Fairy Tail 458 Review: Marginally Less Stupid

Fairy Tail, Chapter 458: Morning Star

Okay, so they sorta expanded on Erza taking out Ajeel instead of just 'she gets a random power up from nowhere and slashes the enemy once in a generic Anime Swordsman Character pose'. I mean, Ajeel still gets beat like that, but there's at least some logic going on instead of Erza just pulling friendship powerups up her ass.

Erza fights Ajeel with a water sword -- which IMO is a gigantic missed opportunity to have Juvia, the woman who is made up of water, to show up and help out -- to harden Ajeel's sand, and uses some wind sword to scatter the sand. It's still kinda bullshitty, but since Erza is winning using actual proper magical weapons instead of just friendship powerups, it's marginally better, I guess. 

We get a pointlessly protracted sequence of every single person reacting to Ajeel's Sand World technique, which definitely went on three pages longer than it should. Ajeel does some weird sand tornado thing, chokes Erza and confirms that his magic can suck out other people's magic (which I honestly don't care about, really). Ajeel has a generic 'call me a god' speech, Erza has that same sequence where she gets asphyxiated before delivering a thankfully shorter speech of 'my guild is friendship and will never surrender' spiel she usually does. She dons this 'Morning Star' armor, which lights her up and allows Bisca to shoot at her location with Jupiter...

Fucking convenient that the full brunt hits Ajeel and not Erza, and she has enough time to do her Anime Sword Slash attack... but it's definitely better. We've got Erza being assisted in taking down this enemy, she's not just using friendship power ups, Bisca and Jupiter has been foreshadowed in previous chapters...

Still pretty freaking boring, though, since it's relatively generic attacks that really don't do anything interesting beyond giant sandstorm and sword slashes, but at least it doesn't hurt my brain reading it.