When Arthur’s big boss, David King held me at gunpoint in our office and told me I should start my own column, I initially pitched him a forthcoming series of satirical film reviews. I’m pretty pumped to write those, as soon as I find the time to sit my (white) ass down and listen to the languorous voice of Carrie-Anne Moss in The Matrix series.

In the meantime, I’ve been getting back into manga. After my umpteenth rant about the deliciously terrible transgender (?) characters of Tokyo Ghoul: re, I chose to take on another manga which I’d heard was “full of gender,” Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Fire Punch.

In the 24 hours since finishing Fire Punch, I’ve become a receptacle for such all-consuming hate that I thought it clever to convert my seething rants into a column that will (hopefully) outlive this initial burst of dislike for the series.

“Portrait of a Dumpster on Fire” is a column about my favourite conduit to art criticism: pure unfiltered hatred. Crucially, this isn’t a column about manga I regret reading, or even recommend against reading—quite the contrary. The things that make me hate manga are often their most interesting and appealing component parts.

I thought Fire Punch an apt first instalment, since it’s rather emblematic of this thesis. It’s a lot like Gaspar Noé’s 2002 film Irreversible: a world imbued with obscene violence that ultimately serves some hyper-abstracted motif that stands in for a theme, itself standing in for an actual narrative. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Fujimoto is best known for his work on Chainsaw Man, a seriesI recently devoured in 48 hours on a recommendation from Managing Editor Evan Robins, and which I much preferred to Fire Punch. I can see the bones of Chainsaw Man’s Denji in the Fire Punch protagonist Agni’s character arc. Despite the insistence of many a Fujimoto fan that Fire Punch is a hidden gem that comes close to, if not surpasses Chainsaw Man in its writing, I maintain that Agni is by far the lesser protagonist.

Agni begins the story as a young “Blessed,”—a human with extreme regenerative powers—in a world frozen-over by the nebulous figure of the “Ice Witch.” He lives in a rural village with his sister, Luna, and feeds its starving inhabitants with his own constantly-regrowing flesh. This is until he is discovered by Doma, a Blessed soldier of the religious fanatic kingdom of Behemdorg.

Using his ability to devour anything with near-eternal flames, Doma kills Agni’s sister and wrecks his village, leaving him perpetually burning alive. The narrative, insomuch as Fire Punch has one, is driven by Agni’s inability to live outside of his past. 

At first, this materializes into the chase after an elusive object of revenge, in the style of Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). His ire sends him after Doma, who goes from all-powerful and unreachable villain to cowering old man. In the face of Doma’s weakness, he is forced to set his vengeful sights on a greater enemy, the kingdom of Behemdorg.

Behemborg itself cowers in the face of Agni, whose unstoppable fire gets in the way of any epic battle as it near-instantly unleashes mass death on the capital. In the ruins of Behemdorg, he appears to set off on what initially appears to be another violent quest, this time after the elusive Ice Witch.

In what first appears like a welcome break from Agni’s I-must-kill-to-live song and dance—which spans 52 of the manga’s 83 chapters—he instead kidnaps an amnesiac Behemdorg high-ranking officer and escapes to the kingdom’s outskirts with her. 

Why would he do that? You ask. As it turns out, the officer, Judah happens to look like the dead sister he shares a less-than Christian desire to “make babies” with. Together, they share ten years of domestic bliss, away from the masses who’ve come to worship him for mass murdering Behemdorg soldiers and residents.

By the end of their escapade, Judah has regained the ability to form full sentences she had lost in her amnesia. That’s right, folks: Agni manages to have a pedophilic and incestuous relationship with a woman who is both older than and shares no blood relation with him.

Also, there’s a 300-year old trans guy named Togata who follows Agni for the first third of the manga in hopes of making him the hero of his movie.

I know this sounds irresistibly tempting, but before you begin to furiously type the address of your preferred free manga website into this browser, I must warn you, dearest reader. The first ten-or-so chapters of Fire Punch contain like, five attempted rape scenes (conservatively).

