Man, I am really enjoying these few last chapters of Fairy Tail! Not that it's good in any way, or to be even confused with actual quality writing, but holy shit, it's just so hilariously stupid and honestly just highlights just why I just don't give a flying fuck about this series anymore and it's just a hilarious manga to read and point a finger at. I thought the manga couldn't have gotten any worse, but of course, Fairy Tail always finds ways to stoop lower in terms of storytelling quality. I used to bitch about the problems in Bleach or Naruto or many other mangas that started off really awesome but ended up meandering out of the way of their primary focus. None of those really even comes close to the sheer inanity of this hopefully final arc of Fairy Tail.
I mean, I've been doing mostly positive reviews or 'could've done better' for a good solid few months simply because I'm reviewing actually good series, but hey, got to live up to the blog's name sometimes, yeah?
Fairy Tail, Chapter 501: Mari and Randi
Brandish turns evil, oh no, and returns Natsu's tumour to its original size! Except Brandish has gone through the general grinder of Fairy Tail's tendency to have 90% of female villains just see the goodness in the good guys and have their hearts all aflutter and all that nonsense, and it's honestly obvious that Brandish isn't going to truly convert to the bad guys again after the nonsense with being Aquarius's BDSM sex slave (because being pants-shittingly-scared into submission is funny, guys) or whatever.
Credit where credit's due, the "fight" between Lucy and Brandish, as anti-climactic as it is, was actually one of the few decent fights in this arc. From a very welcome return by Scorpio -- who I forgot existed -- to Brandish shrinking Lucy and Lucy wielding a Cancer-themed dress to go all swords, to Brandish shrinking then expanding the tsunami that Lucy summons... shame some random "I have to save my friends" rant that lasted two pages had to interrupt it.
Then Dimaria shows up, notes how Brandish is just putting on a show for her sake by pulling her punches, then cuts Brandish down before proceeding to attack Lucy for 'corrupting' her dear Brandish. This is actually a half-decent chapter, to be fair and perfectly honest, if not for Lucy and Happy just yapping along with Generic Fairy Tail Dialogue(TM).
Fairy Tail, Chapter 502: Mavis and Zera
How am I supposed to take Zeref and Eileen seriously when they are literally just tricked by an illusion? Eileen is still very flat and boring, a badly written villain sue. Of course, considering she's Erza's mother, it's to be expected. Doranbolt teleports Mavis back, while we get an extremely long and very, very boring scene of Gajeel saving Jet and Droy and having a slap-slap-kiss moment with Levy. Is it me who finds the 'eeeeeh' face with heads coming in diagonally with blank eyes and square jaws annoying as all hell and not at all funny? It's like every second panel, minor characters react like that and is it supposed to be a trigger for brain-dead people to laugh?
Zera disappears but not after another long-winded farewell with Mavis via naked floating telepathy. Which I honestly just kind of glossed over because there's nothing in these panels that isn't more or less copied from the climax of Fairy Tail Zero.
Dimaria apparently takes the time to bring Lucy and Natsu to a random dungeon instead of killing them outright, and leaves her precious Brandish lying on the battlefield. Just because, hey, fuck logic and practicality.
Fairy Tail, Chapter 503: The Last Sight that I Beheld
Wow, another scene where Lucy is trapped, captive, bound by ropes, and stripped by a villain. Honestly at this point the implication of naked Fairy Tail characters doesn't even register an emotion in my brain. After all the nonsense about Brandish not taking the fight seriously, she wants to strip them down and all that? It gets more serious as she prepares to gouge Lucy's eye out, but we all know it isn't going to happen. And how the fuck do you even sneak in three panels of long, long GFTFS (generic Fairy Tail friendship speech) into the scene between Dimaria holding up a knife to Lucy's eye and her stabbing it down? Fucking shit, these speeches. They are dumb.
We then cut away to Lucy discovering her restrains are loose and Dimaria beaten up and bloody but still alive, because deaths can only happen by being reduced into atoms by giant magical laser blasts, not simple impalement or bleeding to death. Natsu reverted to E.N.D. and apparently was able to move through Dimaria's time. Polyurschisca, Brandish and Evergreen show up and give us a gigantic wall of text that, hey, the anti-whatever tumour was actually E.N.D. demonic power! What a big surprise. It's a very, very anticlimactic way to reveal it.
Natsu is all in black flames and demonic and shit and hunting down Zeref, but is blocked by Gray, leading to the expected and long-foreshadowed Natsu-Gray big beatdown fight. Black flame Natsu looks cool. Nothing else about this scene does, though.
