Real Women of Gaming

This article compares and contrasts how themes of romance, gender, and sex are represented in the hit anime “Darling in the Franxx” and the YA novel “Iron Widow”. It includes both major and minor spoilers.

As I was growing up I wasn’t exposed to a lot of media that openly discussed gender diversity. As far as direct representation, the only media that got me to think of gender from a critical standpoint was anime. I grew up watching shows like Fruits Basket, Yu Yu Hakusho, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Kino’s Journey which all included characters that push at the margins of binary gender. While Japanese culture is still very gender normative, anime had more diverse examples of representations of gender-critical views than anything I had seen from western media at the time. Through my interactions with other anime fans, I’ve encountered many who attribute certain realizations about love, gender, and sex to influential anime growing up. This is why it is important to view these series with a critical eye.

An incredibly common sentiment within the anime community is that feeling of wanting to recommend something because of the plot but finding yourself apologizing for the anime’s fan service (specifically the oversexualization of characters, often for comic relief). Indeed it is astounding the degree to which anime makes it its business to manufacture impossible sexual scenarios as tropes. Often the reaction of anime fans is to shrug and say: “Just overlook those aspects.” While I understand the sentiment, I believe there are a lot of great series with worthwhile messages that are nonetheless mired in a cloud of unnecessary fan service. Personally, animes like Food Wars rekindled my love for cooking, while animes like The Pet Girl from Sakurasou addressed very real aspects of what it means to have depression in academia. While some may advocate for embracing these elements of anime culture I believe that we greatly benefit when we allow ourselves to criticize the media we love. For me, criticism of a work is a sign of true love, because you are engaging not only in the text but also in the meta text, allowing yourself to actively converse with these stories.

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to engage with two pieces of media that exemplify what we can do when we allow ourselves to engage with these conversations. The works in question are A-1 Pictures and Trigger’s hit anime Darling in the Franxx and  Xiran Jay Zhao’s debut YA novel Iron Widow, which have significantly overlapping settings. Zhao, who is non-binary, has even stated in interviews that one of their primary motivators for writing the novel was due to some disappointments they felt as they watched the plot developments of the second season of Darling In The Franxx. Through their critical lens, Zhao revolutionized an extremely niche genre of what I call romance mechas.

To illustrate this we first have to understand what the status quo in this genre is and contextualize how Iron Widow revolutionized it.

Love and Intimacy: Two Minds One Robot

The Mecha subgenre of anime mainly consists of stories that center on pilots of giant robots who are fighting an existential threat be it a war or a giant alien or monster (commonly referred to as kaiju). The robot fights in these stories, while visually breathtaking, are usually a fancy backdrop to more complex themes. In Neon Genesis Evangelion, it is an exploration of Jungian Existentialism; In the Gundam series, it explores themes of war and the victims of political conflict. Darling in the Franxx is an anime that explores themes of gender and romance through a dystopian world where children, known as “parasites”, pilot mechas to fight against alien creatures. It follows an anime trope where a single robot is operated by two pilots. This trope is often used to bolster themes of camaraderie and partnership. Usually, it features two characters of contrasting temperaments and philosophies, and the story centers around how they might settle their differences with the purpose of “syncing” with each other and successfully overthrowing the larger threat.

In the world of Darling in the Franxx (DITF) the robots or “Franxx” must be piloted by a boy and a girl exclusively. A part of the show’s second season is dedicated to explaining that these robots require that their pilots have healthy sex organs to function. The “seating arrangement” in these robots is reminiscent of sexual acts where the boy sits in a dominant standing position while the girl must lie on all fours in front of him for the Franxx to operate. It’s also important to remember that the main characters of this story are all pre-teens. One might think that the series is about sex and puberty, but surprisingly enough most of the story is actually about romance and intimacy. It begs the question then, why did the creators think it would be necessary to include these world-building aspects? Why sexualize kids? I tried giving the series the benefit of the doubt; maybe these more sexual aesthetic choices are part of the dystopia, maybe it’s a story about the sexualization of children. A few aspects of the series reveal that this is not the case. For one, positioning is often used for comedic purposes, making light of the power dynamic. Additionally, the series goes to great lengths to romanticize the gender dynamic in the Franxx. It describes how a Franxx cannot be operated without a girl to embody it and a boy to command it (the parallels to gender norms regarding sex are intentional). Furthermore, the series’ second season goes at length into how our sex drive is essentially what makes us human, dedicating a part of the dystopia to people who have forgone sexual attraction in favor of immortality. According to the writers, those who give up on their natural human urges are doomed to become hollow adult replicas of who they were.

