https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/35e20d3b8decdaed8a16ead2f26cfaf3.mp4 To reside in The Fire Hunters world is to be perpetually afraid of something. Whether that something in particular is a Fiend that is running wild or even your fellow man its always present and looming. And it is easy to understand way in the past a terrible catastrophe struck humankind and made it so that humanity could no longer harness fire. Coming into proximity of it would lead to the body instantly burning and if it should happen to occur within a group of many peoplewell it doesnt take much imagination to think about what could happen. And the show does not shy away on showing just how terrible it really is. The sea of black red and orange bathe the screen as people scream for the pain to stop as though they were mere kindling that allows the fire to spread at an alarming rate. In a flash everything could be gone. So theres only one option that seems sensible: cloister yourself from everyone else and keep outside contact to a minimum. Choose loneliness. It is this cloistering quality that makes The Fire Hunter a hard sell both as a seasonal anime and as a general fantasy story. The idea of a sprawling world for our characters to explore and meet so many new faces along with an equallysprawling soundtrack as they fight against a relatively clearcut evil is traded away. Where is the sense of grand adventure? Instead what we see and experience is an intense interiority which allows for the series to develop some fantastic subtextual worldbuilding. Both in terms of the larger social structure and character relationships there are constant layers to be unpacked and chewed on. Within the pods of villages that exist on the outskirts of the capital city and beyond they had to learn to defend themselves against the possibility of the fire that could kill them but they cannot survive purely on their own. A single village can only have access to so many resources so it became necessary to create a commodity that can bring commerce of some kind muku paper or a paper to communicate with the gods being the mostreferenced inshow. The world is thusly one that as sequestered as a village might want to be must rely on others for money bartering and liquid fire. And presiding over their safety from the Fiends are the Fire Hunters the ones whose sickles and dogs kill Fiends for their golden blood to create a new source of light and heat. Whether as a village or as a villager the ability to work determines ones worth. With Fire Hunters acting as both guardian and harvester of the mostprecious of all resources they achieve a quasidivine reverence among the people of the shows universe. This interplay between isolation reliance and the Fire Hunters guardianship is what brings us into the narrative proper with Touko being in the wrong place at the wrong time. As a Fire Hunter sacrifices his own life in a forest to slay a Fiend so that Touko can live she is subsequently marked by her own family and village as having committed a cardinal sin. She is regarded as a harbinger of misfortune and must atone for albeit indirectly causing the Fire Hunters death. Such is the weight of the sin that her own sister wears a black mask as Touko boards the train treating her as akin to an undesirable. And as a mere child Touko is the most reluctant of reluctant heroes perhaps bound more by a sense of duty to return Kanata and the Fire Hunters sickle to his family in the capital rather than any inner drive that she may have at the start. She boards the truck not knowing at all what awaits her and the derisive attitudes of her home and any she might encounter on the way insinuate that the journey will be anything but pleasant or safe for that matter. Shell learn a lot as she travels on about the cold world around her. https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/77af0060e30a75e4ee0b18ca757819f8.mp4 But her journey of discovering is not one she undertakes alone. The Fire Hunter has another story move in parallel to Touko that of Koushi the noworphaned son of a famed Fire Hunter who is taken in by a wealthy family in the capital. Gifted with a beautiful mind he accepts the offer by the Okibis to escape the old life he once lived along with having proper doctors look after his sister in exchange for using that mind of his. There is apprehension about the current state of the world and Okibi wants Koushi to figure out how to make like his father did and harness skyfire an evenmorepowerful substance from certain Fiends. Between the Fire Hunters death involving Touko and what Okibi is asking of Koushi humanity seems to be hurrying its way to another conflict and one that might have just as dire consequences for their existence. Moments of levity are few and far between it is only when Okibis daughter Kira seems rather taken with Koushi or one of the eventual bridestobe on Toukos train say something caustic that the series allows itself to breathe for a moment. The pieces move slowly and deliberately almost like a mournful dance rather than a grand spectacle best encapsulated by its aesthetic decisions. The series plays itself like a series of theatrical tableaux both in terms of its emphasis on specific moments of heightened tension and in visual presentation. The soundtrack lacks any of the grandsweeping orchestrations or soaring triumphs of brass woodwinds and strings with explosive percussion that we sometimes expect from the standard fantasy fare. Things are more brooding the music adopts lower tones and murkier timbres as stringed instruments play in their lower registers and the percussion feels less broad and more echoed. It is meditative rather than epic. Complete with highlystylized stillshots that deliberately contrast with the rest of the presentation they read as a kind of contemporary spin on the famed Dezaki postcard memory meant to signify either overtly or subtextually just how important or extreme a particular person or moment in time really is. The affect is that The Fire Hunter tends to be more suggestive than anime normally produces with Nishimura Junji treating its world and Oshii Mamorus series composition of the original novels as museum pieces. 550https://i.ur.com/cSrfvXf.png This image of Kira is one of the few times that the series allows softer yellows and whites into the aesthetic showing that her heart is perhaps one of the few points of light in a miserable world And nearly every painting in that museum is a breathing testament of misery and murkiness. The palette employed throughout the series is muted as even the golden blood of the slain Fiends feels almost too dense and congealed to be bright. It is unnatural both in that sense and in the natural sense that we associate blood with red. Even when properly harnessed as either a source of light or heat in its yellow hue that unnatural quality remains. The only real source of light comes from fire which we know is the ultimate death sentence the sun which is rarely shown or in selective postcard memories. The use of setting and placement of the characters within it robs the world of its happiness as though even the mere implication of fire and heat is something that must be avoided at all costs. Especially as the stories of Koushi and Touko continue on their way it allows a real contrast between the higherclass house and its comforts that Koushi enjoys versus the cold hard steel of Toukos train or the shaded canopy of the forest she travels through. At times it is intensely claustrophobic. At others it feels so vast so as to feel that something is just wrong. Every inch of The Fire Hunter is tinged with something to be afraid of no matter who is traveling with you where you are or what is waiting out there. I mentioned before that The Fire Hunter is a bit of a hard sell. Barring the fact that its only one season at present its affect is on some level quite alienating and the narrative runs thick as do its infodumps. Yet the unfolding mysteries about the Spiders the Fiends Okibis goal Kiras feelings Toukos quest the divine clans and many other things make a dystopic steampunkesque fantasy that feels like more is constantly waiting to be unearthed. Its offkilter form of presentation and animated character acting gives tension repose and rumination plenty of time to dig into the earth and its world is only revealed to be more horrifying the further it goes along. In the midst of its bleakness a few characters stand poised to take their steps into whatever fireladen fate awaits them. Just remember that the metaphorical shadow on the wall is not just cast by fire in this case the shadow itself IS fire. 550https://www.sakugabooru.com/data/sample/bf4b2192468675f2c6cb4ba9d717e707.jpg