Anime that will make you horny

Darling In The Franxx, one of the breakout animes of this season, makes the sex lives of teenagers a life or death affair.

The new show , which premiered on January 13 and is being simulcast on Crunchyroll, is about teenagers who live in a post apocalyptic world and who pilot giant mechs by getting in a sexual position. Pilots are grouped into pairs of men and women, and must sync together, Pacific Rim style. Women are positioned in the front of the cockpit on all fours, while the men sit behind them and grab onto handlebars attached to the women’s asses. It’s not subtle.

Darling In The Franxx is clearly about sex. Pilots are named for the reproductive organs of flowers—male pilots are stamens, and female pilots are pistils. Although the overarching plot of the show is about protecting what appears to be the last human city from giant monsters called klaxosaurs, the actual drama comes from the interpersonal relationships of the characters. Zorome is a hot head who has to learn to listen to his partner Miku. Goro and Ichigo are partners, but Ichigo clearly longs to be with Hiro. They have to sort out their relationships or die. It’s like a more honest Gossip Girl. Given that the stakes are the continued survival of civilization, dating and having sex actually is the most important thing in the world.

Our protagonist is Hiro, who is unable to pilot the giant mechs called Franxx until he meets a mysterious horned woman called Zero Two. She has the reputation of being a partner-killer. She’s extremely skilled and powerful, but no one can ride with her more than three times without dying. Hiro doesn’t care about that, or even really about piloting a Franxx. He just likes Zero Two, in a fumbling teenage way. It’s a will-they/won’t-they with the fate of humanity in the balance.

The show can be leering, especially toward its female characters. When we first meet Zero Two, for example, she’s bathing nude in a pond, her long hair improbably covering her nipples. This is more uncomfortable because the show is cagey about how old the characters are. They seem old enough to be starting to have sexual feelings, and the show has the trappings of a high school setting, uniforms and all. However, the adults around them refer to them as “children.” To draw another comparison to Gossip Girl, while high school junior Serena Van Der Woodsen seems emotionally mature enough to have sex, high school freshman Jenny Humphrey clearly is not. These characters seem closer to Jenny Humphrey in age and mental development, and the objectification of the characters feels grosser because of that.

But for every moment that the show is provocative, it is equally tender and thoughtful in how it portrays what is necessary for a sexual and romantic connection. In order for the pilots to work their mechs, their thoughts must be in sync. That means male and female pilots must fundamentally respect each other. Partners warn each other not to squabble so they can be effective in battle. When the cold and cruel Mitsuru is dismissive of his partner Ikuno, they lose sync. Ichigo, the team’s leader, desperately wants to be able to connect with Hiro but his connection to her isn’t nearly as strong as it is with Zero Two.

There’s a lot going on in Darling In The Franxx, even only four episodes in, but I’m most intrigued by Zero Two. She has an untamed, Brigitte Bardot-esque sexuality that other characters seek to control in the service of piloting a Franxx. Her relationship with Hiro keeps the robots-powered-by-teenagers-fucking conceit from feeling too gimmicky. Where Hiro hasn’t been effectively able to express his sexuality, Zero Two has too much of it, and both are ostracized by their society. Darling In The Franxx appears to have something to say about teenagers trying to understand their burgeoning sexuality, though it’s not yet clear if the thesis is much deeper than “puberty is difficult.” Still, I’m enjoying watching Hiro and Zero Two learn to open up to each other.

When I first watched Netflix’s new anime Bastard!!: Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy, I expected a melodramatic anime series along the lines of Record of Lodoss War. What I got was an unapologetically horny show about a wizard and his ever-growing harem of big-haired anime waifus. I loved every second of it.

Bastard!!: Heavy Metal, Dark Fantasy, made by LIDEN FILMS, is a remake of the 1992 anime Bastard!! Ankoku no Hakaishin. Bastard!!!’s elevator pitch in the Kotaku summer anime guide, which you should totes check out by the by, is that a wizard named Dark Schneider is resurrected to save the kingdom of, I shit you not, Meta-Licana (pronounced Metalicana), from evildoers. However, that description is just the tip of the iceberg for what this horned-up anime has in store.

Read More: Your Summer 2022 Anime Guide

You see, Dark Schneider used to be the baddie of the series. In fact, he was the head honcho of the series’ antagonists, the Four Lords of Havoc, prior to the events of the anime. While Schneider touts that he is the hero of this shonen anime—a fourth-wall breaking fact he isn’t afraid to remind viewers and other characters of —Schneider in actuality is the embodiment of early ‘90s OVA anime tropes of lecherous all-powerful wizards. I mean, dude was having Sense8-level orgies with his harem in between his conquest for world domination. But, like all overpowered beings, his hubris got the best of him and he was sealed away into the body of a mild-mannered boy named Lucien.

