im very normal about fuuta in general but i dont think im ever going to emotionally recover from his fire motif and what it represents for his character and how he reflects the greater theme of justice so that means i must rant about it
(more under the cut because this got longer than i expected whoopsies)
so anyway fire is pretty obviously supposed to be symbolic of his passion for justice right? that fire is all over the place in bring it on. he's wielding it to take down enemies, his signature weapon is a flaming sword. it's what he uses to lead the campaign against the people he's after, the people he's deemed in the wrong.
it's a fucking flaming sword, it's badass as hell!!!! it's what a hero of justice, a knight, would use!!!! it's cool as shit, it's his symbol of justice.
that's how he sees his justice in trial 1.
he's righteous, he wants so badly to believe he was a hero, he was doing it all for a good cause, for justice. his passion for justice was a tool he used to meet those ends, to be a hero, to wave it valiantly in the face of enemies.
the fire, however, is conspicuously absent once he's noticed the blood on his hands
interestingly, despite backdraft as a song title being much more related to his fire motif than bring it on, fire is actually surprisingly absent from the mv's visuals. fire, as in actual orange burning fire, doesn't show up much at all in backdraft except for when both fuuta and his victim begin turning to ashes, and a short bit near the end right after the last chorus when the spraycan explodes in fuuta's face. you know what the mv does show a lot of though?
smoke. and ash. the byproducts of a fire, the byproducts of fuuta's passion for justice.
bringing it back to firefighting for a moment: as many people have already pointed out, backdraft as a firefighting term refers to when a fire that has consumed all available oxygen suddenly explodes when more oxygen is made available, such as when a window or door breaks. the thing about fire hazards, though, is if the fire and the heat don't do someone in, usually it's the smoke. the smoke inhalation causes breathing difficulties and suffocation, making it even more difficult for a person to escape the fire.
in backdraft, instead of fire itself, what we're shown is these byproducts of a fire. the smoke is damaging to human health, and the ash shows that the fire has burned things up and caused destruction, in this case killing someone. all we're shown is the negative results of a fire, in sharp contrast to its badass, positive portrayal in bring it on.
hell, even fuuta himself starts turning to ashes and the spraycan explodes in his face, showing how even he is experiencing the negative results of a fire that has gotten out of his control, how even he has gotten burned by his passion for justice. or, is it es' desire for justice?
translation of fuuta's t2 vd by onigiriico
Me, too! I was like that, too! I also didn't think it'd turn out that way!
You and I are exactly the same breed! The only difference between us is the clothes we're wearing.
fuuta's justice and es' justice, it's all the same in his head now, he directly tells es that they're the same, that we're the same. it's all the same hunger for justice that ends up causing harm even if that wasn't the intention.
you know that saying that fire is a good servant but a bad master? i think that's pretty applicable to fuuta's situation. his passion for the pursuit of justice was great when it was still a tool, a sword he could wield, after all he did manage to shed light on some people's wrongs and bring them to justice. but once it exploded, when it became a backdraft that even he could no longer control, it did more damage than he intended.
it burned even him, it killed a middle schooler. and he recognizes that in backdraft. he only shows us the ways fire that becomes a hazard can go wrong.
translation of fuuta's t2 vd by onigiriico
What did I do? All I did was say that what's wrong is wrong! I was just going off at a bad person online!
I didn't think they would die! I just thought that wrong things are wrong, and that a crime is a crime! You get that, don't you? See? Aren't we the same?
it's just. fire is such a good metaphor for the message of fuuta's character and his arc. it's an amazing illustration of how dangerous it is when you feed a desire for justice too much, when you forget to put a boundary on how you handle that fire. eventually the fire spreads just like how passion for justice becomes zealotry, until more and more things fall under what you consider to be 'punishable' by your standards and goes out of control to hurt people that probably didn't deserve it. it's a warning to set proper boundaries on our own definition and desire for justice and what's 'right' so the good intentions doesn't spiral into harm. it's a reflection of our attitudes towards milgram as the audience responsible for their justice and forgiveness. it's amazing i love it i love fuuta's fire symbolism i love fuuta's character arc and i love milgram's writing so so so much
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Having finally read the Nimona comic (it’s very good, everyone please go read it) I can’t help but find describing it as being about the power of incredible violence to defeat an authoritarian state, as I've seen done, to be both kind of misleading and ultimately reductive to the story as a whole.
Yes there is incredible violence in the comic and it was in the end what tore down the corrupt system, but it was also Nimona's downfall, destroyed her relationship with her only friend (and led to her (temporary) death by his very hand as he could no longer stand by her and her actions, even as he never judged her, recognized her role as a victim and tried to save her until the end), put countless civilians in danger, and ultimately did little to nothing to address how to actually fix the problems of the system to keep them from returning. In fact, Nimona as a character shows little interest in fixing anything. She suggests killing the king and having Ballister take his place, despite Ballister neither wanting this nor having the experience to pull it off (and would, in fact, only result in replacing one king with another rather than lead to an entirely new system, as is often the case with bloody uprisings). When people start dying from the illness they spread, Ballister wants to immediately stop it; Nimona suggests they let more people die to further rile up hatred and anger against the institution. Nimona isn't a good guy looking to save people; she's an angry, hurt girl looking to hurt those who hurt her and those who have the potential to hurt her in the future (even when Ballister is one of those people). She is the villain the state turned her into.
And that is kind of the point I see the story making. Not 'you need incredible violence to tear down an authoritarian state' as something good and celebratory, but rather 'an authoritarian state will ultimately lead to its own downfall by creating monsters of its own making, and while said downfall is needed the fact that it has to happen at all is deeply tragic because there are no winners here'. Nimona isn't a villain-villain (the true antagonist is obviously still the Institution), but she isn't a hero either. She's a tragic figure with a tragic end that the state brought upon itself by mistreating its people. She doesn't stick around to help rebuild and heal, and she doesn't (to our knowledge) get to see her home become a better place. It's a bittersweet end where the very person who tore down the oppressors is too broken to enjoy the end result. It isn't a story about rebellion, it's a story about the inherent and justified self-destruction of authoritarian systems.
(Writing it out like this, I realize that, thematically, it’s very similar to n.k. jemisin's broken earth trilogy, which you should all also read because it is incredible and not very friendly to authoritarian states.)
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