I want to add explosions to my 2D game, but im having a hard time with the architecture. Several game elements might be responsible for explosions, like, lets say, explosive barrels and bullets (and there might be chain reactions with close barrels). The only options i can come up with are:

1 - Having an array of explosions and treat them as a game element as important as any other

Pros: Having a single array which is updated and drawn with all the other game element arrays makes it more organized and simple to update, and the explosive barrels at a first glance would be easy to create, simply by passing the explosion array as a pointer to each explosive barrel constructor

Cons: It might be hard for the bullets to add an explosion to the vector, since bullets are shot by a Weapon class which is located in every mob, so lets say, if i create a new enemy and add it to the enemy array, that enemy will have a weapon and functions to be able to use it, and if i want the weapon (rocket launcher in this case) to have access to the explosions array to be able to add a new one, id have to pass the explosion array as a pointer to the enemy, which would then pass it to the weapon, which would pass it to the bullets (ugly chain). Another problem I can think of is a little more weird: If im checking the collisions between explosions and barrels (so i create a chain reaction) and i detect an explosion colliding with a barrel, if i add a new explosion while im iterating the explosions java will trow an exception. So this is kinda annoying, i cant iterate through the explosions and add a new explosion, i must do it in another way...

The other way which isnt really well thought yet is to just add an explosive component to every element that might explode so that when it dies, it explodes or something, but i dont have good ways on implementing this theory either

Honestly i dont like either the solutions so id like to know how is it usually done by actual game developers, sorry if my problem seems trivial and dumb.