Fairy Tail 475-476 Review: God Slayers Earn Their Keep

Fairy Tail, Chapter 475: Dimaria Chronos Yesta

Double review! I didn't care about 475 enough to review it last week, so let me just review the whole fight between the lolicons and weird time god lady.

A bit of a mollification as Fairy Tail backtracks from the revelation that Ultear is back alive... to that Ultear is just a temporal image thing created when Dimaria stopped time. Because of some weird timey-wimey magic that allows Ultear to project herself into the time when time is stopped or some shit okay this isn't going to be explained properly so whatever the fuck. Apparently she can't do anything but allow Wendy and Chelia (or Sherria or whatever the fuck she's called) to move, though, so she's not really upstaging them. Which is good. 

Dimaria blows away the Loli Duo and then assumes Take Over: God Soul... which is a stronger form of the Take Over skill we're familiar with, except that it uses the whole 'god' concept which has been a ginormous failure of a concept ever since God Slayers have been introduced and have done jack shit to explain what they are and what they do. This alone makes Dimaria a gajillion times better than the other Spriggan members we've seen before... shame that Dimaria has less personality than the Cuatro Cerberus people no one ever remembers the name of, since she literally just blabbers on and on about how TIME IS MY SPACE and how despite having the power to control time she goes around ripping people's clothes off. 

It would be something if we knew that the god of time Chronos actually existed prior to this, y'know. If there was a time-using magician who drew their power from Chronos or something. It would certainly make this big revelation of her power far more... well, impactful than just something I don't give a shit about. She shoots Charle in the gut, but honestly who gives a shit about Charle, and who the fuck really thinks Charle's going to die? This is Fairy Tail, come on. We then have a shittily-repeated 'oh no our ally is wounded and is totally going to die! Let's pose with grim faces! The enemy will acknowledge the look in our faces!' which is done in the most formulaic and lifeless way possible. And then Ultear offers a power-up: Third Origin, which allows them extreme power to defeat Dimaria in exchange for never again using magic.

It would help, y'know, if Dimaria had actually done something with her scary Take Over God Soul instead of just creating a big explosion in the ground and then shooting Charle in the gut with a pitiful laser beam. Show the Loli Girls actually getting overwhelmed, show some actual creative usage of time magic, some weird reversal or fast-forwarding or fucking-up of time... nope. Big explosion. Laser blast. Oh no enemy is too powerful must use secret spell. Yeah, despite all the potential, Dimaria's going to just be yet another in a series of disappointing villains.

Fairy Tail, Chapter 476: Farewell to the Mage Girls

Ultear does this big explanation of Third Origin while Dimaria in her weird Tron form is just standing there. Doing nothing. We literally get a panel of Dimaria just fucking standing there. We get two pages full of the most anal 'no me, you too precious' dialogue. It's not even heartwarming or sappy to read, it's just fucking bland. For a moment Wendy seems to receive Third Origin and starts pummeling away (what, you don't even try to use Dragon Force?) Dimaria does some boring pain and laser spells that honestly doesn't set her apart from any other Fairy Tail villain out there.

And then Chelia apparently was the true receiver of the Third Origin thing, which is actually refreshing. I mean, it's obvious that Fairy Tail is too much of a chicken to actually deal any lasting harm on one of the core cast, so it's nice and actually sensible to send Chelia, who, lest we forget is a God Slayer, on the God-Soul enemy. We naturally get a bunch of 'I fight for friendship!' banality thrown here and there, and gratuitous boob shots. Some random flashbacks, some blah dialogue... it would have more impact if we actually knew who Chelia was as a character beyond 'wind god slayer' and 'Wendy clone who's buddies with Wendy', and I honestly don't give a shit that she's losing her magic.

But she does this big god slaying feather tornado thing and takes out Dimaria. Chelia and Ultear say some sappy things. All in all, though, other than the slipshod handling of dialogue and power-ups, it's still one of the more entertaining (and I say entertaining in a loose sense) fights of the Spriggan arc so far (discounting Acnologia's surprise appearance) mostly because the Fairy Tail members didn't dominate the entire fight, and we actually see some effort thrown in. Even if said effort takes the form of hackneyed and overtly forced plot devices.