Headscratchers / Fire Force

Spontaneous Combustion Immunity?

Are fire ability users immune to the combustion phenomena?

• I'm unsure if it's ever stated, but are people who "face" the flames and survive - and thus gain flame abilities - AKA the 2nd and 3rd Generation flame users like Maki and Shinra, immune to the combustion phenomena? There are two different ways to become an Infernal/1st Generation, or if you survive gain flame abilities. One is the seemingly "normal" way, the random idiopathic ignition of a person, the other is becoming infected with an incinerating bug, which burrows into a person and ignites their heart either one has the potential to create a flame human or a second or third generation user. As an example you have the young boy who was infected with a bug by Rekka, but ultimately survived, not only becoming a third generation user but also gaining the Adola burst flame, making him the 6th pillar my assumption is that he's now immune so that a bug couldn't ignite him and that likewise he's probably immune to the "natural" phenomena as well, and that the same would go for any/all other 2nd and 3rd generation people - those with fire abilities.

How is the world even habitable?

The great disaster supposedly wiped out everything and what we see is stuff people built afterward, but how did they do it? With all the flames and monsters and whatnot, and the possibility that the rebuilders could infernalize at any time, the place looks remarkably functional.

• The great disaster seems to be some form of magical geo-volcanic cataclysm - like a global flood basalt eruption - and resulting global firestorm, along with a great many of the survivors transforming into monsters. Pretty big disaster but I can buy people managing to escape it.

• The problem is magical or not a volcanic firestorm of that nature, both the volcanoes/fire eruptions themselves and the firestorm(s) from pretty much 95% of everything combustible on Earth burning would have put not only an immense amount of soot, ash, smoke and dust into the air, triggering a volcanic winter and a mini-ice age that would have taken a few decades to go away; but would also have created titanic amounts of toxic gasses, chemicals and combustion products, and released millions of tons of various toxic metals like Mercury, Cadmium, Arsenic and Chromium, which would have rained out on to the planet poisoning everything. The gases should have combined to form a toxic nitrogen haze with a persistence of thousands of years that would have kept the planet way below it's pre-disaster average temperature even after the volcanic winter ended.

• Then there's the fact that the Earth of Fire Force is supposed to basically be our own Earth, after this horrific event happens sometime in the near future. How is anyone still alive when given the level of destruction, pretty much every nuclear (fission) reactor on the plant has almost certainly melted down, with each one probably making the Chernobyl disaster look tame? Not only should it be burnt to a crisp, the Earth should be a cold, charred and toxic, radioactive wasteland with a moderately poisonous reddish-brown atmosphere, the sun mostly blotted out by the nitrogen haze in the sky.
  • The fire in the Fire Force-verse might not be actual "fire" as we know it, considering its...dubious origin. Laws of physics might not apply to it.

• As we learn latter on Earth had been transformed and has been running on 'softer' physics, more dependent on perception than hard rules. Since technology and biological limits are much more forgiving, it is not a stretch that humans simply assume they can survive and the collective belief has a tangible effect

Why exactly didn't anyone believe Shinra as a child?

• I mean we have a world where people turning into flaming monsters is a regular occurrence, two people whose bodies were never found, and the surviving child claiming to have seen a monster that night. A close look at him shows that despite the smile he is crying right after the fire so it should be reasonable to assume he is actually in shock and the fact that no charges were apparently ever leveled at him and he was not sent to a Juvenile Detention Center should indicate the rumor he started the fire are not true. In any other setting it would make sense to assume he is an arsonist crying wolf but in this setting it just does not make any sense that none of his neighbors thought an Infernal could have been involved.
  • That's what happens when a massive conspiracy is happening and you're caught in the middle of it. People at the top know but aren't dumb enough to spill the beans.
  • Some of it might be cultural, in the west there is a somewhat prominent line of thought that - especially in certain situations - children can be trusted and believed to a degree to be accurate about events, facts and happenings to the best of their ability to do/be so. And while this might be personally subjective, eastern cultures seem to be much more dismissive of children in general, be it in the scope and scale of their abilities, what they can do and are capable of understanding, or feel and witness; there the accounts and views of a child might be simply immediately dismissed or outright ignored as on principle as unimportant in serious matters. This extends into the very rigid seniority hierarchy that exists in such cultures. There are many examples of an older professional being wrong and making a disastrous mistake because they dismissed out of hand the words of a junior colleague who was in fact right; or else cases where younger professionals who knew their senior colleague(s) were making a mistake but didn't speak up either because they felt that they would be ignored or that they might be punished for speaking out of turn to their senior.

