What the heck happened there?
The bubble is mighty crowded this season – over half the series I’ve covered so far are on it. And unfortunately each passing week more of them seem to dig themselves deeper into the pit of uncertainty rather than clarifying their status. I’ll cut Enen no Shouboutai a little more slack as through no fault of its own it’s a week behind everybody else, but if I was hoping it would seal the deal this week it didn’t. Just the opposite, in fact.
That’s doubly frustrating because this episode was built around arguably the most interesting idea of the series so far. That would be a fully self-aware infernal, in this instance an ex-fire soldier who had just been found not guilty (for political reasons, apparently) of murdering the four people he murdered. This itself raises some interesting questions, and I see a bias in play here. How exactly can the Fire Force be sure than none of the other infernals are self-aware simply because they didn’t communicate verbally? It seems to be that the distinction is more about making them feel better about destroying them than anything else.
That could have been the basis for some very interesting moral self-questioning – as it was, this was touched on but only in the most superficial manner. Things really blew up in the details, though. I tend to believe that this may have been an episode that was edited as a result of the Kyoto Animation attacks (especially given the subject matter) – certainly the pacing felty very jerky and at times confusing. If not it was just badly storyboarded and edited, though I prefer to give the production the benefit of the doubt on that score.
What I can’t explain away is the distressingly Ookubo-like element of the Fifth Company and it’s captain, Hibana. She and it are dumb to begin with – she literally walks on the back of the men in her troop wearing high heels. It’s all a ridiculously, insulting stupid conceit, totally unnecessary for any reason except to indulge Ookubo’s juvenile (and puerile) sense of humor. That’s two weeks in a row where we’ve seen these kinds of Ookubo-isms introduced to the plot of Enen no Shouboutai, which is a good reminder of why it was always wise to reserve judgement on this show until more returns were in.
All I can say about the future is “I don’t know”. I saw an awful lot in the first three eps (and even in this one) that I really liked. But it won’t take too many more weeks like this to convince me that this series just isn’t worth it. It’s a wafer-thin season and as I said, I’m giving Fire Force a little extra play on the leash, but we’re getting past the point where some hard decisions are going to have to be made. I’m pretty sure I’ll know for sure one way or the other after next week’s episode.
Derrick
August 3, 2019 at 8:24 pmI can’t wait for the future when the shounen authors will have a better handle on writing women.
I mean, I can do without stupid writing that mocks my intelligence by persuading that thing above is funny.
Kamui
August 3, 2019 at 8:45 pmHibana was the second strike for me. Man, perhaps when I was 15 she would have been “super interesting” or something. To the current me, though, she was an eyesore and destroyed an episode that could have been way more interesting than it was.
Marty
August 4, 2019 at 12:46 amHonestly, it shouldn’t be that hard to write compelling female characters, even if fanservice is almost mandatory in shounen titles, specially if they’re just starting out and don’t yet have a loyal following, that doesn’t mean she can’t be well-written either. A female character’s narrative quality and looks shouldn’t be mutually exclusive.
Shinrakugin
August 4, 2019 at 6:08 amI completely agree with you, Hibana and the 5th were hard to stomach. I’ve read the manga, and I can say that EEnS has its fair share of bad moments, but the arc that begun this week, asides from one or two exceptions, counts among the worst of them. I’m not exactly optimistic for the near future (but I’m not expecting something absurdly awful either). That being said, this series subverted my expectations in the past. We’ll see.
leongsh
August 4, 2019 at 9:36 pmSpeaking as a reader of this manga title, there will be some puerile perverted stuff along the way but the underlying story and development is quite decent. So far, the anime adaptation has cut down on the puerile perverted parts that is in the manga. Example, in Episode 3, it was only Shinra that was affected by the Lucky Lecher quirk of Tamaki. In the manga chapters covering Episode 3 of the anime, there were a few more people who ended up affected by it. If the anime followed strictly, it would have had an extra 2-3 minutes of such which adds nothing to the story and characters.
In the manga, there is a lot of it at the start but it has reduced substantially as it went along. It’s nearly non-existent where the manga is now because things are coming to a head. If this level so far in the 4 episodes puts you off, it would be better to just drop it and move on. I’ll continue because I know what’s coming later and I can roll my eyes and see past it for the core story, development and characters, and not forgetting the top notch production that is going into it – the action sequences are a great watch.