Fairy Tail 470 Review: Dragonslayer

Fairy Tail, Chapter 470: Hybrid Theory

Sorry. My laptop fritzed out and deleted all the Sunday/Monday manga reviews when I was writing them, real life got in the way, and I never got around to really re-doing something I already did. I guess now's a good time as any to talk about them, now that the Thursday/Friday Shonen Jump ones are out. (Tokyo Ghoul might take some time to write by virtue of there being so much to talk about)

Anyway, Fairy Tail! The first chapter in a long, long time that I can unashamedly call good. 

We don't cut back to any of the other guilds where the C-listers are inevitably holding the line until Fairy Tail members show up to save the day, which, let's be honest, is what's going to eventually happen. We don't get some overdone speech about friendship and the importance of Fairy Tail the guild. We don't get Lucy pointlessly crying. We don't get retcons that don't make sense. We don't get redundant flashbacks. We don't get Natsu being all macho and shit.

No, what we got was an actually genuinely well-done plot twist. Something that was actually built-up upon a while back, progresses in a way that makes sense (something that Fairy Tail is kinda poor at when they do a plot twist) and doesn't randomly show up. We pick up where we last left off, and it seemed like it's going to just be an interesting, if unimpressive, continuation of the Ten Saints battle. God Serena had the four good Saints at his mercy, and Walrod is thinking about how he's going to make a last-ditch effort to take God Serena down with him. 

Remember how I said in my last Fairy Tail review how shitty it was for the chapter to cut to Walrod, Jura and those other two dudes being defeated without actually showing them? Well, this last stand was done pretty decently. Walrod summons a crapton of trees to lift God Serena up. Wolfheim (who's totally going to be the Strausses' father or something, isn't he) transforms into a demon monster thing and whacks God Serena in the face. Jura does some earth fist punch thing. Draculos drains God Serena's powers or something. 

Of course, Hades August and the Spriggan weird-assassin dude are still around so even if they took out God Serena they're still in peril. God Serena then shows off his skills, which is displaying a crapton of Dragon Slayer elemental magic. And the chapter up to this sequence alone would've made for a decent if unimpressive, chapter. God Serena uses ground, fire, water and wind spells (well, cavernous, purgatory, neptune and gale) and defeats the four saints, and assassin dude says that Serena has eight dragon lacrima in his body. 

Walrod is all desperate and suddenly everyone goes "what is this overwhelming magic I sense?" And a figure approaches. I groan because I think this would be Natsu, pulling his Main Character Godmode to beat up God Serena and be all "because I am Fairy Tail!" and some shit like that, but no. Acnologia of all people arrives. He delivers an actually badass line instead of a tired catchphrase that wasn't that cool in the first place. "Smells like dragon." God Serena makes a bit of a boast, but Acnologia just one-shots God Serena. And I do mean one-shot. I mean, it would be cooler if Acnologia ripped off Serena's head, but he ripped out a chunk off his side, and just calmly walks of with the same flat expression, saying he's going to slay the other seven.

It's a great chapter! I mean, a bit of a shame that it's not going to really be followed up with something actually cool since, y'know, Fairy Tail, where every damn person in the guild is protected by plot armour, but hey, I call it like I see it. It's a genuinely nice twist, a well-written chapter that seemed to be building up God Serena, and then Acnologia re-establishes his status as the series' Big Bad and Hero Killer, to quote a couple of tropes. And after the honestly disappointing affair Zeref had in recent chapters, it's something we definitely needed.