Fire Force Edits Third Episode Following Kyoto Animation Arson

Kyoto Animation recently was the victim of a terrible arson in which their 1st Studio’s fire resulted in casualties and lost works. Out of respect for their loss, the third scheduled episode of Fire Force delayed its release until this week. Now that the third episode has premiered in Japan, the anime has confirmed that there have been edits made to its release to out of respectful consideration to Kyoto Animation‘s tragedy.

As reported by Yomiuri Shimbun (via Anime News Network), the MBS channel in Japan noted that they have changed the color of the scenes with flames, and the narration. MBS did not state whether future episodes of the series needed to be edited, but stated, “from episode 4 onward, we will deal [with similar situations] accordingly.”

Fire Force‘s third episode has officially debuted, and you can currently find it streaming with Funimation and Crunchyroll. Fans worried about the edits needn’t worry as fans have not noted any major differences outside of a drastic change to the series’ ending theme sequence, which does depict characters inside a mass of flames. But while that change has been noted by a minority of fans, the vast majority of them appreciate the consideration paid for Kyoto Animation during this time.

Fire Force was first created by Atsushi Okubo for Kodansha’s Weekly Shonen Magazine in 2015, and has since been collected into several volumes. The series follows an elite team of fire manipulators as they and deal with spontaneously combusting people in a alternate take on Tokyo. You’ll soon be able to catch the series as part of Adult Swim’s Toonami programming block too. 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?”

via ANN