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This Week in Anime - What the Hell is Happening in Darling in the FRANXX?

There are frameworks for examining something that are more correct than other frameworks in examining art. While no way is fully objective, there is a world of difference between frameworks based on objectivity and those based on subjectivity. Analysis of character development isn't a social construct. Whether or not a work develops its side characters has a base of objectivity. Regardless of your culture, religion, political beliefs, worldview, etc., determining whether or not a work develops its side characters remains fairly consistent. Determining whether the degree to which it did so contributes or detracts from the works is somewhat subjective, but the core of it overall is objective. Analysis of whether or not a work is successful according to Fascist theory has a core of subjectivity, on the other hand. Fascist theory is a social construct, and your degree of adherence or opposition to it will drastically change how you carry out the analysis. Thus, a framework based around an objective core is inherently more correct than one based around a subjective core, as it can be applied universally and is not fundamentally dependent upon the extraneous factors surrounding each personal reviewer.

As far as the refusal to consider the political ramifications of a work being a political decision in and of itself, that's only to true if you are analyzing it from multiple, opposing political viewpoints. Choosing to look at the politics of a show only through the lens of one specific political ideology without giving equal weight to its counterpoints in the opposing political ideology or even multiple other political ideologies between it and its opposite is what is being decried here. While I personally cannot speak for the intentions of the others who call for apolitical reviews, I personally call for them in the sense that a review should either measure the show according to multiple opposing political ideologies or minimize the extent to which any value judgments are made in the review according to a specific political ideology. The fact that all of its reviewers have consistently made those value judgments on the show from the same narrow political ideology is what has caused ANN to receive so much criticism. You'll notice, I have never attacked the reviews on the merits of the reviewer's personal political ideology and insisted that theirs is bad and a different one is good (some commenters have, I have not, and I consider those criticisms to be just as problematic and antithetical to critical analysis as the ANN reviewers making value judgments and measuring a show according to one specific political ideology.) I am merely staunchly against the constant insertion of one political ideology as a guiding metric for reviewing and analyzing DiTF while refusing to consider other viewpoints and assigning supreme value in judging the show to the reviewers' personal political ideology.

I think you are misunderstanding something. ANN is not a hivemind, as Jake pointed out, and it DOES have a fairly diverse set of opinions about a lot of shows. But politically, a lot of them DO tend to skew left, that is true, so if a show is promoting (or seems to be promoting) far right politics, they probably will take issue with it. Assuming they agree that the show is promoting such a view (they may not). But if they do agree, yes, they will all take issue.

And that's a good thing.
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And you're right, that doesn't happen here. ANN doesn't have people who hold those views, or if it does, those people are hiding their views and not letting it come out in any articles they write. And considering that the executive editor is a bisexual man married to a gay trans man, said gay trans man being someone who also works here and is the person you're replying to, I don't expect that to change.

Like seriously, how can you tell a gay trans man "there should be more people who are on the political right working here", knowing what the "right" believes about his basic humanity (or lack there of in their case)?

Whether or not a work develops its side characters has a base of objectivity. Regardless of your culture, religion, political beliefs, worldview, etc., determining whether or not a work develops its side characters remains fairly consistent.

Those in between the far right and far left have consistently stated that the show is not promoting far right politics. So for every single one of the ANN reviewers who has reviewed DiTF to maintain that it is and attack the show as such displays a drastic failure of the site to consider the merits of any argument that doesn't match their own personal political ideology.

Mojave wrote:

Whether or not a work develops its side characters has a base of objectivity. Regardless of your culture, religion, political beliefs, worldview, etc., determining whether or not a work develops its side characters remains fairly consistent.

See, if you skim through this thread, you'll see a variety of diverging opinions about whether the character development in Franxx was "good" or "bad", both from people who are demanding an "objective apolitical review" and people who agree with the comments by Steve and Nick

Quote:

Those in between the far right and far left have consistently stated that the show is not promoting far right politics. So for every single one of the ANN reviewers who has reviewed DiTF to maintain that it is and attack the show as such displays a drastic failure of the site to consider the merits of any argument that doesn't match their own personal political ideology.

Nowhere in this column is the notion that "the show promotes far-right politics" ever mentioned. Nor has James ever said so. Only Jake ever expressed that specific opinion, and he did so more on his personal twitter rather than in his coverage of the show on the podcast

jenthehen wrote:

I don’t think anyone is annoyed that a show would depict heterosexual love and reproduction in a positive light, but rather that it’s pretty absurd to frame getting straight monogamous married and having babies as a true act of rebellion. The world they’ve created that oppresses those choices (apparently for absolutely no reason) is not reflective of any society on earth right now. It’s comparable to “what if whites were the slaves / minority discriminated against???” in crap stories that just don’t get it. I’m pretty sure the creators have just flubbed everything up, though, in an attempt to copy/ pay tribute to other shows (mostly Eva) and were only trying to say that relationships and depending on other people is better than living forever all alone, but the messages got mixed up somewhere along the train wreck.