Fairy Tail, Chapter 504: Rift
There are ways to make conflict between two good guys brought up by a superpowered evil side interesting. Or simply the true and tired trope of having the two main characters fight. Done right it could be a very interesting rivalry. Done less well it could be an example of poor plotting (Ichigo/Uryu in Bleach comes to mind). Fairy Tail, though, takes it to another level, which basically has Natsu and Gray just shout at each other. "You're End!" "Move away!"
Natsu is consumed by an insane urge to murderize Zeref, but Gray gives this long speech where Invel tells Gray all about Natsu's identity as END. We could've had a more interesting way of doing this, like, maybe have Invel go "just find your friend. He'll be obsessed with killing Zeref. The Natsu Dragneel you knew is a facade" which would make Gray's long rant about having to stop Natsu actually have some sense. Here? Here Gray just goes absolutely angry and blames Natsu for the death of his parents, Ur and the fake-out death of Juvia, which is just utterly idiotic. They have a big fight, which, of course, is just them punching each other while flames and ice fly around behind them. Supposed to be epic or whatever, but the poor setup and the generally shitty dialogue makes this look like a fanfiction written by a primary school student.
LUCY SNEAKS IN A RANDOM SPEECH ABOUT GROWING AND SHIT IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS, SOMEHOW. And the rest of the characters treat this like some kind of super-sage advice. Is there like, a set quota of how many percent of the chapter (about 40-50%, I wager) has to be a friendship or motivational speech of some kind? I legitimately wonder.
Natsu and Gray just punch each other. They flashback to... Natsu finding Lucy's tortured body? Gray just shouts randomly that Natsu has to be stopped?
The rest of the guild is fighting the ever-unending swarm of soldiers, we get Erza slicing her way through some of them, Giant Eileen Eye in the sky causes them to freak out, Giant Mavis Hologram causes them to cheer... Eh. It's a setup. The thing is, Mavis is such a generic nice leader with absolutely zero personality beyond being friendly and caring of her friends, and Eileen is such a generic arrogant villain with likewise very little personality. And the rest of the cast has been reduced to nothing but background noise, that nothing they say is even relevant. So yeah.
Fairy Tail, Chapter 505: Trump Card
Eileen transforms all the Alvarez troopers into even more powerful fanged burning-haired monsters that don't feel pain, and the cast (well, mostly just Erza) reacts to this like 'omg we're doomed there are so many of them' despite the Alvarezian army having proven themselves to be utterly and completely incapable of doing the slightest damage to any of them.
Then we get an absolutely stupid way to kill Makarov off. Makarov is all like "I'm going to use Fairy Law!" which is cool, since the old fart has time and time again failed to use Fairy Law in so many times where it could've been useful. Mavis shows up and goes all "stop, you idiot, you'll kill yourself, I have a strategy!"
And Makarov does this long, long speech about how his kids are bleeding, how Mavis sees them as soldiers (would it be cool if Mavis actually was a harsher leader in combat? Nah, she's just generically nice, making this particular statement even more stupid), and how he knows they'll succeed with Mavis's plans... but he's going to kill himself anyway because he can't stand to see his children hurt.
Even though, y'know, Eileen and Zeref are still very much out of range of his Fairy Law, and those two are definitely the ones that will hurt your children. Yyyeeeeah. Bright future my ass. Between randomly dissolving the guild for no reason before the time-skip, to staying in Alvarez and playing chess for no good reason, Bearded!Makarov just feels like such an utterly retarded idiot that it's hard to even feel any emotion for his long supposedly-dramatic rant. There are many, many ways to kill off Makarov (by the way, that's assuming that his 'death' will be permanent, and not reverted in the next few chapters like Juvia, Gajeel, Mirajane and literally every other character in this arc) that would be epic. Have him face off against Eileen and Zeref so that his precious children will not be fighting these monstrous opponents, and buying them a chance, maybe. That old Acnologia fight scene would've been a great way to kill him off, and I still maintain that Makarov bought absolutely nothing new to the table by surviving past that point. That scene? Figting Acnologia on Tenrou Island? That is a genuinely dramatic sacrifice to save his precious children, where they are absolutely outclassed by a monstrous dragon that's out of their league.