This initially turned me off of the manga, but the introduction of Togata (as a woman—his transness is shoehorned in much later) seemed to finally give the constantly escalating sexual violence a narrative purpose.

Togata’s introduction shifts Fire Punch’s focus away from the internal dynamics of its world and towards the cruel voyeurism of his cinematography. The immense pain that drives Agni’s arc becomes his “backstory,” carefully curated by Togata so as to turn him into an archetypal hero.

During his time in the story, Togata pulls the string of Agni’s escalating violence, trying to create a narrative climax out of the remainders of Behemdorg’s now-devastated army. The metatextual origin of the series’ violence is no longer Agni’s own internal struggle with the loss of his sister, but Togata’s unquenched thirst for thrill. I don’t give much weight to a story’s awareness of its own narrative conventions, lest I think every key-jangling fourth-wall break constitutes “peak cinema,” but a self-aware Fire Punch would have had something to say about itself, for lack of anything else.

As the series progresses, however, its focal point shifts back to Agni’s perpetually unfulfilled revenge fantasy, leaving behind any pretensions towards a commentary on its own violence. Each time a character dies, they reappear in a movie theater. The most obvious follow-up would have been for them to watch the world they came from on the big screen, but instead, they’re mostly concerned with talking to themselves.

The first appearance of a character in Cineplex-heaven is truly the last nail in the coffin of Fire Punch’s commentary on violent voyeurism. Filmmaking is no longer the visual symbol of a twisted self-contemplation, instead a mere veneer for the series’ diegetic heaven

What remains is an exploration of stock archetypes (hero, villain) as modes of understanding Agni’s cycle of violence. One minute, he’s a hero avenging Behemdorg’s downtrodden, and the next, he’s a villain for having mass murdered innocent citizens.

Following Togata’s progressive relegation to its narrative sidelines and his eventual death, Fire Punch spends its latter half gesturing aimlessly at Agni and his relationship to the roles impressed upon him. He goes from wishing to be the hero of Behemdorg’s slaves to reluctantly accepting the cult that has formed around him, hoping to mobilize it towards a better and less violent future. It’s only at the very end that he realizes he’d like to be valued as himself, instead of a glorious and/or feared killing machine.

This arc isn’t necessarily problematic in and of itself. It’s simplistic, sure, and the theme of yearning for “naked” human connection—rid of the floating signifiers that mediate our understandings of each other—is arguably better done by the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, but that’s not enough to make me hate Fire Punch.

What I hate most about Fire Punch is the way it, well, tells its story.

There’s a principle I try to adhere to in my writing, one that has been reiterated to me over and over in my article edits: “show, don’t tell.”

In my (meandering) first draft of this article, I wrote about how “show, don’t tell” is primarily a rule of journalism, but also something works of fiction like Fire Punch could benefit from following. I was wrong: it is first and foremost a rule of fiction.

Rules are meant to be broken, etc, etc, and far from me to imply that off-screen narrative progression can’t be done tastefully, but there’s a reason why “somehow, Palpatine returned” is one of the most derided film lines of all time. It was one thing for Star Wars to continually jangle keys in the face of its audience, but the line marked a daring new step in the franchises’ storytelling corner-cutting: throwing the keys at you.

“Throwing the keys” isn’t just about the existence of the figurative keys, cheap narrative devices that constantly up the ante until your favourite spacial scavenger is personally acting as a vessel for the eternal spirits of her Jedi forefathers in order to kill Palpatine himself. It’s about throwing these plot points at you, leveraging the fact that the thrower, Disney, gets to decide that Palpatine is alive again and the throwee, you, dear reader just have to go along with it.

Boy does Fire Punch love throwing the keys. There’s a band of English-speaking Blessed that join Agni’s disciples and literally never get a name or an explanation for their presence beyond that they come from a “place far away” that “grew cold.” At this point, mind you, the entire world is in the midst of an ice age.

This kind of plot interjection isn’t relegated to side characters, either. Agni’s character arc isn’t so much about a demonstrable shift in his perception by other characters, or even the social isolation that comes with being venerated and feared as it is about him burning a bunch of people alive then stating whether or not this makes him a hero.

