Review of Fire Force Season 2

Okay, I'm going to say it. Fire force and I have a love hate relationship. In the things it does well, it does them REALLY well but in the things it does bad it does them REALLY BAD! Battle animation and coreyography is beautiful. Characters are interesting both as concepts and designs. The plot is super interesting and fun. But my praise stops there. This anime has a HUGE problem with tone. It's absolutely all over the place. They seem allergic to dramatic story building moments without ruining the tone with a badly placed joke that brings the emotion of the moment to a screeching halt. Theanimation is also terrible. You can see where all the animation budget went, to short fight scenes where the fire is animated beautifully, but those scenes are so short and SO PRETTY that it makes it very noticeable that most shots in this anime are still images. They cover this up by only animating mouths in close ups that last forever, focusing on a character that is not speaking, not animating faces, or having shots from very, very far away. It's jarring and really takes you out of the moment.

Then there's the cat girl. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE cat girls, but this cat girl is half of this anime's tone problems. In addition to her cat themed fire power she also has an "ability" called "lucky lechery" which is basically just an excuse for her to strip and/or have men fall right into her cleavage. Sure anime have similar beats but this 1) makes no sense because what does it have to do with fire powers? She could have just been clumsy or something and it would have the same effect and 2) happens in almost every serious moment as if the writers went "OH NO! ITS SERIOUS AND TENSE! CAN'T HAVE THAT! BOOBIES!"

But it's not just spoiling tense moments, it's also not knowing how to handle tense moments. Mild spoiler but a scene that really stuck out to me this season was when the fire force goes down into these underground tunnels to fight infernals and they decide they want to show how dangerous the situation is without killing the main characters so they decide "Let's kill of the background guys!" Now, fire force shows no love for background characters. They rarely even bother to anime faces on them, most of them look like copy paste versions of each other, and most of them exist to fill space so when all of a sudden four of them were given names and their own private flashback in which they promised various people in their lives to do this VERY important and VERY emotionally stirring thing RIGHT AFTER they come back from their dangerous mission, before promptly being murdered in some brutal fashion of another, it had the opposite effect from emotional. I broke out laughing. I could not contain it. It was the equivalent of the words "insert tears here"being flashed on the screen and this happened FOUR TIMES in only a few minutes.

But here's the problem right? Every season I start watching fire force, and every season I hate it because of the above issues, and ever season I say this is going to be my last season and I just wanna finish the season because i'm a completionist. But then, in the last few episodes, the animation quality goes up, they lay down some plot threads, and I'm hooked again! It's like being an addict, or in an abusive relationship. I know this anime doesn't care about me. I know it's just going to hurt me again but every time this anime shows up in my feed and goes "Come back baby I can change" and DAMN IT I fall for it every time.

I hate this show. I hate it so much.

Will I be watching it next season?

Yeah. Probably.

Latom.