This is a bunch of slightly more powerful soldiers. Only Erza has even tried anything against these slightly-stronger soldiers. Mavis has a plan in place, and Makarov KNOWS THAT. Gildarts, Laxus and the other heavy-hitters haven't even tried anything yet. Nope, let's just kill myself, taking out the least threatening enemies, leaving the two powerful ones out there unharmed. Good job, Makarov. You have broken the single most important rule of shonen manga, that the Old Man Death is always good and dramatic. From Jiraiya to Hiruzen to Whitebeard to Netero to Kaito to Yamamoto to Ichiryu, one thing that Shonen mangas have been consistently able to do is to make the mentor's death be absolutely dramatic as they stand up to super-powerful villains or to protect their cause and the people they care about.
This? This is a very poorly-written hasty decision with zero impact beyond the readers going "holy shit, what a stupid death. He should've died while fighting Acnologia."
Again, if the death sticks. He turns into stone, which means in chapter 507 or 508 someone will use some bullshit power of justice to revert him back to life.
Fairy Tail, Chapter 506: Broken Bonds
Laxus talking to a crying Mavis and Erza bowing down? Has honestly absolutely zero dramatic value because I don't care at all. It's a stupid death, and to top it off Eileen notes that it only took out 80% of their forces at most, with none of the heavy hitters being taken out.
Natsu and Gray punch each other with glowing fists! Natsu's bony brimstone claw is actually cool, and we finally see a single point of innovation in the entire fight where Natsu slams his hand into the ground and causes an eruption of flame to rise out where Gray is. But other than that it's mostly just punches, the odd fire blast or ice missiles or two. Absolutely boring shit, and the poor setup to this fight, and Makarov's utterly shitty death, ends up making this fight just something to shrug through.
And Erza shows up in the final page, blocking their punches (because she's Erza, fuck power levels) while crying and demanding that they stop. So yeah. Makarov's death seems to just be a setup to get Gray and Natsu to fight. I'll bet money that the power of friendship will restore Makarov back to life, though.
Man, what a stupid series of chapters. When Naruto dragged out its finale, at least it still made deaths and the final confrontation between Naruto and Sasuke feel cool and a nice break from all the meandering about. Here there's just absolutely no tension at all, and the fact that I just don't care about a cast that's just increasingly turning more and more identikit to each other means that, yeah, this is kind of a bad place that Fairy Tail finds itself in.
it was a long time , uh?
ReplyDeletefor chap 501 , i find the fight also interesting. it's quite funny that is lucy of all the perso who deliver it . and yes , boob = good .it's like a physic law a this point for ft
for chap 502, zera was pointless , that it
for chap 503, a swear i believe that lucy would be th ones who beat dimaria and i was not the only one (time-space yadiyada).after all she as to do something in this arc ,is not it ?
but nope ,it's END who do it , and shows that if you add hax power to your bad guy , you must have a good solution against them ( like jojo ) .
but , hey ! use the mode rage/kyubi. it's was not reveil and thus , you can fluf every bullshit that you want! like make perso immune to time stop ! (really , how is work ? )
and again , i see better for rage mode in other shonen .
for chap 504, all i have see is :
-i want to kill zeref!
-me too! but before that , i will kill you !
-naruto
-sasuke
for chap 505, yes makarov shoul have died long ago . and the reason that he can use fairy law is just lame and lazy.
Furthermore , i remark that the old guy was never that interesting ,no? i remember that him doing his titan thing like 3-4 time in all the manga .
oh! and people dont forget gildarts i hope . you know the guy who can explode moutain bu who can nothing the ultimate threat ,FOODER .
really , wtf?
for chapter 506, pointless sacrifice for the old dude and ..
OH MY GOD!
natsu did something else that a punch . and it's the rage mode that doing it !
really , it just hillarois that base natsu is less inventive et more dumb that the rage mode , really .
and yes, erza can probably beat goku super-sayan-god-kayokenx10
(it sound so stupid ) at's point , and can teleport/fell people that do nakama thing for a unknown reason .
really , what a mary sue .
in all honesty , better to laught at it thant be angry at it .
after all , he exist thing worse thant this . thing that make fairy tail a masterpiece .
and justly , i now and have read some of they . how lucky i am.
for example , do you know mainstream chinese litterature ? it just one of the thing on hearth where you end up sating " what i am doing whit my life " and " i hope that the author fall from a stair". really .
and i have perfect example of it . read it and all litterature on hearth will has theirs quality increase by magic .
the manga is douluo dalu 2
oh and where are on black clover ?
The fanservice for Fairy Tail has made me as numb as seeing, say, a person with two eyes. Literally every scene with a female character in Fairy Tail has them suffer some kind of fanservicey pose that it all blurs together and nothing really is new or titillating anymore.
ReplyDeleteZera WAS pointless, she just shows up to ‘tie in’ with the prequel comic without actually adding anything to this story.