No one can argue that there isn’t room for creativity when putting a critical eye to the notion of heroism. Sasuke from Naruto fetishizes his own alienation and sense of warrior’s duty until his eponymous gay lover gives him a good shake and reminds him that he’s not alone. Tokyo Ghoul’s worst arc (despite its outright veneration by thirteen-year olds, in 2018, but I digress) sees Ken Kaneki doing essentially the same thing, before he’s forced to realize that neither his pain nor his power make him fundamentally unable to relate to other people. 

Were I petty, I might point out that both of these manga are overwhelmingly regarded as the fast foods of their respective genres, not nearly as profound as Fire Punch seems to think it is.

Agni is essentially devoid of depth in his relationship with his own protagonism. His self-sacrificial delusions of heroism lack any emotional depth to them, simply because they come down to alternatively saying “I am going to sacrifice myself and become a hero” and “I am become villain, destroyer of worlds.”

Perhaps the worst instance of key-throwing involves Judah before her amnesia, when she’s still Behemdorg’s highest-ranked-soldier-slash-founding-mastermind. At this point, she claims to be over a century old, and is later revealed to have created Behemdorg’s religion around an action B-movie believed to be real-life footage of a God.

As Togata reveals to Judah that he knows the Ice Witch is an invention of her’s, Judah only acquiesces, hoping that the advance of the world’s glaciation will finally allow her to die. Then, the Ice Witch shows up and kidnaps her to initiate the series’ first of two attempts at recreating End of Evangelion’s Third Impact. Go figure.

Judah’s desperation for death is somewhat interesting, but her main role in the story is ultimately to remind Agni of his sister, and to provide him with a blank slate to turn into his pedo-incestuous wife. The fact that she’s one of the most developed characters in the story is an indictment of Fire Punch in and of itself.

Like the rest of the series’ characters, she mostly serves as a component of an outer world which is little more than a macrocosm of Agni’s arc. After Togata gets reverse-key-thrown out of the narrative, the extreme sexual violence of Fire Punch’s world remains solely as a floating signifier of the broader violence which traverses Agni’s character.

The best case in point I can provide here is the character of Sun. At the very beginning of the story, when Agni first becomes engulfed in flames, he comes across Sun as a lost and starving eight-year old boy. Sun follows Agni around despite his (half-hearted) disapproval, and Agni discovers that he is a Blessed with the power to control electricity.

When they’re both found by Behemdorg soldiers, Agni saves Sun from being raped and later dying in an avalanche caused by his electricity. Agni subsequently fails to stop him from being abducted as a sex slave due to his resemblance to a girl. Sun is discovered to be Blessed as he’s about to be forced to engage in beastiality, and instead gets chained to a bed and used as a human battery for the kingdom.

Sun spends a large part of the story being tortured to emit electricity before he’s freed by Agni and his followers. He only comes back at the end of the story as the leader of the cult that forms around the “God of Fire.” His adoration for Agni has led him to fashion a religious doctrine, Bible and all, out of thin air in the ten years Agni spends playing X-rated house. 

Fire Punch’s last fight is between him and Agni, as Sun grapples with his idol’s failure to live up to his Godly ideal. Sun ultimately dies at Agni's hand, struggling to understand why his God won’t save him.

This is by far my favourite scene from the manga. Sun’s abuse is palpable in his impassioned speeches about the glory of his God, and his inability to engage with Agni as anything but a projection of his own yearning for a saviour truly pulls at my heartstrings.

Still, Fujimoto undeniably underexplores Sun’s character, such that his introduction as the series’ final antagonist feels like yet another key thrown at my now-bruised face. Once again, he sacrifices one of Fire Punch’s strongest narrative elements in favour of Agni, and he doesn’t have anything to show for it. 

I cannot understate the extent to which reading Agni and Sun’s fight at the end of Fire Punch felt like a slap in the face. After over 40 chapters without Togata’s presence to let me pretend that I was reading a manga about something, Sun’s return was a cruel reminder from Fujimoto that I could have been reading about someone who experiences emotions more complex than “everyone loves me” and “everyone hates me.”

