Fairy Tail 439 Review: Makarov's Reasons (which doesn't really make sense still)

Fairy Tail, Chapter 439: Arbaless Kingdom

The first few pages of this chapter is just Doranbolt-Mest telling Erza, who's the new guild master, about Lumen Histoire. Of course Natsu and company sneak in and get to see a naked Mavis and Natsu actually seems to get turned on by the naked six-year-old girl. You shit, Natsu. And then we get this rather unnecessary flashback to how Makarov sent Mest on his mission and the many times that Mest and Makarov met -- apparently Makarov removes the whole memory spell whenever he needs Mest to report in because this totally was planned from the start and isn't a retcon. [/sarcasm]

But apparently Mest has been investigating the Arbaless Kingdom in the Western continent, which is totally a thing! Apparently the Council's magic nukes, Etherion and Face, are a deterrent to the Arbaless Kingdom. And they apparently want to invade the Eastern continent to get their hands on Lumen Histoire because Natsu and Mest aren't the only people who likes naked prepubescent girls.

And now that Tartaros killed the Council, and both Etherion and Face are destroyed, they're free to attack. Apparently there are only 500 guilds in all of Ishgar, the Eastern continent, including Fairy Tail, while there are 730 in Arbaless, and they're all combined together as a military kingdom. So Makarov decides to... disband the guild to protect it. Yeah, I still don't folow the logic -- there are a million ways to protect the Fairy Tail members without giving Lucy chronic depression, but okay, at least there's a reason now.

I mean, Natsu and Erza are protected by plot armour, and we know Fairy Tail's guild buddies are going to help out, so that's like a dozen guilds against 730. The number really doesn't scare me all that much if they're going to be just a group of video-game generic mooks like the Avatar guild or whatever that'll just die to unnamed attacks from Natsu. But let's not be too sarcastic now and not be meta for a second...

What good does splitting Fairy Tail up do? If Arbaless is still determined to take Lumen Histoire, they'll invade anyway. What, they'll go ahead and go on home if they showed up in Magnolia and Fairy Tail the guild isn't around? They'll probably raze the rest of Ishgar to the ground and that's kind of where every other Fairy Tail member is hanging out in after Makarov disbanded the guild. Plus if they're inclined to, the 700-strong guild army will probably relatively easily hunt down the Fairy Tail members and while it'll take longer than just striking at a place when they're concentrated, it also means that they'll be defenseless when the armies come for the individually. I mean, yeah, the stronger ones will probably be fine, but what will people like Wendy or Levy or Macao do when the armies come from them? Again, that's under the assumption that they don't just kill everyone.

So apparently Makarov's headed off to the Arbaless Kingdom to negotiate peace or something and apparently he's been successful for a year. Or dead. Though I really don't think they'll do that to Makarov, not offscreen, at least.

Going to war against an entire country is certainly a more interesting thing than well, anything Fairy Tail shat out ever since Tartaros ended. I'm not quite that confident that Fairy Tail won't fuck it up since 'oh this might be interesting' at the beginning of the Grand Magic Games and Tartaros arcs, and they've been underwhelming at best.