The World Isn’t Ready For An Anime Adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto’s Fire Punch… But Someone Should Make It Already 

To this day, Fire Punch remains a divisive work. Some see it as gratuitous spectacle; others as a valuable piece of art that weaponizes discomfort to interrogate morality, trauma, and faith. Either way, its message was never meant to be easy. It was meant to be felt. 

Thanks to this, Fire Punch transformed from being just another manga debut to a provocation for animation studios. 

And that’s what makes this story such a whispered pie-in-the-sky anime adaptation. It’s not just the violence—it’s the vibe. The manga had an air of “getting away with it,” like Fujimoto snuck an adult anime-inspired fever dream past editorial by dressing it up in shonen cosplay. It’s a miracle it ran at all, let alone weekly. 

Fire Punch was serialized on Shonen Jump+ from April 2016 to January 2018, marking Fujimoto’s first officially published work in English following his one-shot Love Is Blind. After eight volumes of surreal brutality and moral whiplash, Fujimoto returned that December with what felt like a blank check from Shueisha—launching Chainsaw Man in Weekly Shonen Jump.

And the rest is history.

Fire Punch—brutal, nihilistic, and genre-defying—was the first instance Fujimoto masqueraded as shonen while operating with the raw intensity of more mature and brutal seinen series like Attack on Titan, Vagabond, and Vinland Saga. To casual readers, Fire Punch felt like it had slipped through the editorial cracks of Shueisha’s magazine, smuggling in a narrative far more transgressive than its platform traditionally published. In its wake, Fire Punch helped carve out Shonen Jump+’s reputation as the edgier, more adult sibling to Weekly Shonen Jump, where moral ambiguity and narrative chaos ran rampant and were encouraged. 

Fire Punch is arguably the closest manga has come to a modern-day Berserk—a revenge saga wrapped in existential dread, where the protagonist evolves not just through violence and trauma, but through the fractured souls he meets along the way on the road to recovery. Agni begins as a cursed wanderer, burning endlessly, gradually becoming something mythic: a godlike figure whose suffering becomes salvation for those seeking warmth in the frozen wasteland of 2200 Earth. His curse, once a symbol of torment, transforms into a genuine blessing of hope. 

But for all its thematic ambition, Fire Punch is a brutal sell for TV. Its unflinching depictions of sexual violence, psychological trauma, and moral collapse make it far more abrasive than Dan Da Dan’s early episode ick—an awkwardness that previously gave Crunchyroll pause about promoting Science Saru’s otherwise blockbuster adaptation. 

And yet, Fire Punch is nonetheless a chef d’oeuvre worth biting into—splintered seabass bones, gristle, and all. It’s not a clean cut of genre meat; it’s a dish that invites you to choke on it. In contrast to the polished, crowd-pleasing works—your Demon Slayer, Jujutsu Kaisen, and My Hero Academia—Fire Punch signaled Fujimoto’s intent to dismantle the formulaic churn of the post-Dragon Ball shonen conveyor belt. No tournament arcs. No friendship speeches. No plucky “little meow meow” protagonists whose sunny disposition screams, “I’m just a bean who wants to make the world better”—and yes, it’s always a he—even if that means punching his way through adversity. Agni isn’t a hero molded by hope; he’s a weapon forged in agony, and Fire Punch doesn’t ask you to root for him but question whether cheering him on is even the point. 

Fujimoto made his intentions clear from the jump: Fire Punch was designed to be a genre shapeshifter. “Create manga that changes genre as the story unfolds,” he said, “and go in a completely different direction from what readers had expected.” True to form, Fujimoto cited Gone Girl and Puella Magi Madoka Magica—a David Fincher thriller and studio Shaft’s magical girl deconstruction—as touchstones for stories that generate buzz by pulling the rug out from under their audience. And pivot he did—through revenge tragedy, religious satire, dystopian sci-fi, and surreal comedy—often within the same chapter. 

It’s a storytelling philosophy readers are still reckoning with in Chainsaw Man Part Two, where tonal whiplash isn’t a bug, it’s a feature. Fans oscillate between “He’s cooking” and “kill Fujimoto” as the series lurches from terminally online madcap absurdity to soul-crushing despair, turning Chainsaw Man into “Painsaw Man” on a dime. It’s a fuse Fujimoto began to light in Fire Punch.

Fujimoto Cycle
by inChainsawfolk

The anime world is already steeped in Fujimoto’s influence, whether it realizes it or not. His former Fire Punch and Chainsaw Man manga assistants have become genre-defining forces in their own right with Yuji Kaku’s Hell’s Paradise, Tatsuya Endo’s Spy x Family, and Yukinobu Tatsu’s Dan Da Dan. Each of these has received popular anime adaptations that have further evolved and echoed Fujimoto’s sensibilities. And the next wave of manga is already forming. Tohru Kuramori, another alum of Fujimoto’s creative orbit, has fans buzzing over Centuria, a dark fantasy series that’s shaping up to be one of the most inventive manga on Shonen Jump+—a testament to the “Fujimoto effect” leaving shards of inspiration to a new generation of creatives to build something stranger than what came before. 

And yet, Fire Punch is still a masterpiece worth celebrating. It dismantles the formulaic churn of post-Dragon Ball shonen—where dark fantasy often feels more like a Hot Topic parody mise en scène than catharsis, and isekai continues its endless loop of derivative escapism. If any studio risks a Fire Punch adaptation, it won’t just be a gamble—it’ll be a seismic shift. The kind of show that could embolden creators to push boundaries, the way Fujimoto has with his own assistants. At least for now, the long-standing “what-if” of a supposed Fire Punch anime remains suspended in limbo as a challenge few studios presume to meet.

But let’s entertain the possibility—just for a moment—that a studio steps up to the plate. Maybe it’s Chainsaw Man’s Mappa. Maybe it’s Science Saru. Or maybe it’s CygamesPictures: the dark horse with Uma Musume clout and The Summer Hikaru Died pedigree that has proven they’ve got the juice to handle both existential dread and gacha-fueled chaos. If any of them goes out on a limb to adapt Fire Punch, what we’d get wouldn’t be just another anime but a David Lynch-style litmus test. 

Because Fire Punch isn’t just shock value committed to a page: beneath its gore pulses an emotional and thematic depth that rivals Chainsaw Man. It’s a story that would demand confrontation, not comfort, challenging the industry and its audience to reckon with its unflinching sincerity. 

Fire Punch isn’t just a manga worth reading—it’s a dare for an anime studio to be bold enough to animate a modern-day Berserk, and in doing so, trigger a paradigm shift. We’re already seeing the ripple effects where shonen protagonists like Gachiakuta’s Rudo feel more like Denji’s spiritual successor than another Goku descendant. The mold of shonen protagonists are cracking, so why not shatter the bust entirely and see what comes as creatives pick up the pieces?  

With Fujimoto’s untouched back catalogue running thin, it’s only a matter of time before someone bites the bullet and sets the industry ablaze with an adaptation of a manga deemed unadaptable. When that day comes, God help anime fans—and the reading comprehension devil on their shoulders—because Fire Punch will be an inextinguishable reckoning.

Isaiah Colbert is a former Kotaku writer and contributor at Aftermath and Gizmodo who loves to write things about anime and put them on the internet. You can follow him @shineyezehuhh.bsky.social.