Fan Service Ruined Fire Force For Me
Everyone shōnen series has a little fan service. It’s an accepted convention of a genre targeted mainly towards men. And even as a reader who doesn't care much for it, I tolerate it to a degree. Because, most of the time, it doesn’t interrupt the story. However, fan service ruined Fire Force for me.
Tamaki Kotatsu, in my opinion, is a character defined only by one quality, and that is Fanservice. Her clumsiness combined with her Lucky Lecher Lure means that most of the time she is on page one or more male characters end up groping her.
Introduced in Chapter Five - The Rookie Fire Soldier Games. Tamaki features on eight out of seventeen pages of this chapter. And, three of those pages are dedicated to one long joke of her tripping and being groped or ending up in lewd positions with various male characters.
In the ten volumes of Fire Force, I read before dropping it. Whenever Tamaki was featured, she was always used as a cheap erotic joke. And for me, it killed my enjoyment of the series.
Her next major appearance was during the, VS. Special Fire Force Company 1 arc. Where we interrupt the climactic fight between Lieutenant Rekka and Shinra for four pages while Tamaki is groped and divested of clothing. Each time Rekka punches Shinra he gets knocked back straight onto Tamaki. Landing in these awkward erotic positions and divesting Tamaki of a piece of her dress. By the end of this scene, she is in nothing but her underwear. For anime watchers, this scene happens in episode nine and takes up about a minute of the runtime
This scene illustrates my problem with Tamaki's Lucky Lecher Lure. There is this high-tension fight going on, and we drop it for a "comedic" erotic moment. Even though Rekka is monologuing before he punches Shinra onto Tamaki, the tension of the scene hasn't dropped. We are learning about Rekka's motivation and new things about the world. And it clicks for Shinra, Rekka could have killed his mother, and the nun's and orphans that Sister Iris grew up with. Enraged Shinra leaps in, and the action continues, except it doesn't. Instead, all the tension drains from this scene as Shinra is thrown back onto Tamaki and we get pages of gratuitous fan service. And that's all Tamaki is ever used for, cheap, gratuitous fan service.
After this arc Tamaki gets demoted from her original Company, Company 1, to Company 8 which promotes her to the main cast. But she doesn’t get much page time beyond her role as fan service till the Netherworld Arc.
This lack of significant page time isn't unusual when compared to the rest of Company 8. Shinra and Arthur get the most page time as the main characters while I would class the rest of Company 8 as secondary characters. For page time Hinawa and Obi rank higher than Iris, Maki, and Tamaki due to their superiority in the station. Because of this, they often get the expository dialogue. But like Maki and Tamaki only end up with a dedicated fight scene every couple of volumes.
In volume eight Tamaki gets a dedicated fight scene with Sister Iris as apart of the Netherworld Arc. Despite despising Tamaki and her Lucky Lecher Lure, this is an interestingly choreographed fight. It makes use of Lucky Lecher Lure to blindside her opponent Assault, allowing Sister Iris to sneak up on him and knock him out. I would have appreciated this more had Fire Force not already exhausted the joke of Tamaki's Lucky Lecher Lure. It may have been funny the first time, but not the tenth, twentieth, or hundredth time.
What little I can find on future chapters Tamaki continues to be utilised as cheap fanservice in most of her appearances. Her fight in volume nine against Assault that was an amusing one-off joke, well that's running gag now, according to the wiki. So, when I got to the end of volume ten, I questioned whether Tamaki was enough to ruin the series for me. Ultimately that answer became yes. And I wasn't going to wait two, five, ten volumes for her just to become tolerable. So I choose to drop Fire Force.
Ending Ramble
Some of you might be wondering if Tamaki bothered you that much why not bow out sooner. Well, I got the ten volumes in a humble bundle cheaply. So I thought I might as well read all of them before making an ultimate decision.
Also, besides Tamaki, there was a lot I enjoyed about Fire Force. And I think if the fan service doesn't bother its worth your time to read. But for me, the story just ground to the halt every time Tamaki had significant page time as she was groped and undressed. And it killed the enjoyment I did get from the manga.
If Kodansha does another collaboration with Humble Bundle that has Fire Force in, I'll probably buy it. But I'm not going to go out of my way to pick up the volumes physically or digitally.
What are your thoughts, does Tamaki grate on your nerves too or is it just me? Leave a comment down below and thanks for reading.