Yeah, other mangas, even Naruto, at least have some rules as to what their ‘rage modes’ can or cannot do, and even when their ‘rage modes’ are first being revealed we actually see the increase in general power and strength against enemies like Demon!Sasuke, Orochimaru or Pain. We know, more or less, what to expect from Naruto’s kyubi mode as it gets progressively stronger and more savage, with the powers consistently being stronger versions of previous incarnations, whereas Natsu? We’re just told that he’s END and very strong, and not really what it can do. Though honestly, even without END Natsu or Lucy can just say some nonsense about “because we are fairy tail and we have friendship and we will not accept your power” or some bullshit while walking through Dimaria’s time.
Hey, with Naruto and Sasuke at least they have a very good reason for fighting: Sasuke is a huge dick. Not a big fan of the Naruto-Sasuke rivalry and eventual redemption, but it’s miles and miles better than this fight, that’s for sure.
The thing is, it’s not just that Makarov never did anything – though that’s also a valid problem with the cahracter, since all he had done is mess up everything for his children by doing his nonsense mission to Alvarez that he told no one about. But it’s that his death is utterly pointless and stupid, not even fighting insurmountable odds or whatever. It’s just… a bunch of troopers. That Erza is shown to be able to knock back with a bit of effort. And your kids aren’t even badly injured, they’re covered in grunge 90% of the time.
I absolutely hate Erza. I’ve actually reread the older Fairy Tail chapters where she’s an actually interesting character, but right around… oh, the Tenrou Island arc, she has became such an author’s pet where the author just lets Erza do anything and overpower anything just because she’s a ‘main character’. Yyyeaah.
Duoluo Dalu isn’t exactly mainstream Chinese literature, it’s just a web novel. And, nah, I don’t think my brain can take anything worse than Fairy Tail.
I last read Black Clover around the time that the characters are looking for something on the undersea challenge and the crazy beast villain shows up. That was like… two, three months ago? I haven’t really read it since. Maybe I’ll wait until some more chapters show up. I have no idea why the manga is voted ‘worst manga ever’ in a poll last month, when clearly Fairy Tail exists. It’s not the most creative of settings and uses a lot of shonen cliches, but it’s a decent read nonetheless.
With 501, I was kinda mixed about the "tumor" - it held no significance to the plot in the previous chapters aside from what felt like a conversion tool for Brandish's heel-face turn - and yet it ironically made the chapter one of the better in this set because it forced Lucy to actually fight without Natsu's help. Of course, it's invalidated the very next chapter where she has to have her ass saved by Natsu anyway, but it was a somewhat good moment while it lasted.
ReplyDeleteI also don't know if it was a smart or dumb move to have Dimaria not just slice Brandish's throat - she should know Brandish can reduce the side of her wounds and that a torso-shot would be way less likely to kill, but maybe that was supposed to illustrate she didn't have it in her to kill her "beloved Randi"... although that flip-flops back to dumb since it seems pretty late in the game to give this supposed cold tyrant a heart.
With 502... I really wasn't all that shocked. Hell, I think I even predicted it in the last comment I made that Eileen was gonna do the whole "they got the better of me?!" schtick that all the other villainous mary-sues in the series have done. I half expect the scene between Gajeel and Levy to get copy-pasted, or at the very least be the basis of, for how Juvia and Gray's or Natsu and Lucy's reunion will be.
And In all honesty, the scene between Mavis and Zera being straight from FT Zero just honestly reinforces what Fairy Tail's biggest issue is - the fact that the author is so afraid to take things forward with permanent changes that he's just going over old ground again and again and again.
The end was actually more forgiving for me - we already had it established that Dimaria loves to torment people for perverse enjoyment, even to the point of tossing logic right out the fucking window (stripping people in battle rather then just ending the war with one stroke per opponent's neck, anyone). So... at least Mashima was being CONSISTENT with Dimaria's idiocy, unlike Gray's in the following chapters.
503... yeah. This is what I went over in the above paragraphs - I actually could have liked Lucy's bravery in the face of danger if it wasn't that we've already had this moment happen before in about a dozen other flavors; it's yet another palette-swap of something already done in the series, symptomatic of Mashima's inability to progress in spite of having done all he can with the stuff he's used thus far. And then there's the fanservice bit - I might have found the scene more threatening if the panels didn't focus on Lucy's panties or how the ropes pushed her boobs out... although, again, at least Mashima is being consistent with Dimaria being a pervert-sadist, if nothing else (though it pains me at how THAT is what he decides to stay consistent with).
