Fairy Tail 454: Lesser Members Do Stuff!

Fairy Tail, Chapter 454: Team Flying Dragon & Team Osprey

I did a Taizai review first but my stupid laptop ate it so yeah I don't feel like rewriting it today so that's gonna be up tomorrow. This chapter of Fairy Tail is... okay. Nothing unexpected happened, but we actually see people other than Team Natsu do stuff! So that is definitely nice. It's honestly not epic or tense at all since, well, y'know, but the art's decent enough that I can enjoy some mindless blasty boom boom. And honestly at this point that's the only thing that Fairy Tail has left to offer for me, since I've completely given up on this manga delivering good plot and characterization.

Throughout this chapter we get Mavis trying her hardest to be a strategist, but the fact that she completely forgot about the dragon slayers' motion sickness -- and the dragon slayers themselves forgetting -- yeah, all for the sake of a cheap joke. I mean, I already don't like Mavis because she's basically turned into a plot device, but this makes her look incompetent in addition to being full of only sweet friendship crap. Plus her "strategy" basically involves 'let the gun girl shoot a big gun, let the rune guy make a big shield, Team A go in and smash stuff'. (Even Wakaba and Macao go 'huhh' at Mavis' totally-doesn't-make-sense speeches.)

Ajeel's flying ship army shoot out, uh, magical bullets, I guess, which would probably look a shit-ton more epic in the anime but just kinda look meh here. But Freed blocks everything with his Jutsu Shiki, at least until his magic runs out. And I absolutely love it when Fairy Tail remembers that it has other characters other than Natsu Erza Gray Wendy. And it's absolutely nice to see these characters that normally do nothing but fill the background actually, y'know, do stuff. Granted all they're doing is pushing back faceless mooks but it's a hell lot more refreshing than just seeing Gray Ice Spell #485, Erza Sword Slash #958 and Natsu Fire Punch #8469.

Natsu, Gajeel and Wendy are just flying around dragon-punching the lesser ships with the cats. Honestly can't say much about this. Bisca, meanwhile, is the titular 'Team Osprey' and she's apparently sniping the main commander ship with Jupiter -- Phantom Lord's big mech cannon from way back when, and, again, it's cool that we get some nice little call-backs to earlier arcs. Ajeel blocks it bare-handed, though, since we need to build up the villain of the week, although Alzack does note that the scattered beam took out a fair amount of the villain ships.

We get the stupid motion sickness joke which was stupidity, then Erza cuts off a chunk of the ship and challenges Ajeel to battle. I really do hope that we don't just get a generic Erza fight and maybe we can get something different than just 'Erza struggles a little, then defeats the enemy with one final slash'. Which literally is every single fight Erza has been in. I would say something about hoping that we get some help from all those dudes down below -- but at this point that would be way too optimistic and I'm hoping that Erza won't take up too much space with another friendship bullcrap speech.

But negativity towards the series as a whole aside, I actually liked this chapter simply because it lets some of the secondary characters -- Freed and Bisca, mostly -- do some stuff. And that is pretty neat. And the chapter as a whole is pretty inoffensive action other than that one stupid sequence. Yeah.