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Fire Force
Episode 41

by James Beckett,

How would you rate episode 41 of
Fire Force ?
Community score: 4.1

“Boys, Be Weak” follows the now typical Fire Force pattern of providing a show-stopping climax to its current arc for one half of the episode, and then using an exposition-heavy second act to debrief the cast and audience while also laying the groundwork for the next phase of the story. This goes a long way towards explaining why last week's messy episode felt so much like Fire Force was padding for time, and though it doesn't excuse “Mind Blown” of its faults, you can understand why Fire Force Season 2 would want to stick with a formula that has more or less been working well for the show up to this point.

The climax half of “Boys, Be Weak” is mostly great stuff. The animation quality has been kicked back up a couple of notches from the middling production values of “Mind Blown”, and the emotional stakes are appropriately high, too. Nataku's flashbacks don't give us an especially original story, but they explain how the poor kid has been conditioned by so many years of adults' expectations crashing up against his own lack of strength and agency. The common refrain of every figure in his life has been “You can do it, right?”, a backhanded display of confidence that puts the onus of strength on the child himself. This normally wouldn't have been enough to psychologically traumatize someone, but Nataku has been placed in increasingly fraught and abusive situations, and the notion that his happiness and freedom is simply hinging on him getting strong enough has clearly been a damaging one. His Adolla Burst takes the form of what is essentially a cataclysmic nuclear weapon, and though Charon is able to deflect his first volley up into the moon, Nataku is determined to exert his newfound strength on the whole city, with Rekka screaming “You can do it!” in the back of his mind the whole time.

The slick animation and intense energy of this whole sequence is awesome, but it's when we get to the source of the episode's title that I started asking some major questions. Old Kurono is simply furious that Nataku is ready to explode all of the weak people in the city that he could potentially demean and abuse, which is what causes him to finally exert his full strength and end Nataku's rampage. The fact that such a gargantuan threat is taken down so easily already smacks of lazy writing, but it gets even worse when Nataku decides to stay and train with Haijima, and Kurono specifically, who has become the de facto “Protector of the Sixth Pillar”. Charon even throws out some pithy line about how Nataku and Kurono's relationship is the incredibly rare instance of such an abusive dynamic being a “beneficial” thing for both parties.

Excuse me: What? I genuinely have no idea what Fire Force is even going for here. Given that his self-declared reason for being is rooted explicitly in abusing weak people, especially children, it would be utter nonsense to try and frame Kurono as anything other than a cartoonishly despicable prick under any circumstances. It's a further level of WTF entirely to have the characters basically shrug and consider it a win for Nataku to be kept with Haijima, since the company pinky swears they won't kidnap and torture any other traumatized children. What kills me is that Fire Force didn't even need to walk this stupid, stupid path; the whole thing could have been as simple as “Haijima is the only party that has the resources capable of keeping Nataku from hurting himself or the world at large, so our heroes must begrudgingly accept that saving him will have to wait for another day.”

Instead we get this utterly baffling handling of Kurono's character, complete with treacly music that makes it very clear that we're supposed to think this turn of events is somehow...sweet? It leaves a pretty bad taste in the mouth going into the second act of the episode. Here, we learn that Haijima is apparently just a garden-variety evil megacorporation, and not one with clear ties to the Evangelist. They've been seeking out new Pillars in order to exploit their Adolla Bursts and build a second Amaterasu, which the Fire Force thankfully calls out as an objectively crappy thing to do. We get a lot of the usual Trolley Problem pontificating from the aloof Haijima boss, who insists that sacrificing one human with an Adolla Burst is worth “saving” the lives of the millions of people in the empire, but even when Shinra admits that he would gladly sacrifice his own life to save millions, Captain Obi has the good sense to remind him that the lives of his comrades don't come cheap (except for Nataku, I guess).

This is our hook into the next arc: Vulcan and the rest of Company 8 promise to find a way to build a new version of Amaterasu that does not require the life-force of a living Pillar to function, which will be a decent challenge for our heroes to tackle with the Evangelist still out there, causing all sorts of mischief. The sooner they figure it out, though, the sooner they can shut down Haijima's sketchy-as-hell operations, and then someone can finally rescue Nataku from his creepy Uncle Reaper.

Rating:

Fire Force is currently streaming on Crunchyroll and Funimation .

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


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