delivered by the Princess: she mentions the weaker Klaxo-Sapiens fused with the earth to form magmatic energy while the stronger ones became Klaxosaurs. In other words, this is all Klaxosaur kind admitting humans are strong enough to inherit the earth and embracing extinction to fuel their future once again.
Also in the finale, how did the prayers and words from the parasites on earth manage to reach Hiro and Zero-Two out in the depths of space? Yellow blood-cells. As it take some gene therapy in order to pilot a franxx, the children have a certain percentage of klaxosaur-genetics in them, not as much as Zero-Two or Hiro, but enough to pilot a franxx. As klaxosaurs communicate through telepathy, it only stand to reason that the parasites had the ability in a smaller scale as well, since it was required to pilot. Due to their low quality, they compensated with numbers instead and using Zero-Two's body as a beacon, managed to send their verbal encouragement as a telepathic message, klaxosaur-style, and reach the mind of that body perfectly, and since Hiro was mind-melded with Zero-Two, he heard it as well. For the first time, the Power of Friendship has been justified and made sense in a series while also being used right.
Continuing about the final episode, at first it seems odd that Nana and Hatchi mention being the final immortals when we've seen other "adult" support staff in the reconstruction effort - replacement Nana even has lines. But these adults were assigned to Bird's Nest, and at that point, VIRM were committed to their endgame and there wasn't a whole lot of magma to go around. The didn't bother making the Bird's Nest staff immortal, as one way or another things would be over before anyone noticed them ageing. Nana and Hatchi only evaded having their minds stolen by VIRM due to being outside the usual system - Professor Franxx had been doing plenty else to screw with APE's plans.
The Klaxosaur Princess has the build of a little girl. Zero Two has the build of a teenage girl (because she is). Strelizia Apus looks like a woman in her wedding dress, down to the sharper, more angular lines of her face (less teenage baby fat), plus the "lipstick". You can also see this difference with everyone else in the epilogue scenes. (Except Futoshi, of course.)
Strelizia’s head shape, specifically her “hat,” resembles a hat worn by brides in traditional Japanese weddings known as a tsunokakushi. Tsunokakushi literally translates into “horn cover” because it was believed to have covered the “horns” of the bride to hide her jealousy and anger so she’ll be a good wife.
- While YMMV on how cool Strelizia Apus’ true form really is, it keeps in theme with weddings and marriage by shifting from a classic Japanese bride dress into then more modern Western dress.
On the subject of dresses, a bit of Fridge Humour: We have a white and (honey) gold army fighting off black and blue "monsters". ...Which is also two extremely subtle, and very possibly unintentional, cases of extreme Fridge Brilliance:
1. The infamous dress is black & blue, not white & gold; which side was Earth's first civilisation, again?
2. The infamous dress is one object, which can be perceived in either of two separate ways; the white & gold is not so different from the black & blue, just as the humans are not so different from the klaxosaurs.
- Though, The Klaxosaur Princess turning Strelizia black & blue while taking it over, in contrast to its usual white & gold colour scheme, suggest that this might actually have been intentional, as a Visual Pun on Blue-and-Orange Morality. ...Which loops right back around to Fridge (Meta) Humour once you realise that one of the most disturbing scenes in the series also, among other things, really drives in that the white-and-gold mecha was really black and blue the entire time, it was just changed by the good guys. A trick of the light, one could even say.

Fridge Horror

The concept of Child Soldier is already horrifying, but this series adds extra horror to it every new episode. First, those kids don't even know what a kiss is. Second, they are totally isolated and not even allowed to approach the cities where most of the population apparently lives. Third, they are convinced they were personally chosen by the adults to protect humanity, but when see them discussing the situation nobody seems to disagree that the kids are expendable. This just begs for questions like, what kind of childhood did they have? Do they even have enough knowledge to survive in society if they were to be relieved from their duties? And what kind of society has your Elite Pilots being called "parasites" anyway?
A klaxosaur whose sole purpose is to melt people's clothes off seems like a weak excuse for Fanservice at first, but it almost caused the pilots to desynchronize in the middle of the battle, so it could actually be quite the smart move. But wouldn't that mean It Can Think?
- Also, if that liquid was actually poison, Plantation 13 would have faced another Total Party Kill.
- This simple explanation is that it was some sort of corrosive or solvent that attacks inorganic compounds... but Franxx are made to fight klaxosaurs, so their armor and the guts of their cockpit were unaffected. It was only the relatively soft, non-mechanical parts of the flightsuits that was affected.
  - It almost certainly had to eat through some airtight seals to get in, which we know have to exist, otherwise the unit in the water would've been completely flooded before Ichigo could swim in.
In Episode 12, after Hiro confesses to 02, she says she'd show him what happens 'after a kiss' and knocks him to the ground, opening up her shirt. While it's obvious what she was implying, one has to wonder how she knows about sex when their society is robotic and utilitarian in nature? Where did she learn about sex? Was she the victim of sexual assault on top of the horrific experiments?
In Episode 13, 02 as a child had a single caregiver, who would pat her head while she ate and (until Hiro came along) was the only person she could call family. When 02 was given the picture book, the caregiver 'dissolved' and 02 said she 'never saw her again'. While the dissolving is most likely symbolism, one has to wonder what it's symbolic of. Did the caregiver simply be removed from service due to 02 being moved into testing? Or did something more sinister happen to her? It wouldn't be out of character for APE to remove people showing too much affection for their experiment (or showing emotion at all).
In episode 20, its revealed to the audience that Kokoro is indeed pregnant. But, her mind was wiped of the knowledge from the book on childbirth, her memories of being together with Mitsuru, and even her initial desire to have a baby. This means she's pregnant, and neither she nor anyone else has any idea what is happening. The odds that things will go badly are pretty good.
In episode 21, The Klaxosaur Princess reveals the Klaxosaur civilisation was on earth 60 million years ago. This is almost contemporary with the dinosaurs which implies that either VIRM wiped them out... or the klaxosaurs did. Urbanisation is a hell of drug, huh?
- Or alternatively, dinosaurs never existed. Fossil record and the like is a fairly recent advancement in our society, and Werner notes in his flashback episode that APE had been creeping on global affairs for a long time before making their power play. Dinosaurs could have been a planted cover-up to make sure humans didn't stumble onto or recognize any evidence of Klaxosaurs/-Sapiens before it was convenient. And if that's the case, what else were they making up?
  - Klaxosaurs have skeletons of sorts—a "ribcage" was left by the Super-Lehmann class after it was killed in episode 15. The implication is that the klaxo sapiens were the dinosaurs. The extinction event which killed them was the war with VIRM, and the klaxosaur remains were misidentified as huge animals by human scientists, millions of years later.
In Episode 5, Ichigo calls Zero Two inhuman while taking her headband off with a slap. Zero Two's anger is horrifying, but it gets much worse in hindsight. Having her inhumanity pointed out is a sore spot for Zero Two, and being told she's not human is an outright Berserk Button, all of this before the Character Development that lets her put value on anyone else's life. Ichigo's lucky to be alive.

Fridge Logic

On the headscratchers page.

Fridge / DARLING in the FRANXX

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