What really bugs me is how Natsu was able to move around through Dimaria's time to attack her - I don't recall there being any reason he should have been able to do that. Is it because he's using curse-power, which magic doesn't affect? Why is it that the important stuff is always what gets glossed over in this series?
504... yeah. Just FUCK it all at this point. I mean it literally is just a cut-and-paste of what was happening in the Avatar arc, just with even less sense - and I didn't think that was possible. This could have worked back then if Gray was actually being taken over by his Devil-Slayer powers, but that wasn't made a factor then and it wasn't cited as one now - and yet again, this is ANOTHER thing that's been copy-pasted from past arcs! Seems to be the theme of these chapters.
DeleteBut the worst part of all... I might have actually forgiven this and found the fight a good twist if not for the fact that Gray seems to be trying to straight-up murder Natsu for being E.N.D. - if it had been a "You ain't goin' anywhere till I get some answers outta you!" situation and a demonically-overtaken Natsu tried to go through Gray, I could understand the fight breaking out. If Gray had asked Natsu of he always knew he was E.N.D. and got angry that Natsu wouldn't give him a straight answer, I could have gotten behind this. If he saw something of Lucy's stuck to Natsu (her keys, part of her outfit, maybe with blood on it, ect) and thought Natsu had become a legitimate threat to the guild, I could have bought this. Instead, Gray is blaming Natsu for things he had no control over or wasn't even involved in - Juvia's (supposed) death, Silver's enslavement at Tartaros and even goddamn Deliora of all things.
Natsu I can buy being senselessly angry because of this curse thing being literally in his blood and nulling his mind, but Gray's reasons look retarded by contrast. I mean, the only hint we have to potentially explain it was Invel's passing split-second comment several chaps ago about Gray's Devil-Slayer power eroding him and making him more evil, but that was so fleeting a notation that to make that a big thing now would be retarded - to say nothing that it WASN'T brought up and just makes Gray look like an idiot.
On top of that, it makes him look like an asshole of an idiot, too - I mean, Natsu losing it to his demon instincts makes it justifiable that he wouldn't have the cognitive sense to think about carrying Lucy to the others to try and heal her, or that he lost control of his senses before he could actually think to check if she was dead... but what the fuck was Gray's excuse for just leaving Juvia's body dumped behind back there in a frozen waste? I mean, he didn't even TRY to see if Juvia could be restored by Wendy the way Juvia had restored him from his own fatal blow - he just went all Sasuke-style on Invel and didn't give it another thought. I mean, unlike Natsu, Gray DOES still have functionality of his mind (or whatever excuse for it he has, since I can only use the term "mind" loosely with his behavior in the chapter) - what excuse does he have to be suddenly acting like a literal dick? If he's making these choices on his own, there isn't enough to justify it as anything else but stupidity - and if an external factor like his Slayer-Magic is affecting him, it hasn't been highlighted enough to pick up on.
And Mavis... yeah, I couldn't really see that as anything but a cornball presentation. I mean, FT in general is so goddamn easy to motivate that a hamster could have been leading the charge in it's wheel and I think they'd follow it forward like it was God on earth.
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Delete505... same problem as the last chapters - retreading old ground, only this time Mashima did what he should have done on Trenou Island in the first place. I mean, I do like that there's at least a drawback to the OP Fairy Law spell, but this was a dumb way to do it. At least make the monsters more threatening - like say they're immune to most forms of magic.
DeleteStill, literally the only Spriggans who haven't lost a fight to FT (though I'll bet it's only 'cause they haven't been in a fight yet) are Eileen, August and Rakhied. All the others had their asses beaten once before this point. Hell, Neinhart, God Seena, Invel, Brandish, and Dimaria (MORE THEN HALF) are already down with the latter two having possibly gone good, and Wal Ich and Bradman (who were Historia clones, remember) might have gone out when Neinhart went down anyway, meaning that Ajeel and Jacob might be the only ones still left on the actual battlefield. So... big surprise, but I can't bring myself to care that the big guns of Alvaraz didn't go down since they're gonna go down anyway and sucked to begin with. Hell, HOW did Fairy Law miss Ajeel and Jacob since they were fighting in the midst of FT's members, who should all have been in Fairy Law's range?!
You already listed all the big reasons why Makarov's death sucked, but I had an additional reason - the fact that, as Zeref mentions in the next chapter, he taught Fairy Law to Mavis, who taught it to Makarov... and since Mavis is supposedly immortal (or at least I think she is, unless her her near-death experience broke her of her curse) and is way younger then Makarov, she should have been able to cast the spell herself without having the aged old man do it. There was some potential here to give depth to Mavis by showing that she's still a human being and not a saint by giving her a FLAW. Namely that she could say she wouldn't know if Fairy Law would or wouldn't kill her - and therefore be shown as being scared to die, even for the sake of the guild she created.
