Reviews with content warning for Self harm - Fire Punch, Vol. 1

Reviews tagging 'Self harm'

Fire Punch, Vol. 1 by Tatsuki Fujimoto

3 reviews

idlereader's review

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adventurous dark fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

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brenticus's review against another edition

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adventurous dark medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

This might be the hardest opening of anything I've ever read. Like, a kid is chopping off his limbs to feed people because he has regenerative powers. His sister proposes making a baby with him. His whole village is burnt to the ground, and he is forced to live for nearly a decade engulfed in flames that will not go out until he dies, but he also regenerates fast enough to never die.

That is the first chapter and it gets worse from there. Fire Punch is weird.

The whole volume proceeds like the fever dream of a man literally too angry to die repeatedly having his PTSD shoved in his face. It jumps around, showing the brutality of the world, the innocence and depravity of its inhabitants, and the injustice rampant in every aspect of civilization. We see early on that the flames Agni carries with him can burn anything to dust, and as time goes on I only see more things that he needs to burn.

This isn't a shonen where you see a person grow to face greater challenges; Agni is the challenge, and you wonder whether there is anything in the world you would want to stop him.

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ally_p's review against another edition

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challenging dark tense fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

(review of the entire series)

Reading Fujimoto’s first work, it’s so obvious that he has improved so much from the time he wrote fire punch to the time he wrote csm. Certain things definitely carry over as he has an extremely distinct writing style (ie the darker themes, philosophical musings, incredibly flawed yet fascinating characters, and overall chaos of the setting/plot), and these things were all parts of fire punch that I thoroughly enjoyed. I do think the one area that has the most marked improvement between series 1 and series 2 is that fujimoto has improved in leaps and bounds in his ability to write memorable, lovable characters. While the characters of fire punch were fascinating in terms of seeing which decision they would make or how they would respond to their (incredibly brutal) situation, i also found some of them somewhat hard to connect with on an emotional level, and the sheer number of characters also made it difficult to keep track of/fall in love with the characters on the page. Although the character writing in this series wasn’t bad in any sense— in fact, far from it— it’s obvious that between this first series and the next Fujimori has really learned how to make the reader truly care about his characters.

The one example to this, of course, is Togata. She was an absolutely fascinating character, and all of the moments I was personally heavily impacted by highly featured her. The way her relationship to Agni changed over the course of the series truly hit hard, and the scenes where we truly get to see what’s going on in her head… oh my god ouch. She also played a key role in introducing arguably the best theme of the series (movies) and her role as a fourth-wall-breaking-without-realizing-she’s-doing-it meta commentator on how we interact with media and our twisted relationship with entertainment (while there also being so much beauty in this relationship at the same time) was, in a word, genius. i would honestly reread this entire series just to analyze the recurring motif of movies and storytelling because it was so, so good.

Another quick note: the commentaries on sociopolitical systems and religious fanaticism were also so interesting and left me with a great deal to think about. so many of the visual images that fujimoto used to further these points will be with me for a long, long time. his analysis of human nature, particularly in times of peril and stress, was just… incredible. yeah. the way the world has shaped people in fire punch, warped their views on reality, forced them into moral conundrums where the rules of morality are completely flipped on their head— aghhhh it was so well done. To give an example of this so it’s more obvious what I mean, even within the very first chapter we’re presented with a fascinating moral conundrum:

the world has become a place where certain individuals (the blessed) have what’s basically magical powers. one blessed, the ice witch, has used her powers to turn the world into a perpetual ice age. as a result, the entire world is without natural resources, and times are basically apocalyptic. our main character, agni, lives with his sister, luna, in a small village crippled by hunger. But here’s the thing: agni and luna both have the blessing of regeneration. Luna’s is semi-slow, but Agni’s is instantaneous. If you don’t see where this is all going, here it is: Agni has been using his powers of regeneration to chop off his arms (and regrow them) continuously so that he can feed the village… those arms. Basically, in order to stay alive, this village has been engaging in cannibalism of Agni’s chopped-off arms, which he continually provides and regrows of his own volition to keep the village alive.

