This particular topic is one that I am very passionate about. I really truly believe that pop-culture can be used as a great way to show realistic mental illnesses so that people can see what it looks like and understand more about it. I’ve written about this quite a bit in the Attack on Titan universe. With this post, I want to look at the ways in which Zero Two from DARLING in the FRANXX exhibits symptoms of C-PTSD.
I was diagnosed with C-PTSD a few a years ago. The road to learning what that means for me and who I am as result has been tough. Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) is a relatively newer diagnosis and as such, is not currently outlined in the DSM 5. It is recognized by the International Classification of Diseases however (which is like the DSM but published by the World Health Organization). While the original diagnosis of PTSD is typically the result of a single traumatic event, C-PTSD is associated with continuous, long term trauma and has high correlations with trauma experienced in childhood.
The great tragedy of childhood trauma is that it occurs before our identities and understandings of the world around us solidifies. Thus as children, we attempt to adapt with a child’s view of what works. Left untreated, this causes severely maladaptive coping mechanisms as adults. Basically, we’re damaged before we know who we are, so we never get to learn who we would have been.
Zero Two never stood a chance at any concept of a normal life as she was a genetically modified clone, intended to be someone’s replacement tool. The scenes we see of her earliest childhood memories (besides the one mysterious nurse who gave her the book) are fraught with imprisonment, scientific testing, and abuse. Perhaps the only thing that saved her from being a complete monster was her run in with Hiro. Hiro was the first person to treat her as a fellow person and not an object. He read to her, tried to give her a name, even tried to heal her wound.
My therapist once explained to me that the people who have the best chances at getting through their childhood traumas and healing from them are people who have at least one supportive person in their young lives. It gives them a bedrock, essentially, of the positivity that the world can hold. Hiro provided that for Zero Two, even with such a short interlude. She had something to hold on to and create a goals towards: Become human.
I’ll be clear here, I don’t think the anime’s writers purposely wrote her to have C-PTSD. But that is the beauty of a skilled writer: They understand people in an intuitive way and can write characters that speak to us without having any psychological background. And that’s why Zero Two means so much to me.
Her whole life she was told she was a monster and she believed it. Strelitzia, her FRANXX, even shifts into a canine-like creature when she pilots it alone as opposed to the humanoid figure it normally holds when piloted with a partner. Her captors lied to her and told her that the more enemies she killed, the closer she would come to being “human”. So that is what she fixated on (fixation also being a symptom of C-PTSD and related anxiety, by the way). She didn’t care for anyone else around her as long as she could have a chance at no longer being a monster.
I could spend time outlining other symptoms she displayed such as relationship issues, dissociation, and emotional regulation issues but there are two scenes that I truly wish people could see the way I do. Episode 6, at about the 17:15 mark: Hiro thinks he has died and is having a near-death vision. A minute later at 18:15, he wakes up to see Zero Two clawing at the walls of their FRANXX manically, looking completely insane to any other observer. Through the course of the scene, she makes these statements:
“Why you! You’re nothing but a monster!”
“Because I’m a monster maybe?”
“I’m always alone, thanks to these horns.”
We’re intended to be viewing the scene from Hiro’s point of view which is why we get no inner dialogue from Zero Two outside of Hiro’s memories. Using context of the scene and the statements above, however, we can guess that from Zero’s point of view she also thinks Hiro is dead and potentially that it was her fault. She has a reputation for killing her partners on their third flight together. And this partner is so much more special to her than the others. This is one way traumatic stress flashbacks can manifest.
If you have ever experienced a flashback you will know exactly what is going on. Zero Two, quite honestly, probably could not articulate to you what she is experiencing in the moment even if she tried. If you have not, imagine the most extreme moments of fear, anxiety, and devastating anger you’ve ever experienced in your life. Now try to imagine feeling them all at once. You might not be able to. The human brain is not wired to be able to process that amount of emotion simultaneously. Imagine an electricity breaker panel, designed to shut itself off or “trip” if an electricity surge goes through. Now imagine that breaker as broken so it can’t trip. The electricity system gets overloaded as a result.
The second episode of importance to me is episode 15 at the 14:20 mark. Zero Two is again flying Sterlitzia on her own and this time her horns have grown enormously, almost as if a physical indicator of how extreme her belief that she is a “monster” currently is. She has completely dissociated and is unresponsive to Hiro until he mentally connects with her to bring her mind back to reality.
Those moments are what living with C-PTSD feels like, when you get trapped in the trauma of the past again, continuously in fear that you are a monster. Someone too alien, too foreign, too broken, and any other mixture of negative self views to be able to integrate into society and have real relationships. I cried so many times watching this anime.
The beauty though is that Zero Two does get her chance to integrate into her squad and eventually becomes more human than any of them. Healing can happen and is possible even though “the horns” will always be there. Zero Two’s story arc was so incredibly powerful due to this. For those with mental illness, believing that healing is possible can be one of the hardest things. But Zero Two gets the chance to learn who she truly is and what her positive qualities are. She ends up endearing herself to so many people despite her childhood trauma. I am so grateful for the way Zero Two was written because of all of this.
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