Hello folks, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. Today we return to the fraught, entrancing world of The Fire Hunter, as Touko begins her pilgrimage to the capital, hoping to redress the crime of a fire hunter’s death by shepherding his dog Kanata home. She has said goodbye to the village she has known and the adopted mother she loved, climbing aboard an imposing forest-bound train that embodies both the technological sprawl of this series and the dangers lurking in the wilds. What awaits her is unknowable; in this world where fire sparks death, the terrors of the deep woods must surely be beyond our comprehension.
As you can probably tell, I’m having a great time so far. Rieko Hinata’s world is distinctive and fascinating, and the show so far is revealing its secrets with the offhand confidence and measured pacing of a master storyteller. The show’s art design is also distinctive and compelling, offering a landscape both melancholy and beautiful, and populating it with characters rich in expressive flourishes of body language. Stillness, anticipation, and grief; there is a charged, mournful aspect to Touko’s story, like a dark cloud promising a cold rain. Let us see where the journey takes us as we return to The Fire Hunter.
Episode 2
“Humans hunt Flame Fiends and harvest the fire within them, then build their lives around it.” An unspoken assumption of the first episode, revealed casually for the first time in flashback. One of this show’s strongest qualities, one of the fundamental things that sets it among a superior class of fantasy, is its confidence in letting its world simply exist for us to discover, rather than rushing to explain all the distinct details of life in this place. Such confidence not only makes for a more graceful, gradual, and intriguing introduction to this world, it also makes both the world and its characters themselves feel more real, as if they have existed for millennia preceding our intrusion into their reality
This style of worldbuilding is of a piece with a more general writing truism: be willing to reduce and excise, offering the reader exactly so much of your world as best facilitates the story you are telling within it. Not everything you invent has to be explained to the reader, and in fact, learning how to effectively self-edit will make your remaining material all the stronger. If that monastery you invented only results in one monk briefly passing the protagonist’s path, so be it; that work was still not wasted, as it informs the solidity of that one precious remaining moment
Worldbuilding only betrays us when we prioritize it over the narrative; it is fine to construct as much as you want, just don’t try to inflict every detail of your world on the reader. You’re making a story, not a sandbox!
Apparently that was the capital that Koushi inhabited. Unsurprisingly, even the largest city in this place is something of a ruin, a pale recreation standing in the shadow of humanity’s former glory
“The Three Brides”
Given we’re already bound to this pilgrimage, I imagine the journey through this train’s remaining village stops will offer us some natural vignettes, etching the contours of this world while also building Touko’s confidence a bit. This is how you reveal your secrets; along the journey, at the pace your characters experience them, in such a way that their existence is immediately relevant to the protagonists’ own journeys
Apparently Touko puked and passed out as soon as she got on the train, which seems like a pretty natural reaction to first riding a bumpy coal-burning train straight along the forest earth
She is greeted upon waking by two women who exemplify this production’s realistic yet personality-rich character designs
Touko immediately demonstrates both her dedication to her mission and distrust of this company, grabbing her bindle and clutching it to her chest
The two women are Hotaru and Benio
There is also a younger girl named Kaho. Are these our three brides?
Yep, they’re all heading off to other villages to be married. A graceful illustration of how life works in this world, with small villages like isolated islands in a grand, formidable ocean, sending well-guarded ships between themselves only to ensure the blood remains strong
Interesting; this conversation employs a screen-in-screen partition to convey the characters’ eyes, much like Masaomi Ando and Yoshiyuki Tomino are fond of doing. I wonder if that’s common in Nishimura’s productions
We learn Touko is eleven. Nice anxious character acting as she scrambles off her cot
Though she wishes to take her bag, she is instructed to leave it. Her first time being forced to trust these strangers
“The trucks were the last thread linking the humans isolated within protective wards.” Honestly, I’m not really sure this narrator is necessary; the show is explaining itself visually quite well
She’s put to work under Shouzou in the engine room, a gawky, awkwardly tall man with thin cheeks. This show’s character designs consistently emphasize how you don’t really need to embrace wild exaggeration to make a distinctive collection of characters. Of course, that’s really just a question of preference that comes down to your story’s aesthetic and intended tone; distinctive silhouettes are also a generally strong choice for animation, but this show deliberately chooses another path. The guiding principle either way is “does this character design seem right for this narrative and world”
Her first conversation with Shouzou is conveyed as a series of three intricately shaded still panels, akin to the drawing used to convey the Fire Fiend in the first episode. It’s an interesting choice that presumably calls back to the illustrations of the original novels, though I suspect this production is employing it because the show’s standard for character acting just doesn’t work for a seasonal production with limited resources, necessitating some still Dezaki-style flourishes
I kinda doubt Dezaki ever made a postcard memory of a girl cleaning a toilet, though
The kindly Enji is unfortunately on the other truck. Guessing that means Car 2 isn’t long for this world
The third, sullen bride Kaho offers Touko her food, for which Hotaru admonishes her
“If we die on the truck, then… what are we here for?” She was putting on a brave face earlier, but it seems she feels similarly to Kaho – they are being ripped from their entire lives to wed men they’ve presumably met only briefly, if at all, and to live within communities of strangers, never to see their families again. Humanity survives this way, but it’s an unhappy path
“They packed us off as brides to get rid of curses.”
