This isn't so much of a review, because a review would require objectivity and effort. It's just that I really, really want to talk about this week's chapter of Fairy Tail. I'm not sure if I missed a chapter or two, nor did I particularly care -- some people told me to read this week's chapter because of how badass Acnologia is doing?
He, uh, shows up, scares the piss out of Erza and Wendy and stomps Eileen's face into a squishy pile of blood. HAHAHAHA! Fuck you, Eileen, no one respects you, piece of shit. Of course this probably means in a chapter or two Erza will get so angry that even without magical power and with only one bone unbroken in her body she'll be able to gather enough BURNING JUSTICE to slash Acnologia's head off because of the POWER OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP and BECAUSE SHE'S ERZA.
In other news, Acnologia continue to be mysterious and look cool and have everyone afraid of him. Just like how he was 200 chapters ago. So, yeah, in 200 chapters Acnologia never got past the 'mysterious powerful villain with a cool design' trope, and at this point I am absolutely bored of him. Do something already! He's still better as any of the other villains in this arc, but shit, that's like saying I'd rather eat mouldy bread than eat shit.
Natsu and Zeref has the most boring-ass fight in all of manga history. What the fuck? You two are magicians, and all you do is whack your fists at each other.
Also I don't understand Zeref's motivations, like, at all.
Natsu gives some boring-ass crap about "the power of me". It's probably supposed to look badass, and if we're going with a hero that's actually been through some effort to get their power -- Naruto, Ichigo, Eren, Toriko, Midoriya, Luffy, Gon, Gintama, Ed Elric.... literally every other shonen protagonist -- but it makes him feel like a sore loser protected by plot armour.
August proves himself to be quite pointless, rambling on and on about how Zeref is the only way. Fucking fight Gildarts already, you old Hades knockoff. Cana shouts about how "we don't care about justice, the precious time and blah blah blah whatever with friends is what's important to us", thereby sealing the deal on how utterly selfish and crappy the Fairy Tail mentality is. Like, jeez, Hiro Mashima, if you want to write Fairy Tail as a group of anarchistic psychopaths who only care about their own, y'know, you can write that. But I don't think they're supposed to be anarchistic psychopaths, I think they're supposed to be likable? Somehow? (Also Cana, why even bother? You're not part of the main six characters, whatever you do doesn't fucking matter in this manga)
This is really the part of the chapter that really entertained me and led me to finally make a post about Fairy Tail. It's really this mentality that, I think, makes the Fairy Tail cast as a whole so unlikable. They talk such a big game and bullshit about friendship and everything, but they clearly don't really give two shits about people outside their little group, relying on nothing but brute-forcing their way through all their problems, then crying about it afterwards because oh my god Lucy is sad. Everyone in their way that isn't won over by friendship (read: converted) ends up getting flat-out murdered. How the hell are these guys still our protagonists? Like, they don't quite go into wanton murder territory, which is their one saving grace, but the people living in Fairy-Tail world probably doesn't find it very nice. It's either the Alvarez Empire that wants to invade and kill everyone or whatever vague thing they're planning, or Acnologia who wants to kill everyone, or it's Fairy Tail, who causes as much damage in their insane rampages and clearly isn't fighting to protect the world, just their friends. So yeah.
Like, characters are human and there's a significant portion of humanity that's inherently selfish. I can accept that. Attack on Titan recently did a chapter about how all the events circle around Eren's group and they keep getting all the good stuff, but at least he's called out for being such an ass.
Then August, despite previously being portrayed as this very down-to-business, ultra-loyal Zeref majordomo, suddenly goes on a rant about how he wants to see Gildarts' reaction when his daughter is killed in front of him, because, shit, let's make all the villains as cartoonishly and stupidly evil as possible, without any variation between them -- except for the big-boobed women, whereby they have a Freudian excuse as to act as they do and be redeemed and everyone forgets about their crimes.
Yeah, this is nonsense.
Man what's the point of Irene exactly? Mashima just asspulled a character, gave her a torture-filled backstory, humiliated her by own daughter in the fight and now her corpse is being defiled by Acnologia. Her being mother of Erza didn't affect her daughter one bit, her invention of DS magic means shit if Igneel (and the others) could enchant their magics into Natsu anyway. So WTF Mashima, you just used her, for the sole reason, to wank off Erza and then threw her away like a used condom. What a disgusting treatment of one's own character. You sicken me Mashima.
ReplyDeleteAnd fucking Acnologia doesn't know who the Dragon Queen was but suddenly now he can recognize her all fine, all of a sudden? And what about the serious no BS take down all dragon slayer agenda? He just ignored Wendy right in front of him!
