Fire Force Season 3

Episode 15

This week's episode of Fire Force begins on a fairly unassuming note, considering that the moon has been replaced with a cartoon grotesquerie thanks to the reality-warping power of the Adolla. For the first act of the episode, we're mostly just checking in on characters after last week's big battle, with Licht popping in with a brilliantly stupid disguise to help the exposition pill go down a little more smoothly. So far, so good.

Then Sho makes his repentance into the narrative, which is when things start to take a turn for the…well, I'm assuming you all saw the episode, if you're reading this. This little boy's simple quest to learn more about the family he has grown up without turns into quite the revelatory turn for this show, and it all comes down to Sho and Shinra's mother, who, it turns out, gave birth to her sons without any assistance from the opposite sex. This wasn't some turkey-baster situation, either; Shinra and Sho didn't have a father at all. In other words, these boys were the product of a virgin birth. And their mother is named Mari Kusakabe.

That's right, folks: As befitting a world filled to the brim with nuns, priests, Devils, and demon Doppelgängers straight from the pits of hell, it turns out that our boy Shinra isn't just any old savior: He is literally the Fire Force equivalent Jesus H. Christ Himself. Or, rather, since the doctor in the flashback acknowledges the legend of the original J-Man that comes from the world before the Cataclysm, maybe that means that Shinra is Jesus 2: Electric Boogaloo. Sho takes this news very well, as it happens, declaring himself to be the guardian angel who will protect his brother and prove the savior's might to the world.

This is obviously pretty silly, but that doesn't mean it isn't also an interesting development for the story to take. The most compelling aspect of the conflict between Adolla and the mortal plane has been the way that human imagination plays into the forces that are shaping reality. In the same way that the Soul Eater moon got stuck up in the sky because that's simply how a lot of people picture the thing from their memories of childhood storybooks and crayon doodles, Shinra was created by this world's collective belief in the idea of a great hero who could take on the forces of evil and redeem all mankind. It's kind of a neat trick to take Shinra, who is in so many ways the archetypal shonen manga protagonist, and have his straightforward and earnest nature be a core feature of Fire Force's grand plot, and not just a cliche.

We're not working with high art here, though, and if this episode suffers from anything, it is the simple fact that Fire Force is never quite as entertaining when its characters spend most of the time talking instead of fighting. Still, as this story continues to take us closer to its ultimate conclusion, I appreciate that Fire Force hasn't stopped being its big, dumb, goofy self.

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Fire Force is currently streaming on Crunchyroll on Fridays.

James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.