This is a fascinating scenario because of the way it stretches the bounds of and plays with our concepts of morality. There are certain things that are generally deemed unforgivable and inherently immoral: cannibalism is one of them. Part of the reason for this, of course, is because cannibalism usually ends in the death of another person. But that’s not the true reason that cannibalism offends us to our very cores. Instead, it’s the betrayal of the species— the absolute taboo of reducing a human being to the level of meat, a level which is typically reserved for animals (and even as I’m typing this, i’m realizing how this idea connects to other parts of this series— fujimoto really is a genius huh). Cannibalism offends us so because it is a direct affront on the human ego. And that is why, in this situation, where we are posited a scenario in which cannibalism has no obvious moral cost in hurting others, the meat is freely given, and its most obvious moral result is actually helping others survive rather than starve, we are faced with extremely conflicting feelings. On the one hand, there’s nothing obviously wrong about the situation. and, on the other hand, we feel that there is, that there is something fundamentally wrong with what is playing out before us. I believe that fujimoto sets this up on purpose to engage the reader to question our innate relationship to morality and how we inherently view things as right or wrong, and how we begin to define what is morally justifiable. This, of course, is the absolute best position to be in going in to fire punch, which is constantly questioning morality, both of the characters and ourselves.

So yeah, all of that I thought was absolutely phenomenal. But that’s not to say that I didn’t have my issues with fire punch as well.

This is a deeply disturbing series. A lot of its purpose is to present characters who have been warped and twisted by their incredibly messed-up situations to become incredibly messed-up people who do incredibly messed-up things. And while, for the most part, I really loved this (san’s arc is an incredible example of this), there were some times that were just wayyyyy too much for me. i also think for fujimoto, a man, to include so much allusion to sexual assault of women (although nothing explicit) had me feeling a little (very) uncomfy. Although his commentary was farrrr from enabling or excusing sexual assault, it was just… very present within the text to an extent that had me feeling very uncomfortable. In the end, I just think there were parts of the manga that were a tad too dark and fucked-up for me. Also, i’m not quite sure what the purpose of that one incest plot line was, and i kind of really wish that it just wasn’t included at all. Maybe it was a commentary that i just didn’t get, but it also could very much have just been manga doing its thing alllllll over again. ugh.

Also, while so many characters were so, so interesting, i did find myself having a hard time connecting with Agni’s storyline in particular— which wasn’t ideal, since, of course, he’s the main character. The point of his character is that he is experiencing a total lack of self for the entire manga, and is struggling to even begin to understand how to exist within the world, who he is, and what role he has to/wants to play. While I definitely appreciate this type of storyline, I think it could’ve been approached a bit better. For a lot of the manga, we end up with an agni who is constantly flip-flopping between extremes— do i enact revenge/do i not, should i continue living/should i give up and die, do my actions make me the protagonist/do my actions make me the villain/am i… god??— to the point where it’s hard to keep track of where exactly his psyche is in this constant reversal and indecision and how much progress he’s made (if any) from his original state. As a result, I found myself being taken away from Agni’s narrative more and more throughout the second half of the manga, and eventually would be just kind of react like “ope ok i guess we’re killing people now” or “oh alright this person is now super important to us.” This isn’t to say that agni’s narrative was boring— simply that it was so chaotic that at a certain point it became very hard to follow. while i do appreciate having the whole character identity crisis, i think that as a result of all of this it became hard to get to know exactly who agni is as a character. While struggling with identity can be a phenomenal character arc, there needs to be more closure and structure around this narrative than in agni’s case. Otherwise, it runs the risk of creating a character who has absolutely no central identity at all, who is undefinable as a character, and leaves the reader with absolutely no basis for determining whether this character is truly redeemable at all apart from pure subjective opinion. When this is the main character in particular, this is even more important— this narrative becomes the central narrative of the text and thematic ambiguity of this narrative can lead to thematic ambiguity of the text itself, which I would argue isn’t a good thing… but that’s a topic for another time.

In the end, bizarrely enough, I found the strongest part of the manga to be its middle section. The beginning struggled a bit to find its footing within the incredibly complex world, and the end simply became too expansive and loose narratively, while the middle of the story found the perfect intersection between the two and managed to provide incredibly insightful, fascinating commentary and character work. Overall, I would give fire punch a 4/5 for having some parts that i ate up and absolutely adored while also including sections of the narrative that i felt disconnected from/alienated by.

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