English Dub Review: Fire Force “Answer”
The Mother, the Son, and the Holy Shinra
OVERVIEW (SPOILERS)
The Earth is consumed in black flames. Everyone except for Shinra, Sho, and Haumea are dead. The Great Cataclysm has been achieved. In the deepest depths of despair, Shinra goes for an impossible gambit that will change the world forever.
OUR TAKE
We’ve reached the penultimate episode of Fire Force, where Shinra, the embodiment of the story’s themes of hope and optimism, faces Haumea, the conduit for all of humanity’s despair. With everyone else sacrificed at the pyre of the Evangelist, things truly feel at their most hopeless. So, what would make more sense than for Shinra and Sho’s Infernal mother to appear from nowhere, lead Shinra to merge with them both to gain a whole new demonic looking form out of nowhere, and recreate the whole world and revive all of humanity from only his memory…out of nowhere, including people he’s never met. This all sounds like it would be a recipe for an absolutely reviled ending that took all the heaviness of the previous episodes and waved it away with a seeming Deus Ex Machina, a cardinal sin in modern writing. BUT then you have to consider that we’ve seen for quite some time that the closeness of the story’s world with that of Adolla has been making what constitutes reality a lot more suggestible. And with most people dead, all it takes is one of them to have a strong enough imagination to turn the tide. Aside from the somehow alive and fully healed Arthur floating in space with a now sentient Excalibur who is shouting “Fool!” That’s right, this is the origin story for that annoying sword from Soul Eater, and that’s just the start of the floodgates for explaining and referencing stuff from that.
Anyway, Shinra’s unbeatable hope for humanity’s future being the thing that ultimately saves the world from despair and dying in flames would have made for a perfectly decent ending with a solid message, but we’re not stopping there. Haumea’s cries for Shinra to stop remaking things doesn’t come from her simply being a sore loser, but because she has spent her whole life hearing the negative thoughts of those around her, and just recreating the world as it was would only get things back to square one, which even Sho has to agree with. As nice as it is that Shinra believes humanity will sort itself out, something like the Evangelist will only rise again on a long enough timeline. So instead, he decides to (supposedly) recreate the world numerous times in the blink of an eye before coming to something well enough, with all of his friends, and even his enemies, back to life to help move the world forward. But how will these new changes be cemented and put humanity on a better path? And how will a certain young girl and her talking scythe be involved? Find out in the review of the final episode of Fire Force…coming later tonight after this one!
