Hello everyone, and welcome to another week of Fire Hunter! I apologize for the delay, I was celebrating a friends birthday this weekend and so I wasn’t able to work on this until Monday. We have a lot to talk about this week, as a small glimmer of hope shines through Fire Hunter’s myriad of problems. So without further ado, lets dive into it!
Starting off, I’ve harped against Fire Hunter’s visuals for a while now. And while it continues to degrade and get worse and worse, this week I wanted to harp on something else: The pacing. More than the disappointing visuals and lackluster story presentation, I think the format of the episodes themselves are what’s holding Fire Hunter back. Simply put, Fire Hunter is killing itself with how it communicates to the viewer. Take the end of the episode as a prime example of this! A whale breaking the oceans surface behind the boat, this moment of monumental natural beauty in a dystopian world. But how do we lead into that? A stare down, ominous music, dogs growling, and a sudden, shitty cut. This should have been an easy slam dunk of a scene! Instead it falls on its face, like the rest of the episode.
Presentation of the narrative aside, the narrative itself was… fine? For once? I quite like the new fire hunter, Akira. Part of that is that I will automatically be a fan of any strong woman a show introduces, I just love them. But I’m also engaged by her story and how she ended up here. Part of me expects that she isn’t actually a regulated fire hunter at all! That she got her dog and weapon in a very similar manner to Touko, and that this is all the start of Touko’s journey to becoming a fire hunter herself. This might not be the case, since the journey to the capital is so short. But I would love for Touko to join some kind of fire hunter apprenticeship program after basically being kicked out of her village. Would be cool, and let her stick around the capital!
Beyond Akira, we also get a bit more about the Spiders, and why they are such threats. The big one being that they have discovered a way to become immune to fire, thus allowing them to live in the forests. My big question here though is: What are the drawbacks? Because surely if the process of inoculating everyone to fire like they used to be was simply being bitten by a special kind of bug, they could do this to everyone! Right? Is that what was in the blow darts? Is that the secret to why the Divine Clans hate them and cast them out, because this immunity to fire would have broken their stranglehold on the government? Fire Hunter has a lot of potential here, a lot of interesting routes it can take. Hopefully it manages to pull at least one of them off.
Really the only weak part of Touko’s side of the narrative this week was the beach. And even then it wasn’t really a problem with the narrative, more its presentation. Here I’m talking about Touko filling a Flame Fiend and saving the other girl. Is this cool, does this progress her towards independence and being a fire hunter herself? Yes! Does it make any sense at all for her to one shit a huge bear and did it look like absolute shit when it happened? Also yes! And that’s kind of the story with Fire Hunter at large. It has these cool ideas, this awesome world, but it has absolutely no idea how to present them in a satisfying way. And that’s really weird, because this isn’t Junji Nishimura’s first rodeo! Suffice to say, I’m really curious what is going on behind the scenes there.
[As for Koushi’s side of the story, this continues to progress painfully slowly. While Touko is meeting people and trekking across the wilderness, Koushi is making kissy face and only now starting to make inroads with Skyfire. Maybe if we knew a bit more about it, or what they plan with it, this would be interesting? But right now its some dude inviting a kid with 0 combat experience out to watch him hunt one of the most dangerous creatures in the world. I don’t know why he thinkins bringing Koushi to hunt a Fellbeast is a good idea, maybe he just wants to talk to him outside the walls where no one can hear, or maybe its to meet the Spiders that would be cool. But whatever it is, it probably isn’t a good idea.
My main gripe with Koushi’s side of the story though has to be that “dream sequence” with his sister. That was another example of Fire Hunter’s poor presentation. Not only the lead in, as we had 0 reason to think this a dream and even then it made very little visual sense, but the lead out as well. Why such a hard cut to a wide shot of the mansion? It makes it seem like a time-skip rather then a dream sequence. Why not just cut directly to his face, showing that he saw himself in a different place than he actually was, like he was zoning out? Then you wouldn’t have to directly tell us that it was a dream sequence, we could have inferred it. Again, that’s sort of the issue with Fire Hunter. It has no idea how to portray and communicate its story.
So yeah, all in all this was an improvement, sort of? The parts of the narrative that do make it through are nice, Akira is cool. But Fire Hunter continues to fail in almost every way visually. The melt is getting worse and worse, while the actual story telling behind the narrative is just downright embarrassing. It’s a shame, because there continue to be moments of good, engaging narrative. Stuff that I want to watch and learn more about. Fire Hunter just makes it such a chore to actually do so, it’s driving me to want to read the novel instead.
