FIRE FORCE: THICC PLOT

FIRE FORCE. Ahhh, I love self-explanatory titles. It saves me from having to describe what the show is about. There is fire and a force that stops it – pretty self-explanatory. Sure, it’s a bit more complicated than that, but we’ll come back to it. Fire Force is an adaptation of the manga of the same name by Atsushi Ōkubo, who, after spending ten years writing Soul Eater, decided to switch gears and focus on one of the greatest elements known to man: fire.

This time, rather than a group of kids who team up to fight witches and the like, we

instead have a group of kids who team up to LITERALLY fight fire with fire. Fire is, of course, the world’s great solution. There are very few problems that fire can’t solve! Bad hair day? Paper jam in the printer? Light the paper on fire, no more paper jam. Currently on fire? Add more fire and it’ll eventually grow, use up all the local oxygen and snuff itself out. Problem solved. Of course with this being an action shounen, that’s not the route they take. In the world of Fire Force, a new phenomenon makes random citizens occasionally burst into flame, becoming demon-like beings called Infernals, and it’s up to the new specialized fire defence companies to rush in and defeat the threat in a timely but humane way. So humane, in fact, that they bring along a priestess to pray for the souls of the recently inflamed. How very Chrono Crusade of them. Not that anybody gets that reference…

Unlike a traditional fire department, the Fire Companies are made up of pyrotechnic humans, people who have gained fire controlling abilities instead of just combusting themselves. Their abilities vary wildly, from straight up fire control, to wielding plasma in blade form, to just having jet feet and giving the Infernals a good ol’ boot to the head. And they all have their unique personality traits that set them apart: one whose switch between tsun and dere is on a hair trigger, a protagonist who smiles with shark teeth when he’s nervous, and OH. MY. GOD. WHY IS THIS GUY CALLED ARTHUR, AND WHY DOES HE CALL HIS PLASMA BLADE EXCALIBUR?! Okubo, you did the King Arthur reference last time with one of the most annoying anime characters in existence! Just go and write for the Fate Franchise already! Jeez! 

So the overall goal of the series is for us to watch the cool fire-centric powers of the

protagonists, the Infernals, and the other villains who will inevitably be introduced

as the Infernals probably get moved to cannon fodder status. We also get to try to piece

together the show’s great mystery of where the Infernals come from, what happened in

our protagonist’s past, and what conspiracy ties it all together. It’s also cool that

our protagonist is called Shinra, so I can make FF7 references and not sound out of place.

Shinra’s family ended up being burned to death in a fire that coincided with the appearance

of his powers, however both he and the story at large doesn’t place the blame on that

as the cause for their deaths. Instead, there’s a lot of nebulous inferences that there’s

something far more sinister going on and no one wants to talk about it, not even the firefighter

that saved his life as a child. But it’s hard to get a grip on what’s going on so far. There’s a lot about what’s happening that’s been left purposefully unclear. Thankfully, the production of the series makes up for a lot. The production is being handled by David Production, of all studios. While I can’t fault the house of JoJo for pretty much anything here, I do have to register my surprise at how well they are emulating Okubo’s style. If I didn’t look at the production credits for this series, I would have mistakenly bet quite a bit of money that production was being handled over at Bones, considering there is so much of the style here that’s identical to their previous work. From an animation standpoint, so much of this show’s style screams that it is from the maker of Soul Eater, yet Bones has nothing to do with this project, not even for key animation or the like. It’s actually quite impressive that they’ve been able to emulate the style so well. Maybe if the demand for a Brotherhood-like remake of Soul Eater ever becomes a possibility, David might be a viable choice. Sure that’s more of a pipedream. 

Back to Fire Force though, what’s probably going to happen is that I’m going to drop the series until it gets some more episodes under its belt. And I know that when I say the word drop people take it as a negative against the series, but you really shouldn’t. The reason why I would hold off until there’s a decent amount of episodes is because the overall story is what I’m finding interest in. The cast is so large here that we haven’t had enough time to get to know them and attach ourselves to them. I have no doubt that I will eventually find Arthur endearing, but at the moment I can’t stand him being on screen. Calling in a comparison to Soul Eater, I had this same problem with Black Star. Loved him eventually, but couldn’t care less about him at the get-go. So the show is still trying to balance so many plates at once right now. It’s gearing up its overall plot, introducing major and minor antagonists, while also trying to give its rather large main cast time to breathe, and there just hasn’t been enough time for that. I suppose the show isn’t utilizing its time as well as it could yet. We have rather large action set pieces that one could argue are a bit overkill for this part of the story, but both that and the gratuitous fan service are things that we unfortunately would be stupid to expect them to skip over.

The action because my god it looks good, and the fan service because, well, fan service.

You think they are going to skip over what probably brings them a crap ton of fan interest

and sell them a lot of merchandise? I don’t think so. Speaking of skipping over things though, while I haven’t talked about OP’s or ED’s, the ED for Fire Force is great! That's all I really wanted to say I've had it on loop for awhile, so don’t skip that s**t. In summary, I really do like this show, but considering it’s probably going to have a significant episode length by the time they decide to cut the anime off, Don't think that it's not going to probably happen, it could, it happened before… I don’t think it’s had enough time just yet to fully get up to speed. The action is superb, the production is top notch, and the story is coming from one of my favourite shounen mangaka. So while I will highly recommend the series to people, I can also calmly say that I’ll likely put it on hold until next season or so, just to let it build up some steam. Thanks for joining me in this quick discussion.