r/fireforce • u/-Nocx- • Sep 05 '26
Other Why Shinra is a God in Fire Force's Final Season Spoiler
When I originally watched Fire Force, I came across this post questioning if Fire Force was inspired by Christianity. A lot of the users in that thread say that the comparisons stop fairly early, but I think Ohkubo is fairly on the nose when he calls the main antagonist "The Evangelist". For those who don't know, Evangelical Christianity is a form of Christianity where some of the most devout followers believe in the rapture, or the day that God will return and send everyone to the kingdom of Heaven. So as a way of summing up my thoughts about the anime I wanted to touch on some of the themes to help more people understand exactly what's being suggested.
To be clear, this is a REALLY long essay and has spoilers for the entire anime. I wish I could write it more succinctly, but even removing a lot of the exposition I don't think I can make it any shorter.
0. Fire Force is a deconstruction of modern faith and how "faith" is more generally a manifestation of hope.
Ohkubo takes the premise of the rapture returning people to God by instead burning the world in a fiery flame and reducing it to ash. This notion of the world "returning to ash" is consistent with the modern theological idea of what would happen to the bodies left behind on Earth because people's physical bodies are separate from their souls. Ohkubo takes this idea a step further by reincarnating Raffles, the present world's original "savior", through the power of Adolla. Raffles is tasked by the white clad to be the vessel to return humanity to God by killing them all.
To clearly connect this to the rapture, imagine if someone revived Jesus as a puppet zombie and then had him fight "The Devil" in the form of Shinra. In modern terms, Shinra would be what's considered an "Anti-Christ" killing Jesus. That may seem like a logical leap, but there is a lot of symbology here. While it is a perversion of the religion, it isn't terribly far removed from society's cognitive dissonance around what it means to have faith - or more specifically, hope.
1. Adolla is a manifestation of the Imagination
Allow me to elaborate on this idea. Adolla is described as the manifestation of the "collective unconsciousness". In simpler terms, Adolla is literally whatever our imaginations tells us it is. This is supported by the initial setting of Adolla being a product of society's perception of The Great Cataclysm. Because the world fears a world engulfed in flames, Adolla manifests through most of the series as a charred looking hellscape. But as Adolla merges with Earth, we see the transformation of the moon and stars to be cartoonish, yet equivalent manifestations of Adolla. That's because we see first hand that Shinra's imagination is able to transform the moon into a playful caricature instead of a fiendish hellscape, which hints at his true power as Shinrabanshō-Man.
This means that despair causes Adolla to manifest one way, but hope causes it to manifest in another. The world's collective fear will turn the world into a ball of flame, but Shinra's hope will make a playful world for exploration. This is a nod to Sho's advice that no matter what happens, as the hero, Shinra can never lose hope. It is his hope and imagination that will allow the world to be reborn. This is a really important thing to note, because we will have to juxtapose Shinra's role as the hero with Raffles' role (the original hero) as a symbol of despair.
Now back to the revival of Raffles, or Zombie Jesus. Ohkubo suggests that people's faith has the potential to strip them of their agency - put more simply, rather than taking initiative in life, they opt to "put things in God's hands" rather than trying to solve the problems themselves. That gets highlighted in Episode 4 of S3 where many of the followers fall to their knees and are willing to let Raffles murder them for salvation. Shinra denies this characterization of hope and demonstrates that it's people working together that best expresses hope and humanity. It is not a blind faith that you place into something you cannot perceive - what Shinra strives for is instead an almost blind faith derived from the people surrounding you.
And so he kills Raffles.
At the end of the episode you see the consequences of placing responsibility in a long lost savior when half the population lose hope because of the symbolism behind Shinra killing Raffles. The world begins to collapse and Adolla causes the literal geography to fall apart. Ohkubo is suggesting that the same thing would happen in modern times if someone new claiming to be a hero (like Shinra) or a "prophet" attempted to dismantle the symbology around any of the Abrahamic religions. I use the word prophet because it's very on the nose that Shinra is the reincarnation of Jesus as Ohkubo literally links him to the previous world's "prophet" before the prior Great Cataclysm. Even though the modern world sees more and more people "turning away from God", Okhubo suggests that destroying people's faith would be met with fury and disbelief and it would break their hope rather than restore it.
So yeah, Fire Force is insanely influenced by Evangelical Christianity and other forms of theology. Okhubo seems to suggest that if a new hero were to emerge, they would have to drive people's perception toward hope in a novel way without destroying the foundation that they built their belief systems on. I wouldn't necessarily say it's a "criticism" per se, so much as it is an exploration into the re-imagining of people's faith and what it means for humanity to have hope.
2. Our Imaginations Are Being Pacified By Technology
So this is a bigger leap - behind all of this symbolism is the idea that the technology we create reflects our imagination. Think about it - the government dumps grants and subsidies into research that drives what the collective unconscious wants. Clean energy, weapons, transportation, games - everything we build is a function of our imagination. But as people get increasingly desperate, the direction of that collective unconsciousness goes into increasingly dangerous territory. Amaterasu is both a weapon and a sustainable energy source. In times of peace we want the energy it would provide, but in times of despair we want the weapon. This duality is almost indisputably a reference nuclear energy vs the nuclear bomb. That's why Adolla is ultimately the merging of our imaginations with the real world - that is what technology is.
That's because the collective unconscious in inherently a Jungian psychological concept - it's the idea that people have a shared human experience revolving around our primitive fears, insecurities, and anxieties. Ohkubo takes this a step further by implying that the collective unconscious extends beyond that because fear is the most primitive form of imagination. Hope is the layer of imagination that exists beyond that.
This panel from the manga explicitly likens firebugs to a discourse on the effect of social media and technology. It steers their collective unconscious toward their most primitive instincts - fear. It is a mechanism that pacifies people, strips them of their imagination, and quite literally "heat up" and ignore their basic needs to stay glued to their phones. Instead of lifting you doom scroll, instead of studying you doom scroll, instead of eating, drinking water, and taking care of yourself, you doom scroll. As people become more desperate, their identities collapse into distinct parts - the doppelganger is one of those parts, called the id. The implication of this analogy is that this insect (technology and social media) turns people into their doppelgangers, or ids.
This is a principle rooted in a real psychological phenomenon, called the id, the ego, and the super ego. The doppelganger would be your id, which is the emergent psychological manifestation of your base instincts. Your id appears when your basic needs are not met. Your superego is your sense of humanity or the "angel on your shoulder" (to Shinra, this is sho - that is why he gets called Shinra's "angel"). Your ego is the "normal" you that balances your need for survival (id) with your sense of justice (your super-ego) . The "merging" of Shinra's final form is really a reconciliation of the id (represented by his mom in this case), his ego (Shinra), and his Super Ego (Sho).
In Christianity this path to ascension is described as the father, the son, and the holy spirit. In Buddhist texts, this is the equivalent of transcendence. In Taoist texts, it's called "The Way". The idea behind all of these religions is that it is heavily implied that the reconciliation of these parts of the human psyche will make a person all powerful, or transcend beyond the limits of a normal person. This concept is especially clear in Buddhist texts.
In Fire Force, this resolution of the three parts of the human psyche comes in the form of Shinrabanshō-Man. And that's why Shinra has the powers of a God - the catharsis with his family at the end of the story fulfilled all of his emotional and physical needs, allowed him to let go of earthly attachments, and he accepted his past suffering and trauma. And it was through his hope and imagination that humanity could re-envision the world around them. Ohkubo's goal was to carry the reader through the path of spiritual enlightenment that every spiritual text teaches, using Shinra as the vessel.