This would further highlight her being a foil to Zeref since he's the exact opposite; he WANTS to die for not being able to interact with the world in any other way as a death-bringer, whereas Mavis's little loophole let her live the same way but without the death-curse hurting everyone. That, after having lived as a disembodied spirit for so long, she's not actually used to risking her life the way the other guild-members are, therefore coming across as being unwittingly selfish and that, at the pivotal moment, she might hesitate to die for her family - something nobody else in that guild would give a second thought to. Makarov could point that out and say this is the basis for his taking matters into his own hands - that any plan she makes, it will only work in a situation like this if she herself is willing to put herself on the line for it the same as she asks everyone else to do; that Mavis, for all her power, doesn't really understand what it means to be a parent to everyone and that, as much as he's sorry to say it, he doesn't want to leave them to a rabid army of monsters on such a big maybe. Maybe throw in that his life is coming to an end (though it should have a long time ago if that heart attack he had in the Thunder Colosseum/Fairy War arc was any indication - add that to the list of plot points that never got touched on again) and that he feels Mavis, being the younger of them now, should be the one to experience and learn what it means to truly interact with the world as opposed to an old man like him.
And yeah, it's not stellar storytelling, but it's 3:00 AM where I am, I'm running on nothing but coffee after finishing a school project and thought this up off the top of my addled brain... and yet I still think this crap would be a better basis to develop the chapter from then what Mashima did. If nothing else, it'd be consistent to the kind of mushy "responsibility and bonds" stuff the series was founded on.
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Delete506... yeah, no emotional investment at all. Hell, my only conflict was on if I should sigh, chuckle humorolessly or just plain groan at how the picture of Makarov's petrified corpse was contrasted by the shot of Erza's butt on the right-hand side of the page as she knelt on the ground in front of it. Can't even do (what's supposed to be, in Mashima's mind at least) a heartfelt deathscene without an ass-shot making its way in there...
DeleteAnd then the Natsu vs Gray thing comes up again and I'm reminded just what an asshole Gray is being; as I said in the last comment, he's (supposed to, at leas) still be sane, unlike Natsu - he should be able to recognize Fairy Law got cast and that, by extension of that, the rest of the Guild's in big trouble. Yet here he is, trying to straight-up murder Natsu for literally no other reason then he's E.N.D., which we still don't even know if Gray thinks Natsu hid from them or not.
And then when Erza jumps into the fight, I had to choke back on my rage just to keep from screaming "is THIS the only reason you killed off Makarov - just so that you could give Erza an excuse to lecture Natsu and Gray for fighting while their Master was dying for their sakes?!" I mean, Erza already would have plenty of justification to stop the fight purely off of the stupidity of it's basis - Makarov didn't need to die just to be Erza's morality hammer for beating sense back into those two. And how the hell did she even get there so quickly? And of all the things to snap Natsu out of his state, Erza crying is what does it? Not the declaration from his best friend that he's gonna kill him, not the fact that he's getting pounded by ice attacks - Erza's fucking tears brings him back to normal just like that?! For fuck's sake, any character could have cried - LUCY could have done that. There was literally no reason Erza had to be the one to do this - if you're trying to ship Gray with Juvia and Natsu with Lucy (which seems to be what Mashima is going for), one of them ought to have been the one to stop this.
...
Phew. OK. I'm done. Sorry for basically flogging your page with these super-long posts, but these past few chapters just really, really pissed me off at the sheer number of things they did wrong
Holy shit, you’ve basically reviewed all the chapters yourself! Will try to keep replies succinct enough without repeating what we’ve already said. Personally the tumour in particular felt like a stupid plot device. It went from the ‘one time power up’ nonsense that was so hinted to be END back during the first Natsu/Zeref confrontation in this arc, to this tumour, and apparently it’s a big revelation that the two are one and the same?
DeleteHonestly, I actually thought the concept of Fairy Tail Zero was pretty cool mainly because while it’s ultimately another generic friendship-saves-the-day story, the characters felt somewhat fresh, even when half of the cast (Precht, Mavis, Warrod) are old characters. But vomiting up basically the most boring parts of FTZ, which is Mavis and Ziera? Bah. The issue isn’t just repetition, the issue is badly-written repetition.
Considering both yours and Rotbud’s comments, apparently it was a big annoyance that Natsu was able to move through time in 503, but honestly I’ve just shrugged it when Natsu, Lucy and Erza just can just pull shit out of their ass to justify beraking through the enemy’s power.