In essence, this passage asks its reader “what if instead of throwing keys at you, I had been telling you a compelling story?”

By turning the world of Fire Punch into a macrocosm of his protagonist’s rigid and cliché inner life, Fujimoto sacrifices his story in favour of bare themes, which have very little weight when detached from any sort of tangible narrative. He points at real, visceral pain embodied by his side characters without giving them the agency to be anything but symbols of a more diffuse, ambient pain that makes Agni who he is.

I think we’ve gotten to this point now. Let’s talk about the ubiquityof rape in Fire Punch. By allowing for the obscene sexual violence done to Sun and just about every single female character in his story to bleed into a general ambience which only really informs Agni’s arc, the author shoots himself in the foot with his own key-firing automatic rifle.

It goes without saying that the gendered nature of sexual violence doesn’t evade Fujimoto’s story. In fact, Behemdorg’s higher-ups never miss an occasion to reiterate how utterly normal it is for them to rape women and girls. They say that procreation is sacred, and that women don’t have the same human rights as men.

The abstraction of explicitly gendered and sexualized violence into a broader mosaic which exists mostly to illustrate Agni’s own struggle with the violence of his world is the source of Fire Punch’s worst blunder. This is why I initially compared this manga to Irreversible.

The obscenely long rape of Monica Belluci’s character Alex in Irreversible becomes totally fixed by a textual denial of Alex’s agency afterwards, turning her visceral and embodied experience into the stepping stone for Marcus (Vincent Cassel)’s descent into Hell-on-Earth. Likewise, the unrelenting stream of attempted rape scenes in Fire Punch immobilize their victims, turning them into signs of Agni’s endless agony.

It’s difficult for me to blame those who talk about this manga’s “WTF moments” and absurdity using screencaps of Sun and his fellow slave Neneto being ordered to engage in beastiality when those moments aren’t given very much in the way of context in the first place. If rape doesn’t live past its initial affect within the original narrative, I struggle to blame readers for only engaging with that affect.

Digression aside, there’s not much that I can say about Fire Punch’s ending. Judah sacrifices herself to do another Third Impact and Agni’s memories are wiped. He lives happily ever after in acceptance of the impending doom of their world (because, again, Third Impact) and after a few thousand years of singularity, he finally gets to have sex with his ersatz-sister guilt-free. At least she doesn’t have the mental capacities of a child now!

I truly can’t emphasize how much this ending derives from End of Evangelion. End of Evangelion’s own take on the singularity sees Shinji struggling to come to terms with the impossibility of a truly naked human connection outside of human instrumentality. Fire Punch, on the other hand, ends in its own sea of LCL, because the singularity is actually super fun when you’re having pseudo-incestuous sex in it.

Considering both Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man from a bird’s-eye view, I’m forced to ask myself why one worked so much better than the other. After all, both manga feature no shortage of sexual misconduct, so why is Fire Punch’s treatment of rape so different?

From reading both manga, I can confidently say two things about Fujimoto: he wants to write about sexual violence, and he wants to write male protagonists. I think that Fire Punch fails in its approach because it absorbs its latent sexual violence into an abstraction called Agni. The problem then comes from Agni’s total lack of a relationship to that violence. The many attempted rapes of Sun or Neneto are patently unlike the pain Agni endures, no matter how much the narrative attempts to break them down into artifacts of the violence that animates him.

Denji, on the other hand, experiences sexual violence firsthand. The pain of his grooming and dehumanization might set in after the facts, but they are part of his broader experience. As such, they can coexist with the other forms of pain he endures and inform his character—they’re his.

Fujimoto tells the story of Denji as his own character, whereas he turns each and every character in Fire Punch into a fixed artefact, hoping that the aggregation of their pain into Agni will make his sorrow palpable or at the very least, that it’ll make him less boring. Instead, Agni is the aggregation of their untold stories, the missed opportunities of Fire Punch personified.