Fire Force’s Latest Toonami Episode Censors Controversial Scene

Fire Force, metaphorically and literally, is one of the hottest new anime series of the Summer, and fans are certainly enjoying new episodes of the series’ English dub as part of Adult Swim’s Toonami block. While the series has edited its broadcast previously out of respect for the victims lost in the Kyoto Animation fire, the recent airing of the series’ third episode on Toonami has started a bit of a heated debate among fans for censoring a scene.

In Episode 3 of the series, “The Rookie Soldier Fire Games,” fans are introduced to the more fan-service heavy character Tamaki Kotatsu. In her first interaction with the main character Shinra, her “Lucky Lecher Lure” activates and Shinra unwittingly places her hand under her top and on her chest, and then in her pants bottoms.

But on the Saturday, August 10th airing of the series on Toonami, these moments are gleaned over in a notable way. While the English dub on FunimationNOW includes the shot of Shinra’s hands going where they’re not supposed to go, the Toonami broadcast version instead holds on Tamaki’s reacting face for several beats.

Pausing on her reaction faces for the scene rather than depicting what occurs, fans took to Twitter to note how strange the edit was given how the audio of the scene still played. So there’s a notable something missing, even to fans that have yet to see the series. It’s even more odd considering another “Lucky Lecher Lure” scene that makes it in later:

Though there’s no explanation as to why the episode’s been edited as of this writing, Toonami co-founder Jason DeMarco did respond to one fan on Twitter about the situation and confirmed that Toonami is not editing the episodes, “I dunno why ppl keep asking this, but we are not editing the Fire Force episodes.”

Fire Force officially made its anime debut on July 5th, and you can currently find it streaming with Funimation and Crunchyroll alongside its run on Saturday evenings as part of Adult Swim’s Toonami block. Fire Force was first created by Atsushi Okubo for Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine in 2015, and has since been collected into several volumes. Kodansha USA has licensed the series for an English language release, and they describe Fire Force as such:

“Terror has paralyzed the clockwork metropolis of Tokyo! Possessed by demons, people have begun to burst into flame, leading to the establishment of a special firefighting team: the Fire Force, ready to roll on a moment’s notice to fight spontaneous combustion anywhere it might break out. The team is about to get a very unique addition: Shinra, a boy who possesses the unique power to run at the speed of a rocket, leaving behind the famous “devil’s footprints” (and destroying his shoes in the process). Can the Fire Force discover the source of this strange phenomenon and put a stop to it? Or will the city burn to ashes first?”