Volumes: 8/8 (Complete), In Print
Seinen (reads like)
Genre: Post Apocalyptic, Fighting, Dark Comedy
Summary: In a world said to be frozen over by the Ice Witch, a child Agni and his sister, Luna try to survive in a hellish world where winter never ends. As a Blessed- someone with supernatural abilities- Agni is a regenerator with the ability to heal from almost any wound. He and his sister willingly chop off his arms repeatedly to feed to the starving villagers, until one day an airplane lands in the village. A man named Doma, who leads a small group of soldiers from Behemdorg, raids the village for supplies and they discover the chopped off arms in the villager’s houses. He sentences them all to death for cannibalism, and uses his own Blessed talent- fire that doesn’t go out until the thing is completely burnt to ashes- to kill all the villagers.
Agni survives with his powerful regenerating ability, but his sister Luna and all the villagers perish. He is trapped in a hell where he keeps regenerating faster than he burns, but after many years he manages to control the regeneration and restrict the flames away from his face. Vowing revenge against Doma, he sets off into the eternal snow, but is that the only reason to keep living in this miserable world? Revenge?
Review: Fire Punch is a series that has a lot of mixed reviews, because of what it is. It looks like, at first glance, to be a story about revenge and a sort of hardcore violence. But there is no cathartic revenge story here, in fact the story is the deliberate opposite of catharsis, which is even mocked in the story itself. What this truly is is a very Dark Comedy story about a nihilistic world abandoned by God. There are no Gods but the people hope for salvation and project their wishes onto Agni. Life is what you make of it. There are no heroes, and no villains, only humans who do good or bad things. But to people, Agni is both a hero to some and a villain to others.
A lot of this nihilism is represented by Togata, a regenerator Blessed who has lived 300 years. As regenerators live longer and longer, they start to lose their emotions and care less and less about other people as they become numb, having lost everyone they ever loved and having nothing to live for. Togata literally lives for movies- and a lot of this nihilism is reflected in the arbitrariness of her creating a movie about Agni, trying to create a hero, or even a God. But they are all only stories we tell ourselves, for our own reasons.
After the Behemdorg story arc ends, it starts a new arc about the religion centered around Agni. Then finally in a story that echoes the legend of the Life Tree, Yggdrasil, Judah is turned into a giant tree that sucks the life out of all things in an attempt to reheat the Earth into being able to support life again. This arc has an intermission in it, where Agni tries to live peacefully, but it doesn’t last.
Highly Recommended: If you’re hoping for a heroic story about revenge or justice, turn back, this is not what you want. But if you’re looking for a darkly comedic and observational story about the dark side of humanity and how there is no inherent meaning in anything except the arbitrary designations given to them by humans- then this is a wonderfully crafted story.
Age Rating: R: This is a story where lawlessness reigns and the powerful do whatever they want. Quite a lot of violence, attempted rape, but not gratuitous. It’s all part of the story.
Other works by this Mangaka in English: Chainsaw Man
No comments:
Post a Comment