AKA: 火狩りの王 (Title translates to "The Firecatcher Lord", per Wiki)

Genre: Sci-Fi

Length: Television series, 20 episodes, 24 minutes each

Distributor: Currently availble streaming on crunchyroll.

Content Rating: 14+ (Violence.)

Related Series: N/A

Also Recommended: The Third: The Girl with the Blue Eye

Notes: Based on novels written by Rieko Hinata and Akihiro Yamada, published by Holp Shuppan

Rating:

The Fire Hunter

Synopsis

Touko is a young village girl whose life gets saved by a Fire Hunter, at the expense of his own. (In THIS world, humans have become somehow much more combustible, bursting into flame in the very presence of natural fire; but various beasts contain Fiendfire, which can be harnessed (with some elaborate precautions) to do the things natural fire used to do. The Fire Hunters are the ones who gather this.) Touko heads for the capital to try to return the Fire Hunter's sickle, and his hunting dog, to the Hunter's family.

Review

Call this a flawed attempt at an epic. It suffers from a sluggish pace, and is visually unappealing: the human characters are pallid, while the backgrounds vary from charcoal gray to olive drab. And when Touko finally makes it to the capital, we're introduced to a myriad of characters and entities, yet at the end I was STILL unsure about what some of their agendas were, or exactly how they fit into how this world came to be.

Let's start with the list of entities. Well, we've regular (if now highly flammable) humans. (Side note here: I once read a debate on whether "inflammable" (which is the preference of pedantic traditionalists) was always to be preferred, but I remember that the late Isaac Asimov argued that since the "in-" prefix usually meant "not", "flammable" conveyed the meaning much better. I'm going with Ike in this review.) We also have the Spiders, which, confusingly, are NOT spiders at all; they're humans who apparently can MOVE like spiders, and can control insects. (I THINK that Hinako, the sister of our male lead, got transformed into a Spider, but I'm not sure of that, or, if she was, how long it lasted. That's just ONE of the things I couldn't quite figure out here.) There are Treefolk (like Tolkien's Ents, it seems) who are only allowed to roam freely in the countryside. There are also the Gods, who ALSO seem to be transformed humans; at least some of them represent the Japanese traditional elements (wood, water, wind), and their representatives are plotting against each other, as well as the Spiders, etc. (This is the most convoluted plot I've seen since The Skull Man.) And finally there are the Okibis, the hosts of our male lead (again, I swear I'll GET to him), who ALSO seem to be against each other as well as against everyone else. (Mrs. Okibi, in particular, is just horrible; her husband can at least pretend to be a civil human being.) We've got a couple other Fire Hunters thrown into the mix as well. We don't have a kitchen sink to also throw in, but we've something maybe even more outrageous: a returning SPACECRAFT that's connected to something called The Flickering Flame, a position which has been foisted on a very unwilling girl named Kira, our male lead's would-be girlfriend (and the Okibi's daughter.)

Look, it wasn't any easier on ME to avoid naming the male lead, and I'll finally relent. His name is Koushi, and his original approach to the Okibis was to cure sis Hinako of a mystery disease. My original hypothesis for their interest in him was that he might be working on some way to fireproof people, but it's more like they want him to work on a defensive weapon. (The Okibis apparently knew that trouble was brewing.)

By the way, even the "Fiendfire" the people extract from beasts is not exactly safe for humans; when we see it being installed in a machine, the person doing this has to wear a full fireproof suit, and put it into a tightly sealed chamber. There's a plot thread about the Spiders somehow actually having a way to restore relative fire-resistance to humans, but as far as I can tell that thread was simply left dangling. I never DID quite understand why "muku paper" was so important. AND OF COURSE I NEVER SAW A FULL EXPLANATION OF HOW HUMANS ENDED UP LIKE THIS IN THE FIRST PLACE. If Kaina of the Great Snow Sea had some problems with chemistry, THIS one seems to have issues with physics.

Koushi and Touko are really the stars of this cumbersomely large cast. Koushi is, I guess, brilliant; certainly I would never have been able to make the sweeping deductions he makes based on the evidence the show actually presents. As for Touko, she spends much of the show with an expression of mixed shock and dismay on her face, though we do find out that her inheriting the sickle and hunting dog of a Fire Hunter was maybe not such a coincidence after all.

The Rec this time is a show whose plotting somewhat reminded me of this one- complete with some loose ends, and pieces that don't quite fit- but THAT one was much better paced, and had better developed, more sympathetic characters. And while both this one and the Rec have narrators, in the Rec the narrator was really largely superfluous, while HERE a narrator is insufficient.

I sat through all 20 episodes of this, but it was a painful slog toward the end. I don't THINK my own stupidity was why I never understood much of this show. Well, not JUST my stupidity, anyway. — Allen Moody

Recommended Audience: Crunchy says 14+, for violence.