Fairy Tail 422 Review: Relevance! Lucy Kick! Bluenote!

Fairy Tail, Chapter 422: Orochi's Fin

Definitely a lot better than the past few chapters, mainly because it's at least somewhat relevant. It's still squarely in 'unnecessary filler' category and all of the revelations here could've been worked into a better arc, but I actually enjoyed this chapter a fair bit. Orochi itself and its army of generic beasts, of course, don't really pose much of a threat. Natsu just blasts his way through a huge chunk no problem, and the Lamia Scale people (even Oobabababa) do their signature attacks on them. Wendy and Chelia are basically kind of joined at the hip which is fun for them, and they do a little Sky Dragon's Roar/Sky God's Howl combo thing that I think may or may not be Unison Raid. Considering how close they are... they get to take the role of kind of describing the situation in general which is appropriate, I guess.

We see some other character upgrades. Carla's human form can apparently allow her to do little kicking stunts. Well, it's a kick and she calls it 'White Moon', but I guess that's better than Happy's little 'I can not eat fish!' schtick that he tries to show off. That was actually kind of funny. Lucy also actually gets an upgrade, which I was actually surprised about considering she's kind of been a butt monkey and I expected her whole 'I got stronger over the year' to be just a joke. Well, in a sense it still is, but she has learned a new power: Stardress, where she shoves Loke's key into her chest and kind of... Requips Loke's power which changes her clothes into a dress kind of like Erza.

All she does is her regular Lucy Kick but enhanced with Loke's Regulus powers, but that's something and I guess when we get to the more exotic Celestial Spirits like Gemini or Scorpio it'll be more interesting.

And the master of Orochi is revealed to not be weird snake-tongue guy (who is the Beastmaster), but rather a familiar face... Bluenote Stinger! I laughed my ass off really hard when I realized who he was. For a moment when we saw only his mouth I thought it was a clean-shaven Tempesta, but no, it's the return of Bluenote Stinger ever since he got thrown into the sky by Gildarts all those years ago and it's entirely unexpected. Bluenote does his gravity thing and stops Chelia, Wendy and Carla from doing stuff... but Natsu just shows up no problem and the super-awesome gravity doesn't affect him at all.

Which is nice! In the grand scheme of things Bluenote Stinger isn't really an important character, but he was someone who fought on the level of Gildarts before and it'll actually be a nice match to pit against Natsu to see how much he's grown over the timeskip. Certainly more threatening than just this random guild no one has heard about! It's a nice little read, and while I still don't really care much for this arc, I do like how the pointless filler manages to catch my interest with these little power upgrades and tying up some loose ends.