The Kingdom of Meta-Licana is forever on the losing end of a war against the Four Lords of Havoc. The Kingdom’s sole trump card is the resurrection of Dark Schneider from Lucien’s body. They aim to do so by having Lucien kiss the lips of a virgin woman. Wait, don’t close out of this tab just yet. I know, that’s a pretty eye-rolling premise. However, this show works because of how self-aware it is of its ridiculous premise. The spell-breaking virginal kiss to save the doomed kingdom is one of the many times that the show pokes fun at its absurdities every chance it gets. After summoning Schneider in the show’s first episode, for example, the kingdom asks to summon him again at the start of the second episode because it’d be easier than going through the effort of assembling their armies.

Bastard!! isn’t like your parent’s romance novellas.Screenshot: LIDEN FILMS / Netflix / Kotaku

While overcoming the Kingdom’s demands to smooch the tall, dark, and handsome Schneider, Lucien’s caretaker–and arguably the second funniest character in the show–Tia Noto Yoko develops feelings for the dark wizard despite his abrasive personality. She’s not the only one either. Without fail, every episode has Schneider’s would-be adversaries develop a desire outside of their orders to join his harem, sabotaging the Lords of Havoc’s plans.

Say what you will, but hear me out: Bastard!!’s depiction of strong women who defy orders and know what they want, whether it be a conquest for power or some sexy time with a hunky wizard, is leagues ahead of the genre’s allocation of women being interchangeable cardboard cutouts of characters that blend into the background.

Unlike most harem anime that depict its protagonist creepily salivating over its cast of women, the women in Bastard!! Don’t take any shit from him. Whenever Schneider crosses a line, they call him a bastard with the tenacity of AEW ring announcer Justin Roberts and give him a well-deserved ass kicking.

Hmm, where have I seen this dynamic before?Screenshot: LIDEN FILMS / Netflix / Kotaku

Schneider and the show itself often tease the female characters for being understandably horny for him by virtue of him being the show’s de facto attractive male character. But Schneider has some class about him. Underneath his self-centered horny teenager bravado is a weirdo who occasionally has thoughtful things to say and throws himself in harm’s way for those he loves. Instead of treating the women as his property, the show subverts the trope by having Schneider have an actual relationship with the women in his life.

The personalities of Schneider and Lucien blur together, much like that of Amon and Akira Fudo in the manga Devilman Grimoire. This fusion of personas transforms the former POS Schneider into a kind of edgy wizard Inuyasha-type character; he craves to be praised whenever he does something cool like, say, saving his caretaker from a clothes-melting slime monster. That isn’t to say the show lacks “spice.”

Although the existence of smutty anime that normalize sex and attraction are few and far between, Bastard!! somehow manages to have its smutty cake and eat it too. It’s one of those anime where you’ll have to turn down the volume so as to not get any noise complaints from neighbors about high-pitched moans interlaced with heavy metal music. The show occasionally dips into being Dragon’s Breath-chile-pepper-scoville levels of spicy, but they’re more hilarious in context than its trailers tease, and there isn’t any actual sex in the show, just hilarious inneundos. For example, characters in the show get poisoned more often than not and must have other characters “suck the poison out.”

Sometimes Schneider fights Beowulf style.Screenshot: LIDEN FILMS / Netflix / Kotaku

While the fan service-y situation isn’t surprising to see in an ecchi anime, the English voice cast clearly had a lot of fun dubbing this show and cranked up its ridiculousness to 11. I laughed my ass off when Schneider told the holier-than-thou puritanical princess that she needs to suck the poison out harder. Bastard!! is tropey as hell, but it doesn’t take itself too seriously, kind of like the comedy isekai Konosuba if the main character had copious amounts of sex.

While Schneider has yet to hit a home run with any of the defected Four Lords of Havoc underlings that he converts to his side through his Dio-esque power of charisma, the show’s opening and closing themes fuck unequivocally. Coldrain and Tielle knocked it out of the park with the show’s high-octane opening and closing themes. No notes, or skips, just straight bangers.

Bastard!!, by all accounts shouldn’t work as an anime in 2022, yet it somehow comes out the other end as one of the funniest and spiciest anime of the season and I want more of it.

What is the best anime for 18 year olds?

What is the deepest anime?

What is the most complex anime?

What is the coolest anime to watch?