There is one, actually.
Major spoilers for Fire Force manga ahead!
Summary:
- Many wonder if Fire Force and Soul Eater are connected.
- In Fire Force, there’s a character who looks just like a Soul Eater character.
- The Fire Force protagonist created the world of Soul Eater, but fans didn’t like that plot point.
Fire Force (Enen no Shouboutai) has been a pretty popular series — that goes for both the manga and the anime. The adaptation is getting a third season in the future, and fans actually care about it again now that it seems to be getting a full adaptation.
The actual reason for Fire Force’s popularity isn’t its premise or story, though. It’s simply the hype from the author’s other manga, Soul Eater, carrying over. With Soul Eater being iconic, Fire Force was destined for being at least moderately popular.
Fans, however, noticed some connections between the two series — and they’re more complicated than you might think.
One of the Soul Eater characters appears in Fire Force
In one of the episodes of Fire Force (more specifically, Episode 18 of S2), you can see Spirit Albarn — also known as Death Scythe — who is the father of Maka Albarn, one of the main characters of Soul Eater. This made fans think the two series are somewhat connected or even take place in the same world, though everything else suggests otherwise.
The worlds of Soul Eater and Fire Force are so different they can’t possibly be the same. In fact, there are barely any similarities between the two. Nothing suggested one is a parallel universe to the other, either, and so, many fans believe Death Scythe’s appearance in Fire Force is simply an Easter egg.
They’re actually directly connected
While that particular episode might really be just a sneaky Easter egg to tease the fans, the two anime are actually connected — and not in the way anime-only fans ever expect them to be. Believe it or not, Fire Force is a prequel — yes, not a sequel — of Soul Eater.
At the end of the Fire Force manga, we learn that its protagonist, Shinra, created Lord Death — and the entirety of Soul Eater’s world. This connection is absolutely insane, as not many things pointed at it before — though things were getting so ridiculous that some fans actually expected it.
Still, this plot point is actually controversial for fans of both series. Soul Eater fans feel that their series is essentially secondary to a later-released Fire Force, but many consider Fire Force to be much worse.
For Fire Force fans, the lack of connection to Soul Eater was one of the initial selling points, and the manga didn’t rely on being related to the mangaka’s previous work until the very end. Overall, the connection is there, but nobody really likes it because it’s too contrived and came out of left field.