So they’re each essentially sacrifices, offerings made to restore the vitality of their villages’ prime exports. But as Benio lists their villages’ problems, we see the remains of a truck that has collapsed and been abandoned, emphasizing the collective point – even this fallen world is decaying, even this thin network of human survival is falling apart. Sacrificing young women to the foolish whims of the elders will not restore the balance
“Don’t growl like you own the place. Show some manners!” Benio is great, and Kanata seems genuinely intimidated by her scolding
Hotaru mentions there’s a fire hunter on the other car, and Kanata might be hearing his dog whistle
Kaho wakes Touko in the night, telling her to stop making noise while returning her mislaid personal items. As with her offering food, the contrast between her caustic affectation and considerate nature is clear
Touko examines her treasure – a handmade warding stone marked with “Rin,” her terse but secretly supportive stepsister. A parallel with Kaho, and even Kanata; sometimes things that frighten us are secretly gentle. We hide behind intimidating facades like Rin’s mask to protect ourselves, but we long to connect and communicate
“Koushi.” I assume these segments were divided by character-delineated chapter breaks in the original novel. Not sure why they’ve chosen to keep the title cards; in general, this adaptation seems perhaps a touch more faithful to the original novel’s structure than it needs to be
The capital seems to always be defined by rain, even in the OP
Koushi’s father was Haijuu, a fire hunter. Apparently he was previously hosted at the great estate from the end of the first episode
The intricate clock from the OP stands in this manor, another indication time is running out
He meets with a large man named Yuosichi, a first encounter also conveyed through those variations on postcard memories. They’re quite good for capturing the nuance in precise expressions, like Yuosichi’s initial combination of happy surprise and guilt here
Ah, his father is actually away, not dead. Perhaps the fire hunter on Car 2, then
Yuosichi offers to let Koushi and his sister live here. “It’s better than it once was, but the capital is still far from safe.”
“You’ll have free rein to use the skyfire your father left behind.”
“By law, all skyfire and fiendfire must go to our rulers, the divine clans.” So if fiendfire is fire extracted from the fiends, presumably skyfire is lightning in a bottle
“The government of this land is likely on its last legs.” Yuosichi makes explicit the fears voiced by the three brides
“Skyfire only comes from fallbeasts, the fiends of the air.” Well that sounds terrifying
“It doesn’t burn. It explodes.”
Apparently, only a handful of fire hunters can harvest it, and few engineers can even exploit it
“I believe you can reinvent bottled lightning for a new purpose.” The reason for Yuosichi’s generosity at last becomes clear – he believes Koushi’s brilliance is worth investing in, that it might bring about some sort of energy revolution
“I share your father’s premonition. This country’s government will soon falter.” And when it does, wealth will mean little – only power, the kind of power an exclusive control of bottled lightning might offer
Koushi is renowned for having the ability not just to learn, but to create
Over with Touko, the trucks have stopped, and the hunter on Car 2 requisitions Kanata to hunt with him and his own hound Izumo
Meanwhile, Kaho has disappeared. Touko pledges to bring her back, heading out after her and Kanata. Once again braving the deadly forest for the sake of another
The limits of the animation become clear as a fire beast attacks with Kaho held in its arms. Lots of stills and reaction frames, though these are least lent some dynamism through the frame-in-frame tricks from earlier
On the other hand, the fluidity and warping shapes of these cuts as the dogs attack the beast are delightful, and really hammer in the surreal, nightmarish nature of the fire fiends
The shift from this desperate violence to the extremely efficient harvesting of the beast’s blood emphasizes the fragility of life here, how a system this fraught and dangerous is practically mundane to its observers
Having broken the rule to never leave the truck, Touko learns she is to be dropped off at the next village with one of the brides
And Done
What a cruel world Touko is trudging through! We received a great deal more context this episode, which largely confirmed what the premiere was tonally implying: fragile as it is, this system of disparate villages and a central capital is already fraying, with both the government and the land itself seemingly decaying day by day. The people scrabble at the embers of a once-glorious bonfire, extracting what power they can from the beasts that have inherited the earth. Though the animation is obviously straining to convey such a visually complex narrative with so much focus on distinctive character acting, The Fire Hunter’s aesthetic remains striking, and its story only grips tighter by the moment. Onward towards the capital!
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