Communist regimes have historically been involved with the disruption of traditional family units and, depending on the countries, have been attributed to repress sexuality and knowledge of it. Considering that APE has a number of similarities with both right and left wing authoritarian governments, it's really not that much of a stretch that the writers would draw from that idea. North Korea still executes people for watching VHS tapes, and simply selling generic crops in a market got people thrown in gulags or executed in China in the past 50 years.

As for the whole issues with childbearing, it may be an issue that seems nonsensical to outside audience but could resonate for viewers at home. Japan's population is going through an aging crisis and there's simply not enough children being born. Within the next hundred years Japan is expected to "... lose 34 percent of its population, the United Nations found."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/02/26/its-official-japans-population-is-drastically-shrinking/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.dc719f46b866

That's actually a serious issue to the long-term survival of Japan. The show is probably referencing how economic and industrial progress has created a culture where children have become seen as an inconvenient, unnecessary economic burden in Japan. This could be where the whole "parasite" metaphor comes into play.

I'm not going to say that all Japanese feel this way or even most do, but I've heard reports from a number of my Japanese professors of the national business culture being hostile or even penalizing to families with a pregnancy. A quick google search pretty much confirmed this with articles from the Guardian, Al-Jazzera, and The Economist.

So, maybe it feels silly to you, but there's an established political and cultural context for this theme.

That's because this isn't about Darling in the FRANXX. It's about ethics in anime journalism.

I'm kinda surprised how many comments are about the "heteronormativity"/gender/"political" stuff though considering that only comes up briefly in this article. Most of it is about how FranXX is just a poorly-written show in a broader sense, like unconvincing and bland relationships, tired plot twists, etc. That isn't about politics at all.

All art is political. All of it. There is no such thing on this planet as apolitical art. All art is created by people, and all people are biased in one direction or another. Therefore all art delivers a political message of varying degrees of simplicity. Artists of all walks of life have no choice but to live with the fact that every single thing they add to their work is going to say something.

No, that's what some users are trying to make it about because at the end of the day they simply don't like the review. So they have to come up with some sort of excuse to justify their internet rage instead of simply disagreeing civilly.

All art is not political. There is art that is intended to be political, for example political cartoons. There is art that is not intended to be political, for example a landscape of your backyard or one of those family photos that you can doodle on before it's printed.

James S. wrote:

All art is not political. There is art that is intended to be political, for example political cartoons. There is art that is not intended to be political, for example a landscape of your backyard or one of those family photos that you can doodle on before it's printed.

The thing is that you don't get to decide whether the landscape of my backyard is political art or not. I was the one who landscaped that yard and whether I intentionally put a political message or not, it was created based on my personal biases and will therefore carry a certain amount of my aesthetic and political values. Furthermore, there is always a chance that someone else will disagree with how I approached landscaping my yard, therefore creating a conflict in ideology and once again making my art political.

Ultimately while you're right that the author's intention must be considered and respected while studying a work, a thorough critical analysis must consider all alternative interpretations. As an analyst, I don't get to reject the political interpretations of my work just because the original creator dislikes them or didn't intend for them to be read that way. I am expected to be thorough in my approach.

So no, your post doesn't actually prove that apolitical art exists. What it proves is that there is art that was created with intention of being political and art created without said intention. It doesn't change the fact that both works will ultimately develop political undertones as they are analyzed by different people from multiple angles.

James S. wrote:

All art is not political. There is art that is intended to be political, for example political cartoons. There is art that is not intended to be political, for example a landscape of your backyard or one of those family photos that you can doodle on before it's printed.

The thing is that you don't get to decide whether the landscape of my backyard is political art or not. I was the one who landscaped that yard and whether I intentionally put a political message or not, it was created based on my personal biases and will therefore carry a certain amount of my aesthetic and political values. Furthermore, there is always a chance that someone else will disagree with how I approached landscaping my yard, therefore creating a conflict in ideology and once again making my art political.

Ultimately while you're right that the author's intention must be considered and respected while studying a work, a thorough critical analysis must consider all alternative interpretations. As an analyst, I don't get to reject the political interpretations of my work just because the original creator dislikes them or didn't intend for them to be read that way. I am expected to be thorough in my approach.

So no, your post doesn't actually prove that apolitical art exists. What it proves is that there is art that was created with intention of being political and art created without said intention. It doesn't change the fact that both works will ultimately develop political undertones as they are analyzed by different people from multiple angles.

ANN is not a hivemind, and my opinion of the show will be different from Zac's will be different from James's will be different from Nick's and Steve's