The story begins with our male protagonist, Hiro, who is unable to sync with any girl. Hiro struggles with feelings of self-worth. In this world where children are required to pilot Franxx to prove their worth, it is hard to fault Hiro for feeling worthless. This starting premise could be an interesting way to explore themes of loneliness and lovelessness, the idea of feeling alone in a world that values pairs. However, because the sexual metaphors are so conspicuous, it forces the narrative into another somewhat more insidious direction. I can’t help but see Hiro’s struggle as reminiscent of the incel struggle (Specifically the frustration of not finding a sexual partner and thus being “involuntarily celibate”). The story doesn’t do much to tell us that Hiro is worthy outside of a Franxx, rather it invites us to pity him for not having an appropriate partner even though he is a genius pilot. It is essentially a premise that springs from feelings of emasculation. The way self-worth is tied to sexual performance and being able to successfully engage in sexual acts is central to both the plot of Darling in the Franxx and the incel way of life. Much of the first season shows how the main character would rather die than be left without a partner, often engaging in self-destructive acts because living without a partner is worse than dying.

Luckily, Hiro’s loveless days are over when he meets Zero-Two. Zero-Two is a succubus metaphor, she is sexy, strong, and a powerful pilot. However, no man who has piloted alongside her has lived to tell the tale, at least not thrice in a row. She instantly has an attraction to Hiro, calling him her “darling”. While the writers include a justification for this in the second season, in the first season we are left to believe she is merely smitten by this person she’s never met. It plays into the idea that Hiro was never the problem in any of his relationships but rather he hadn’t found the right girl, this very forward girl who is unbothered by his gaze, who starts their interactions with an unsolicited kiss and who is very interested in getting in a Franxx with him. With little effort Hiro gets the girl, but at what cost? Hiro will have to nearly die to maintain this relationship, which is no problem for him given that he would rather die than not have a partner. Little effort is put in by Hiro to learn how they could make their relationship sustainable, instead he doubles down on being in a Franxx with her no matter what, even if it kills him. There is something compelling about a self-destructive romance, but again the core of the message is mired by the sexual metaphor. Essentially, his recklessness ends up solving their problem itself. The series implies that forcing self-destructive sexual encounters was the key to intimacy and romance, which was the solution to the succubus’ problem. She needed someone to truly see her as a human being (not a devil) and tame her.  To be fair, I believe the story was trying to weave a metaphor on how one must open themselves to the possibility of getting hurt in order to fully engage in a romantic relationship. The series has a lot of great romantic themes which I wish I could show everyone, but mired in the sexualized storytelling, most of it falls short.  I feel I can’t recommend the show to the general audience without inadvertently supporting some of its more insidious aspects.  Even after the second season is over it feels like the series cannot conceptualize love without sex, or rather it suggests that lack of sexual drive is incompatible with love, which ignores the lived experiences of people on the asexual spectrum.

Iron Widow subverts many of the expectations that the mecha romance anime genre often relies upon. The story starts with the premise that a Chrysalis (the mecha) must be piloted by a man and a woman. However, as we dive into the personal life of the main character, their conversations start by questioning the very idea of binary gender. In this world men are the dominant pilots who often consume a woman in the process of piloting a Chrysalis. Much like in DITF, we see the gender power differential in the mech suit, but it does not romanticize it, instead, the main character’s motivation is to abolish it. The main character, Wu Zetian, is motivated to seek revenge against her sister’s killer. This man, Yang Guang, is a famous Chrysalis pilot who has taken the lives of multiple women who have piloted alongside him. Here Yang Guang is the Incubus, the demon that takes women in, uses them, and discards them. However in this world, Yang Guang is praised for his actions, and the death of these women is romanticized, not only as martyrs for a cause but also as women who fulfilled the societal role to be subservient to a man. Wu Zetian sets out for revenge by becoming Yang Guang’s concubine and taking an opportune moment to kill him. As much as it feels like this story is about blood and revenge (it is) it is also a story about abolishing the systems that the patriarchy upholds. A constant quote spoken by one of Wu Zetian’s love interests resonates with me: “Love isn’t some scarce resource to battle over. Love can be infinite, as much as your heart can open.” The story includes a true love triangle, a polyamorous romance in which everyone in the relationship is in love with everyone at each point of the triangle. The story is interested in discovering what love means when we get rid of the prescriptions patriarchy has made for it (monogamy, in this example). The love in this series is borne out of a sense of kinship, shared trauma, and mutual care for the well-being of one another. There are sexual urges and feelings but these are not the center of the romance, but rather an aspect of it. Their love is not tied to their ability to play the prescribed roles of man and woman, but rather their ability to show up as themselves unapologetically and take care of each other. What Zhao did was take the DITF recipe and question it at every corner.

The exploration of love and its power to move mountains is explored in both DITF and Iron Widow; however, the degree to which this exploration feels impactful in these stories varies greatly by the dystopia that it seeks to overthrow. The dystopia in Darling in the Franxx consists of a world where children are forced into relationships that require that they be in sync but their love is constantly managed and surveilled. Any possibility of their relationships existing for love, marriage, or reproduction is banned and so the children must find ways to deal with their sexual frustrations in the ways the dystopia has deemed normative. There is a thread there that could be valuable to queer audiences but the show does a good job of delegitimizing the queer experience in small and big ways (more on that later). Instead the main goal, the powerful groundbreaking mission that our protagonists fight tooth and nail for, is the ability to reinstate heteronormative love and the ability to reproduce and produce offspring in this world. It is to return to our status quo. I found myself cheering for the main characters as they rediscovered themselves in relationship to one another, but overall, the ultimate goal falls short. At the end of the story they recreate marriage as an institution and they have many kids and they live happily ever after. In Iron Widow love takes a more nuanced and transformative role, it is not the ultimate goal to get married with your heteronormative pair, but rather to find twin souls that resonate with you and your struggles. Love in Iron Widow is all-encompassing, it is the alternative to the dystopia. A world where we not only value one another but we let ourselves lead with our hearts and destroy any convention that stands in its way. Their love abolishes ideas about gender norms, sex, and heteronormativity, which are the tools of the dystopian patriarchy of the story. This dystopia in turn is reminiscent of the way patriarchy rules culture today. It encourages us to love and be kind to each other first and then find out what that means for us outside of prescribed norms. While the Iron Widow series is far from over, it is immediately visible how powerful the main character’s motivations are, and it motivates us to reflect on how patriarchy directs our own social norms.