Honestly, them pussying out of the Devil Slayer thing is a huge irritation. They could’ve made the Avatar arc be somewhat relevant by actually having Gray succumb to his devil things and have him actually kill Frosch and/or Rogue, maybe unseen by the audience, which would at least give Gray’s random stupidity in this arc some measure of sense. Or actually have Juvia die a couple of chapters back, which will also give him some kind of motivation to push him over the edge. Or something. Your argument that there’s no real sense for Gray to attack Natsu is written very well, too – mostly because I wasn’t paying attention to the panels being presented, but yeah, the scene just became a lot worse in my head.
Compare it to Nanatsu no Taizai’s King-Meliodas relationship, at least before the timeskip. King is absolutely passive-aggressive and being a little tit about the fact that Meliodas is a demon and never told him, but that ended at that. Sure, King second-guesses Meliodas’s orders, but up until Meliodas does something that endangers them (which is not yet) he’s just paranoid, not straight up “murder the freaking demon”.
DeleteI dunno, going “Sasuke-style” honestly isn’t anything new, Fairy Tail never really pulled punches with killing villains. It’s the heroes that keep receiving quote-unquote near-death wounds that are restored the next chapter. With the villains? Dudes that got killed, especially the relatively high villain death toll in the Tartaros arc, stay dead and no one ever loses any sleep about it.
What you just typed out about Mavis sounds a lot, LOT more interesting than whatever trash happened, but then Fairy Tail has this tendency to expunge all negative character traits (other than being braindead idiots, as we see in Makarov and Gray’s case here) so it is unthinkable for them to make Mavis have emotions and hesitate in sacrificing herself, because that would be against the whole FAMILY FRIENDSHIP bullshit regurgitation. Nevermind that the personal internal turmoil and the conversation with Makarov would make both of them far, far more interesting than the chess pieces that they have been, no, Fairy Tail can never allow their characters to have negative traits. It’s a bit of a decay that has been done to a majority of Fairy Tail characters, and on initially somewhat-villainous characters like Gajeel, Laxus and the Raijinshu it’s a lot more noticeable. Laxus and Gajeel at least had the decency to go through multiple chapters of character development, with the Tenrou Island parts being the most interesting, but the Raijinshu? Bickslow have barely appeared at all, Evergreen is just tsundere for Elfman, and Freed is lol horny gay so funny.
The whole nonsense about the Makarov-died-to-be-a-plot-device-for-Erza-to-cry is just so stupid that I just don’t want to dignify it with words. But man, it’s just dumb.
And who wants to bet five bucks with me that Makarov gets restored back to life (or as a Mavis-style ghost) at the end of the manga? Hell, ten bucks for the resurrection happening within five to ten chapters!
The only reason I think anyone got hung-up over the time thing is because it's another instance of a supposedly-big development getting less attention then Lucy's boobs. Yeah it's a nitpick, but it's one that could have explored the dynamic of how curse-power doesn't seem to be affected by magic-power, in turn expanding on just why Natsu's so damn durable and even calling all the way back to Tartaros in how he could eat Jackal's explosions and not die. It's that interesting little tidbits like that are getting glossed over for the sake of making more fanservice/nudity jokes that just makes people like me and Rot cringe.
DeleteWell, when I said "Sasuke-style", I meant the way Gray suddenly seemed to decide "screw my friends and this girl who loves me; I'm killin' this dude" and leave Juvia's body dumped in the middle of nowhere like that. There really wasn't any excuse for him to not at least try and get Juvia to a healer besides illogical angst-rage. Natsu had his demonic instincts as an excuse for sanity slippage, but Gray didn't seem to - and if he did, it sure wasn't illustrated very well.
And, of course, the biggest turning point I've seen for fans was Erza's actions. I literally saw a debate on ForneverWorld's channel where this one guy, after spending upwards of a week defending Fairy Tail's characters as "well developed" and it's villains as "uniquely diverse", did a complete 180 and declared the series to be shit after Natsu and Gray's fight was effectively revealed to have been started for faux-drama and had Makarov die just to have Erza end it as quickly as it began, to say nothing of how easily Erza just stopped both their attacks cold with one hand each.
I'm with you on Makarov - they've done it for Hades already (twice, if you count the Historia clone Neinhart did), so I'd be honestly shocked if they just let him die without anything further to say. Hell, I'm not even sure if he's even dead right now yet, what with how many fake-outs I've seen in the series and especially this particular arc.
