Fairy Tail 442 Review: The Spriggan Twelve and Pedo Doranbolt

Fairy Tail, Chapter 442: The Law of Space

This chapter's opening page was one of Wendy in a bikini, because Fairy Tail really likes showing prepubescent girls in sexualized positions. Wendy, Mavis, Chelia... but the opening page is relatively innocent enough. We actually get Doranbolt fucking lusting over Wendy at one point, and it's treated like a joke, like one of those character quirks like Natsu getting vehicular sickness or Juvia going all goo-goo over Gray. Um, it's not. Doranbolt is a pedophile, now more apparent than it ever has been. Go fuck off, Doranbolt.

I'm calling him Doranbolt because that sounds better in my head than Mest, and I've been calling him Doranbolt for years. So yeh.

Anyway, Doranbolt's extremely questionable lustful desires aside, Wendy and Carla go off with the little boy they rescued, Doranbolt teleports off to meet with their informant, while the rest of the A-team beat up the random mooks. And then Natsu and Erza go and eat some dessert from this random dude, who takes an entire page to talk about how his dream is to expand his ice cream store and whatnot before it naturally gets blown the fuck up because we need additional reasons to show that these Spriggan Twelve dudes are evil people who exist only to crush the dreams of decent people and whatnot, as ice cream dude just cries about his dream. Extremely cliched, but what can you do.

(Gray gives ice cream dude some money as compensation)

This member of the Alvarez Empire's "Brandish Force", called Marin Hollow, is the one to blow it up and he looks pretty generic as far as anime characters go. Erza's requip and Lucy's celestial summoning get effectively disabled by Marin Hollow's magic, called "The Knight", which allows him to equip anything, as well as disable any kind of space magic around him.

How does that translate to creating explosions to blow up ice cream stores, exactly? I dunno.

But apparently anyone who breaks the laws of space gets an invitation to Marin's "personal relaxation space". And both Erza and Lucy disappear into bubbles or some shit into Marin's dimension of, I dunno, PG-rated sexual dungeon or something. Marin talks about how the two women belong to him now, and then goes all angry and drops a very wounded Doranbolt, and apparently men are not allowed to use space magic in front of him. Um, okay? Women can, but you won't allow them? And you yourself use space magic? Marin Hollow, your logic does not really work. But he's insane so yeah.

Also Lucy is kind of an idiot, isn't she? Erza tries to use her magic, it doesn't work because Marin so helpfully explains like all shonen manga characters that space magic doesn't work before him. So Lucy, whose fighting powers revolve around summoning things from another dimension, is the first to try something. Good job, no really.

Marin does some teleporty magic to get away from Natsu and Gray's punches, but one of the Spriggan Twelve, Brandish (leader of the Brandish Force, I assume), shows up and Marin immediately gets subservient. Brandish is... a lady in a bikini with gigantic boobs. Yay boobs! It's kind of eyeball-roll inducing, but when the alternative is disturbing pedophilia I will go for shameless boob-and-ass displays every time.

Gray reacts with this big surprise at Brandish's magical force, but I'm not really counting on her or Marin to put up a fight, honestly. It would make for a better story if Brandish actually does defeat everyone here, including god-mode-main-characters Natsu and Erza, but I dunno. Hopefully we can get something decent and not regurgitated ad nauseum is all.

But sarcasm aside, it is a pretty great introduction, I must say. I mean, granted, Tartaros, the time-travellers and Grimoire Heart all had great introductions too and they kind of end up being poop, but let's not judge the rest of this arc by previous failures, yeah? It's pretty great. Marin, who is a mere subordinate of this arc's "big group", pretty effortlessly takes out two of the main team plus Doranbolt, and does it in a way that actually makes sense because of his powers -- control over space -- instead of some ill-defined I'm-more-powerful-than-you cockwaving. And like the Nanatsu no Taizai way of 'these guys haven't regained their magic yet', this dude that takes out half the team and runs circles over the two main dudes isn't even one of the Spriggan 12. Again, hopefully next chapter doesn't immediately feature Natsu one-shotting Brandish and Erza breaking out of the prison because. Overall, pedophilic Doranbolt aside, it's pretty solid of a chapter.