Fairy Tail, Chapter 455: Magnolia's Defensive Battle
This chapter is... pretty good! I enjoyed myself reading it. It's just full of action scenes and hops from one character to the next and a pretty great "oh no the enemy is a lot stronger than we thought" chapter, introducing a bunch of elite mooks and re-introducing three more of the Spriggans pretty well. Except, y'know, there's always the dreaded blade over my head about how this will be resolved in two or three chapters with a "because she's Erza" battle. I would love and would hope that the writer actually handles it well -- make Erza's victory make sense, or at least have someone like Laxus or Jellal or whatever assist her in taking down Ajeel. But nah. Optimism is not a luxury that Fairy Tail can afford to get from me.
Oh hey look random fanservice cover page of Erza yay who the fuck cares
We kind of cut away from one group to the other all throughout the chapter, with the first few pages serving as kind of a recap with Heaven-Wheel!Erza facing off against Ajeel, the Dragon Slayers heading off to go and fight somewhere that isn't a boat, Makarov, Mavis and, uh... Warren? Basically having faith that Erza will raise morale and shit.
We then cut to Freed talking about how he can still maintain his Jutsu-Shiki with the amount of enemies cut down, we cut to Team Bisca waiting for the Jupiter cannon to recharge, to these bunch of generic mooks charging on the ground. And it's great! This is what an early war/battle chapter should be like, cutting back and forth between characters as they make their move. We then cut to a bunch of Ajeel's mooks, Karim (stereotypical Middle-Eastern turban genie man) and Bakyll (eye-covered scarfaced berserking idiot), but the generics with them get crushed by Team Dragon Slayer's dynamic entry. And this, really, is how you do a proper dynamic entry, Fairy Tail. No need to waste giant splash pages and three other ones just showing the same 'Natsu blows away mooks with fire'. A page showing some motion and some other things going on -- like Bakyll blocking Natsu's attack -- is fine.
Natsu is fighting this Bakyll fellow, so, uh, one-shot kill? Hopefully not.
Also there are like seven different alternate translations of Ajeel, Bakyll and Karim going around and I'm just choosing the ones I like typing most.
We see Erza fight with Ajeel a bit. Ajeel blocks the Heaven Wheel swords (what named character doesn't?), Erza goes Black Wing and slashes Ajeel, but Ajeel just goes all "are there anyone stronger man you suck" and Erza goes all "don't underestimate Fairy Tail!" before Ajeel attacks Erza with more sand and apparently fucks up her Requip... and I would go all 'oh, they're actually not making it easy for the heroes', except, y'know, it's Erza. And Erza has the absolute worst track record of pulling wins out of her ass in all of fiction.
We cut back to Team Freed, who reports that there's a hole in his Jutsu-Shiki, cut to Warren who reports the same thing, cuts to... uh... Adjudicator dude whose name I forgot. The 'you sin, Emperor Zeref' fellow with the weird hair. He's leading a bunch of Yu-Gi-Oh cosplayers and just walks through the Jutsu-Shiki no problem. We cut to a bunch of the other characters heading into intercept -- Gray and Juvia; Laxus; the Strauss siblings -- and Lucy is apparently just in her house and apparently freaking Brandish of all people is pulling a Natsu and is taking a bath in Lucy's bathroom. Brandish is funny, I don't know why. By all rights she should annoy me, but she doesn't.
Also that creepy-ass midget is just hanging around having a good view at Brandish's non-existent nipples.
Warren detects Brandish as well, and apparently 300 more ships are coming from the north with three Spriggan 12 members, and another 300-ship army from the South with more Spriggan 12 members.Warren is crying and shit, and apparently they're desperate and whatnot. Macao and Wakaba mention some 'Bosco' that apparently Albaress just curb-stomped. I'm not sure who Bosco is, if it's a mistyped Bisca (I don't think so) or some random guild master or whatever I don't remember.
Overall quite enjoyable, even if I'm sure this feelgood quality won't last. Ideally, we would have the Fairy Tail members fight a survival battle -- ideally, Natsu would possibly beat Bakyll, Erza either loses straight-up against Ajeel or barely escapes/barely wins with help, and the other Fairy Tail members are forced to a survival battle... maybe even utilizing their unique magic for things that aren't just "send an explosion of X element at the enemy"? Gosh, that would be unheard of! [/sarcasm] And with us knowing that Crime Sorcerie, the Wizard Saints and presumably other guilds are on the side of Fairy Tail maybe we can have them show up to bail Fairy Tail out or give them power-ups. Or maybe Mavis has some actual 'strategist' within her that isn't just friendship speeches and 'place strong people at strategic places'.
Knowing this manga, though, we'll have Erza don the Blaziken suit, struggle against Ajeel's sand, and one-shot Ajeel with a single iai sword strike with an unexplained burst of strength in two or three chapter's time. Because she's Erza, the pinnacle of Mary Sue and Victory-out-of-ass. Sarcasm aside, though, I fairly enjoyed this chapter. Though, uh, no expectations for next week if only so I can enjoy a functional chapter like this if it does happen.
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