The thing is, fanservice is one thing. The amount of... whatever the fuck that Fairy Tail is engaging, how every single encounter with an enemy has to end up with a female character being tied in such a way that the boobs are prominent, front and center, or clothing injury is done, or (like pointed out by one of you guys) having Erza's butt dominate the shot after Makarov's dramatic death... there's a time for fanservice, that's for sure, but it's certainly not every single damned chapter.
DeleteThe biggest annoyance of that Gray bit is that, well, Sasuke has been established as being an asshole obsessed with vengeance from day one. Gray's your average NAKAMA FOREVER Fairy Tail guild member. And Sasuke at least spiraled into insanity a lot more prominently than Gray in the pre-timeskip stories. It's not particularly well-written, no, especially his actions when he's a villain, but there's at least some sense to his actions.
The thing is, fans have been defending Fairy Tail to the death even during the decline that is the Daimatou Enbu (which, to be fair, had some great points and possibly the last 'badass Erza' moment that actually felt badass), and the long drawn-out mess that is the Tartaros arc... and some people that are not unable to comment in this blog actually went out and defended the stupid, fillery 'get all Fairy Tail members back together after they are separated for no reason' Avatar arc.
Hades is particularly annoying because I really want him to come back and be relevant, not just show up and be all 'hmmm dark magic! AGAIN! Is it Tuesday? I'll say some creepy shit whoops time's up lads see you next crisis!' Especially considering Hades is easily the best part of Fairy Tail Zero, and this could easily be his redemption or whatever, but no. Gotta bring Ziera back in, so you can draw naked prepubescent girls. Does anyone care that Warrod is half-dead in a ditch somewhere with the three other Wizard Saints? So much for Fairy Tail friendship speeches. It only applies to people with boobs and fragile clothes, and not tree-people, apparently.
welllll, the term maintream means mostly (and for me) the literary genre the most popular for the masse . (in a bad way)
ReplyDeleteor , douluo dalu is now a manga and therefore exceed the limits of the web. ( and the author is now a rich
thanks to this .so not amateur for me now)
the xianxia (and all these derivatives) rule a little theirs web , and so the population of 10-30 ,like their Japanese counterpart (manga , light novel ) .
the problem is the archetypes of the xianxia are , well, bad .like horrible . as to lose all faith in humanity.really .
for douluo dalu 2 , i advise you to read just the scan of the manga . it's really a pearl of comedy .
if erza is terrible , the mc of douluo dalu 2 is literraly spoon feed by the author . ( the author give the mc the power levels of goku and expects that the reader will feel tension when enemies are Saibamen)
and it exist worse than that .
thing who last for 2000 chapter with a scenario who repeat itself in a neverending cycle .
and sorry for the bad English and the rant.
I dunno, I really don't feel like reading 2000 chapters of nonsense that's worse than Fairy Tail.
Deleteactually , the manhua(chinese manga) is at 84 chap a this moment .
Delete....
after reading what a write previously , i see that i deviate of the original talk of this post . (but just try it little , i does not have that many chapter. douluo dalu 1 has 165 chapter anf the two has 84 . but in manhua )
otherwise , after reading theirs chapter , i realise the quality of the war scene of one piece. and the creativity of mashima who range at this point in the negatif .
in all honesty , what you imagine in a war where magic exist .
where mage-doctor can healing solider quickly and efficiently.
where officier can augment the strenght of the solider .
where barrier can be put on to proctect and control the movement of enemy.
special force comprise just of demon (because zeref can surely create more thant one anyway)
war marchine of terrible consequence ( because zeref can do a godman time machine and tower who can negate dead , but machine for explode thing , it just to much form him).
and a millions other thing that i dont think about .
and what we see in fairy tail?
guy with no magic .730 guild and several nation .and they can provide more than 30 guy with magic .it just sad . very very sad .
and for all the problem of the last arc of bleach , the bad guy know how work their universe .
Deletein shorts , they have sent theirs elites do the fight and the fodder had the role of "cleaning" the rest .
because , if their have just sent theirs two best guy , the war last like 2 minutes (1,59 minutes for talking ) .
and we could avoided this if mashima had introduce other strong people of different kingdom of their continent . ( and bamm , no plothole).
Yeah, even compared to other war series with huge differences in power levels like Naruto or Taizai, they generally have a good excuse to pair up powerful characters against each other and weak characters against each other.
DeleteBut since Fairy Tail has a bit of a problem in just wanting to use the same pool of around 40 'good guys', among whom maybe the same 10-12 get actual screentime while the rest are just a glorified cheerleading squad...