Rekka’s ‘death’

• He gets frozen completely. The person doing the freeze confidently plans to interrogate him later. Then snipers blast out his heart, and maybe lungs, declare ‘mission accomplished’ and eventually leave. The thing is, real-world medicine can actually undo a lot of that damage, at least in the short term. It hasn’t successfully frozen anyone and brought them back to life. Assuming the ice caster solved the issue with mammalian cells wrecked by freezing water, then the snipers didn’t actually kill Rekka, and he can still be interrogated.
  • In the manga, Karim froze Rekka and said he would let him enough window to breath and not die by suffocation. When Rekka was blasted through the thorax, his blood practically flooded the area around the ice -the anime didn't show this. Karim even says Rekka only had minutes before dying. Even if Karim could truly freeze him in an state like you mention, with the White Clad Sniper attacking them, there wasn't enough time to do it. As for why he didn't do this in the first place, poor Karim, he just wanted to take his old friend back to interrogation.

"Lucky Lecher"

• What is Tamaki's "Lucky Lecher" exactly? Something genuinely beyond her control? A side-effect of her pyrokinetic powers? Or just Tamaki being a Covert Pervert exhibitionist with a talent to get herself into compromising situations on planned purpose, but tries to cover it up by accusing others of being the perverts instead as a way to preserve her image and reputation alongside her dignity in the eyes of others? Or is it just a cat-themed play on the notion that cats do NOT like clothes in any regard whatsoever and willing to do anything to escape them, due to triggering their reflexes, triggered by the sensation of being held capture in the grip of a predator when wearing them? What is it?
  • There's a chance it might be a combination of some or all of the above, though fan-service is the most likely reason. There might be some sort of cultural or lore based connection with bad luck and her cat-esque powers, but if there is one it's very obscure. As above though most likely reason though is just fan-service and rule of funny.
  • One of the more clever things about it is instead of or rather in addition to events happening and the male "victim" being blamed, and beaten for laughs for being a pervert, Tamaki acknowledges that some kind of bizarre phenomena is going on,(Lechery Lure, Lucky Lechery Syndrome etc.) and that the males around her are not actually intentionally groping her. This show a level of awareness of the situation that few characters have - though considering just how severe her version of the "syndrome" is, being oblivious to it may just be utterly impossible.
  • During the last chapters we learn the world had been slipping further into working based on human perception, to the point tropes had real power. Tamaki became trope-bearer

Shinra getting through to Sho?

• This has been the central point within the story where suspension of disbelief fell apart, something that has always bugged the heck out of me as being completely illogical even within the context of the story. Sho was taken as an infant and raised by the Evangelist, in real world terms his claims that nothing about Shinra or their mother matters to him should be absolutely true. What he went through wasn't brainwashing in the classical sense, because there was nothing to wash away; he was raised by the big bad to be the commander of her cultist forces, he should have no compassion, no idea of human connection or care for others, no sense of anything but loyalty to her and it should be for all purposes indelible. He was a blank slate when he was taken and there shouldn't be anything Shinra could do, even by sharing a few dozen paltry memories to suddenly change him into something more resembling how he would have been had he not be taken and separated from his brother. Had he been older say 5 to 7-ish when he was taken, and then subject to both a new upbringing and various forms of brainwashing it at least would be somewhat believable that there was someone underneath all the cult commander mentality, as it is though, Sho should be a lost cause.
  • Truth in Television, friend. There have been plenty of cases of people reaching out to others in situations just as mentally awful as Sho´s. Granted, it´s neither easy or fast, but it does and has happened. Also keep in mind that Shinra was basically fighting against hopeless odds and struggling along with pain and injury, all while telling Sho just how much he loves him and desires him back. It is likely that Shinra´s actions just touched Sho in a emotional way, it´s not like Sho is sociopath or something. Last but not least, Sho is still pretty young and some panels in the manga implied that Sho does have at least a few memories from before, which likely helped.
  • Shinra didn't just give some speeches. He was directly bonded to Sho's mind. He shared the memories and feelings exactly as they happened with no distortion or deception in a way that words could never replicate. Sho was experiencing these effectively first-hand. This is far beyond any normal deprogramming method, so it having a far more drastic effect than any normal method could is to be expected.

• Why does Lord Death think pyrokinesis is too dangerous for humanity to have but not Soul Wavelength or magic?
  • A combination of several reasons comes to mind
    • Their pyrokinesis was enhanced when the law of reality weakened, to the point it allowed feats on the level of an early Adolla Burst even non-users developed some spontaneously. Too much easy power, especially since after being remade the world is even more cartoony (to the point humans can become monsters even), which would only empower pyrokinetics further
    • It is actual fire, destructive by nature, even by accident
    • Unlike Soul Wavelenght, pyrokinesis was not an inherent part of humans, it came from Adolla/another plane
    • This is a supposition but magic had yet to earn the reputation of 'swaying' the users/witches into destructive habits. Inca seems to have started that thrend
    • Same for anything Madness-related, it was too early for anyone to know