Suddenly, Aliens. If you are surprised by this sudden plot twist then I am guessing you are new to Trigger works. For in some form or another space gets involved. Indeed this is fairly reminiscent of Kill la Kill or Gurren Laggan and I will toot my own horn about somewhat anticipating it. I at least was right on the money about Father and the leaders being of extraterrestrial origin. But well here’s the deal. Turns out the Klax were the good guys all along who were trying to protect the planet from alien invaders who tried to drain it’s resources. They kicked the Aliens ass before and went underground to prepare for a second attack in the future. Meanwhile humanity surfaced on the planet and the Aliens, in a mark of rather genius manipulation, infiltrated their society, introduced Manga energy to get them to slowly kill the planet and even got humans to fight off the Klax for them. The Alien race is named VIRM and as a Reddit poster pointed out, VIRM and APE are a clear anagram of VAMPIRE. So yep, now they have revealed themselves and disabled the Klax queen while setting the planet to self destruct because we need a big finale.
Naturally the ground troops are wondering just what in the hell is going on and we got complications with the team in regards to Kokoro and Mitsuru. Both seem to be remembering unconsciously as they call each other by name, promoting an obligatory headache. Actually it is a common trope in regards to memory stuff but why is remembering always followed by some kind of headache? Shouldn’t it be more along the lines of just them accidentally recalling and wondering how they knew? I suppose the boring answer is that APE put in safeguards to [prevent them from recalling old memories. But in that regard this isn’t so much memory erasure but rather locking away memories. Well memories or no memories there is a problem, Kokoro is pregnant. But nobody knows she’s pregnant and sees it as some regular illness. So she’s going to get real surprised when her belly swells and suddenly she has contractions. Not sure how Darling is going to handle this particular plot point so close to the end goal but it’s going to be troublesome if they need to pilot.
I can’t say I appreciate the whole thing with the Loli Klax queen basically NTRing Zero Two. Much like the previous episode regarding Ichigo getting between Hiro and Zero Two, this feels like a forced development. It’s obvious that they are setting up Zero Two coming back to Hiro and just powering up the new Strelizia into some super form to take down the aliens. I doubt this series is going for an end of evangelion ending despite how hard it’s foreshadowing such a turnout. I said before that if this series was going to take a dark turn, it would be at the halfway point so now is too late. At most it will be Zero Two dying by series end which is very hinted at. But if they go that route then…this would basically be repeat of Gurren Lagann’s ending? Minus the giant battle on the milky way while using Galaxies as shurikens. Of course not exactly the same but the beats may be quite similar which leaves me with mixed feelings. For throughout the entire series there has been constant foreshadowing and hints at much darker tidings to come and I don’t believe that is just me looking too deeply into things. To me this series felt like it was promising to dive into deeper more mature themes but ultimately skirted the edge without truly risking anything. So i do feel cheated in that regard, much like watching something that was putting up a front of being deeper than it was. I do feel like they could have taken more interesting routes but didn’t and instead played the safe game. Which can be fine but rather underhanded when you promise more than what you are.
I never had any big hopes to be honest. If there is one thing I learned it’s that I should never hope for much when the main cast consists of teens only, especially when the setting is either an actual school or something trying simulate one like here. No matter what the actual world this is taking place in might be, postapocalyptic or not, it will never be anything but background noise save for the last few episodes which is the point at which they’ll just throw in some generic explation for everything, usually “technology = evil” and aliens.
Kiznaiver and FranXX do honestly kill the hype I might I have had for the next Trigger coop anime as well since I already notice the warning sign: the casts of Gridman are teens in a school-like building and there seems to be a 50:50 male/female ratio so I fear we might already know where this is going, although I hope I am wrong.