Monday, 7 September 2015

Fairy Tail 451 Review: Precht Gets Screentime

Fairy Tail, Chapter 451: Fairy Heart 

Wow, they are really stretching this flashback for all it’s worth, isn’t it? Even accounting for the Zero recap, I really didn’t the last three chapters needed to be any longer than one and a half chapters. They really padded things out a lot throughout the flashback and instead it just feels so spaced out and hollow. This one isn’t quite as strong as the previous chapter, but it still isn’t exactly bad either. Though part of it is probably because it stars one of my favourite underutilized Fairy Tail characters, Hades (a.k.a. Purehito/Precht depending on how you want to romanize his real name).

I don’t quite understand why Purehito doesn’t recognize Zeref and is actually like, legit surprised. I was under the impression that Purehito obtained magic from Zeref the same way that Mavis and the others did, but whatever. This one I might just not remember properly from Fairy Tail Zero. Zeref literally dumps Mavis’s body in front of Purehito with no one else to witness it, he kind of strolls off talking about how he’s going to continue his battle simulations while at the same time crying over the fact that he fell in love.

Purehito was the one who put Mavis’s comatose body into the lacrima into the form that we see Mavis in now. Purehito also discovers the whole ‘Mavis took Rita’s life’ thing, but kept it a secret, before eventually succeeding Mavis as guild master. Yuriy apparently died a while afterwards, though it remains to be seen if he is God Serena. Fairy Tail is the very last manga to kill off characters off-screen like that.

Purehito’s constant attempts to revive Mavis apparently caused him to discover this super awesome Eternity Magic: Fairy Heart, which is basically infinite mana. And we get four full pages of people just reacting to it and Mavis explaining the concept of ‘unlimitless, near-infinite power’ to the idiots. Apparently Ivan Dreyar was gunning for Fairy Heart as well, and Happy’s (actually intelligent) question about why they didn’t use Fairy Heart before is handwaved with ‘it’s too uncontrollable’.

We then get four full pages of fluff – just a generic ‘WE WILL FIGHT FOR MAVIS’ and Mavis tears and all that shit. It isn’t as bad as it could’ve been, mostly because it’s short, but really we didn’t need that much. We get a little Gajeel-Levy shipping moment because having the two of them assume a sex position while naked isn’t enough shipping. And Natsu reveals he’s planning something – we know that bandaged hand is hiding something, yes, with the foreshadowing that’s as subtle as a wrecking ball bashing your head in.

Overall a pretty m’eh chapter. I did like seeing Purehito again, though all it brought up is more disappointment because this seems to be the last explanation to his mysterious connections to Zeref and whatnot – it was a ballsy move for Fairy Tail to just murder Hades at the end of his arc when he has so much mystery surrounding him… and then the manga had to fuck everything up by teasing at his backstory being delved into – in Fairy Tail Zero, where he’s nothing more than a supporting character, and in Tartaros where, well, he was reduced to a power mushroom. But this seems to be it for poor Hades and the dude’s just yet another that is assimilated into a minor plot device in this big Zeref-Mavis arc and I can’t help but feel disappointed for Hades’s sake.

Next chapter is prelude to the final battle. So, uh, maybe we can have Albaress attack and people can die? 

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