Character · Darling in the Franxx
Hiro
A pilot who has spent his entire childhood failing the only test his school bothers to measure.
In Otakana the clue reads: Boy pilot known as code zero one six
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Darling in the Franxx
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Hiro is code number 016, raised inside a walled facility to pilot a machine he cannot make work. Children in this world fly in pairs, and the ones who cannot sync with a partner are quietly taken off the roster. He is the prodigy who stopped performing, which in a place that measures children by output makes him a problem to be filed away rather than a person.
Then Zero Two arrives, code 002, with red horns and a reputation that precedes her: three rides and her partners stop coming back. The two of them fly together and it works. That partnership drives the whole series, and the cockpit design makes the metaphor about as subtle as a brick, which the show is fully aware of and never apologises for.
Darling in the Franxx aired in 2018 as a joint production between Studio Trigger and A-1 Pictures, directed by Atsushi Nishigori. Reception split hard down the middle. The early episodes about children raised as equipment are widely admired, and the argument about where the last stretch goes has not cooled off since it finished.
Spelling HIRO
HIRO is four letters and the game wants the given name. The trap is the English word hero, sitting one letter away and matching the character's job closely enough to steal your fingers. It is an I, not an E. ヒロ has two kana and no long vowel, so nothing is being dropped: HIRO is the whole of it.