Thanks to Bundle of Holding, I have read through the entirety of the Fire Force manga by Atsushi Ohkubi. My initial impression of it was My Hero Academia as fire fighters. Which isn’t remotely accurate but I love me some My Hero Academia so that was enough to get me on board.
Of course, in this case, the fire fighters in question almost all have pyrokinetic powers and fight fire monsters called infernals. In world that should be a whole lot more dystopian than it appears to be on the surface.
Around two hundred and fifty years earlier, there was a cataclysm that nearly destroyed the world. The Empire of Tokyo has risen up from the almost literal ashes. However, the world is haunted by spontaneous human combustion, which doesn’t bit turn people into dead ashes but infernals which are rampaging fiery beasts.
Fire Soldiers, most of whom have some kind of pyrokinetic powers, are a special division whose purpose is to put infernals down. A very important element of their job is that these are innocent people who they have to kill. Each squad even has clergy to administer last rites after or during the battle.
Killing infernals isn’t presented as a moral quandary per se. Eldritch fiery abominations killing people is an issue society has to address. However, it is presented as a moral burden. It has to be done but it is horrible.
Our hero is Shinra, a young fire soldier with the power to generate fire from his feet. This gives him the ability to fly, super speed, an unbelievable kick and a distaste for shoes. And I intentionally do mean our hero since being a hero is Shinra’s goal in life.
Which would make him sound like a simple, naive character. However, he is a grounded by childhood tragedies that just get worse the more we learn about him. In fact, one of his greatest feats is being a functional, caring person after all he’s been through.
(As long as I’m talking about characters, I’ll address the elephant in the room, Tamaki, a fire soldier who is cursed to fall out of her clothes. It’s kept PG but seriously? To give Atsushi Ohkubo some credit, it is treated as a serious condition and something Tamaki has to struggle with socially and emotionally. On the other hand, her nemesis is a guy who passes out every time he sees her in her underwear and it’s treated as comedy. That’s trying to have your cake and eat it too. Yeah, it’s a problematic.)
Fire Force doesn’t have a monster-of-the-week formula. Instead, it is clearly big story arc pretty much from the beginning. And, without giving away any spoilers, boy do the plot twists keep hitting.
Now, I pretty much assume that all Shonen works are going to have major turning points where the status quo is not going to be coming back. If the words Jujutsu Kaisen and Shibuya Incident don’t make any sense to you, trust me, they are a darn good example of this. But Fire Force just keeps having them.
The series keeps on having points where I told myself ‘ah, this is where everything changes’ And everything does change. But then we’d get another point where everything changes. Again, I want to avoid spoilers but near the end, I became convinced that if Atsushi Ohkubo and Grant Morrison ever met, it would destroy the universe.
I also want to note that many elements of Fire Force that I wrote off as only existing because of the rule of cool or silly fun end up having profound in-universe justifications. And from the aforementioned Jujutsu Kaisen to Jojo’s Bizarre Adventures, I’m used to in-universe explorations and explanations of weird powers. Fire Force still takes it to places most creators rarely go.
If I had only read one or two volumes, Fire Force wouldn’t have had much impact. But being able to read the whole series to the end made me appreciate what a crazy, mad fever dream it is.
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