Gender, An inconvenience or a construct?

There’s a scene with one of my favorite characters in Darling in the Franxx, Ikuno. She is a lesbian character who is in love with Ichigo, the leader of the main squad. Ikuno struggles with the idea that a Franxx can only be piloted by a boy and a girl. Early in the series, she attempts to prove that two women can pilot a Franxx by asking Ichigo to pilot alongside her. However the attempt fails, and it’s up to the audience’s imagination whether the experiment failed because two women cannot pilot a Franxx or whether it’s because Ichigo wasn’t particularly into it. Later on, it is revealed that both male and female sexual organs are needed to pilot a Franxx. Towards the end of the series we see two boys pilot a Franxx, however, the impact of this is lessened because one of the male characters has been bioengineered to be able to pilot a Franxx on their own. This in turn denormalized and devalues homosexual relationships and instead reinforces that they are artificial or somehow unnatural. It’s important to keep in mind why the authors make these choices and what the world-building has to say about human relationships. Especially in a world where everything is a metaphor for sex and relationships.

There is a conversation in which one of the Nines (a group of highly powerful pilots) is trying to keep the main characters “in check” and tells the group: “Have you ever thought that gender could just be a necessary inconvenience needed to pilot the Franxx?” Ikuno reacts to this with anger because she sees her struggle in this statement. She understands that two women cannot pilot a Franxx and therefore she is doomed to be unhappy. The show does not give an alternative to this. It could’ve given way to a discussion on why Franxx are made the way they were, why they need the two sexes. However, the series was not interested in answering these questions, and the quality of the series’ storytelling suffers because of it.

Thankfully, Iron Widow is very interested in grappling with those questions. The story starts with a poetic conversation around a sexual dimorphism in butterflies. Early in the text, we see questions about what gender is, who creates ideas about gender, and who benefits from these gender norms. The Chrysalis is built to seat a man in the Yang seat and a woman in the Ying seat. The seating arrangement has an inherent sexual aspect to it, where the man appears to embrace the woman from behind, although the intimacy translates better as the characters almost having full body and body contact. The educational system in Huaxia romanticizes this arrangement, how the strong man embraces the delicate woman like a flower. However, through Wu Zetian’s eyes, we can see how this relationship is more parasitic when it is asymmetric or non-consensual. Throughout the story, it is revealed that the Ying seat is built to suppress a woman’s power intentionally by design. This shift from nature in DITF and design in Iron Widow is essential. Iron Widow is interested in discussing how gender is constructed and designed into our society and how it is meant to prescribe the “proper” place of all things in creation. This revelation invites us to ask what a Chrysalis without this configuration would look like, it invites us to imagine a world outside the patriarchy. It does not invite us to accept the status quo and take it for victory but yearn for ever greater worlds where love is allowed to be free and limitless.

These examples illustrate how Iron Widow revolutionizes the romance mecha genre by being an active response to Darling in the Franxx. To be clear, I enjoyed many aspects of Darling in the Franxx. I love Zero-Two as a character and how both Hiro and she learn to rely on each other throughout the story. Iron Widow’s dystopia is a much more abrasive one, Wu Zetian is a powerfully cruel protagonist who takes pride in revenge. It is hard to imagine how love could fit into her story, but somehow Xiran Jay Zhao is successful in making love a driving force throughout their novel. It is love for her sister that sends Wu Zetian into vengeful wrath, it is the love of her peers that resignifies what her quest becomes after she completes the fact. Essentially the relationships in Iron Widow feel impactful and revolutionary because it recognizes all its aspects like how it can be suffocating and abusive, but also how it can be transformative. Having conversations with the media we love is good and transformative work. Much like the way love is free and limitless in Iron Widow, I feel our love for our favorite media should be the same. We should want to grapple with its darkness and we should want to transform it and not passively accept its shortcomings. You can love something and hold it accountable.

Xiran Jay Zhao has paved the way to helping us understand how we can achieve that.

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At the time of this post, you can watch Darling in the FRANXX streaming on Crunchy Roll, Funimation Now, or free with ads on Crunchy Roll. It is also possible to buy Darling in the FRANXX as download on Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, Microsoft Store.

You can find the book Iron Widow on Amazon and all major book outlets.

Happy Pride Month folks and remember WE LOVE YOU!