Zeref has more mood swings than a hundred pregnant women. First he wanna die, then he wanna kill everyone, then he wanna kill Acnologia, then he wanna do something bigger, then he wanna save humanity's future by killing Natsu, ffs why didn't you kill him in your first encounter then? He's like "Playtimes over since I can sense Acnologia now", you dumbass, Universe One just got dispelled five minutes ago, of course Acnologia was coming back but you just wanna waste time, don't ya?
August has some fetish for father-daughter action. No wonder he was so fond of Brandish. Calling this guy a Hades knockoff is an insult to Hades!
Next chapter: "Why wasn't the majesty's son never loved?" oh fuck, next chapter is about Larcade, someone, pls, cancel this manga.
Problem is that when characters are used as plot devices, authors are usually honest about their dirty work but the way Mashima dragged Irene on, trying to portray her as a character yet used her like a plot device is just insulting. It's like he's saying "No no, she's a geninue character! Look how I make Acnologia stomp her corpse! That's deep characterization right there!" Oh just let her rest already damn it Mashima. You ain't fooling no one, literally pissing on her and calling it rain.
DeleteI realized the thing about Obito was that he also seems to have a thing for an underage girl. What's up with villains and their pedo tendencies nowadays? Seems to be a connection with how crappy villains they end up being.
"Oh fuck, Lacarde? Didn't he die already?"
Not dead enough it seems, besides it's not like that's gonna stop Mashima from giving us a bullshit backstory from August's mouth and watch Larcade get redeemed by her loli excuse of a mother, with a speech filled with so much cheese that your cheeseburger will be overflowing with it.
I think if’s more that Eileen was Mashima’s attempt to “tie loose ends up” with DS magics and Erza’s past, which failed. It also seemed to be Mashima’s attempt to inject a “threads of fate bind us!” subplot in how now all the main characters have something that bind them to Natsu’s past (Gray through his grievances with the demons, Lucy through her ancestor Anna’s friendship with Zeref, Wendy through them actually knowing each-other but having their memories erased or something(?), Happy having originally been sent by Edolas to observe and kill Natsu because, yeah, turns out he’s a pretty big threat. Now we have Erza by being the daughter of the woman who invented DS magic).
DeleteAlso, I think the implication with Acnologia… is that the dick was just sitting back watching Eileen and Erza fight (I’d say he was being pragmatic, but he was never shown as ever caring about that before), and listened in on Eileen’s expo-dump about her inventing DS magic. In other words, Mashima had Acnologia sit on his ass in the middle of the war-zone, even though that goes completely against his defined character of being war-hungry and therefore that he shouldn’t have been able to resist jumping in. Because this is the only way Acnologia could know about Eileen now, this also makes Universe One even more pointless if Acnologia wasn’t even delayed by it in the first place.
With Zeref though, it’s SLIGHTLY more justifiable because, as Mavis’ flashback chapter way back when implies, Zeref’s actually insane from his centuries of despair. Granted, as I’ve said before, Mashima seems to think this “insane = devoid of any rationale” - he thinks that them being out-of-it means they don’t need any kind of reasoning, logical or otherwise. With August though, it’s not - not only does it go against his seeming wise-old-man character, but he HAS shown inklings of understanding this kind of bond just based off his interactions with Brandish.
She’s not just a plot device, she’s a badly-written plot device that plays off the author’s favourite plot-protected character. There’s no way that was going to end well. Didn’t really care for Acnologia stomping on her, though I did find it hilarious.
DeleteObito’s more lamenting of his lost childhood love, really, more than having a thing for underage girls – in his mind Rin is either aged-up to be as old as Kakashi and he is in the present, or he’s imagining them all as children. I’m not defending Obito because I still think he’s a crap villain, but he’s not a pedophile, at least… not like Doranbolt is in Fairy Tail. Which, oh, yeah, by the way, is an actual thing that I sometimes forget – that one of the good guys straight-up lusts after like an eight year old girl or whatever.
I’ve always, always hated it when stories go “oh by the way our ancestors/our threads of fate bound us in the past!” which is always felt like a weak way to shoehorn in unneeded tie-ins. Fairy Tail’s especially bad with this, though – especially the absolutely makes-no-sense retcon that the five dragon slayers actually knew each other as kids but Convenient Selective Amnesia™ means that Natsu remembers vividly all the time he spent with his adopted father but nothing else.
Also, yeah, good catch on Acnologia suddenly realizing everything, and while the mental image of Acnologia sitting on a rock watching all this nonsense go down… man, how awesome would it be to have the Erza-Eileen fight end not with a “I love you actually for no real reason” conversation but with Acnologia storming in all crazy going “DRAGON MUST KILL MUST MURDER!” and killing Eileen? Yeah. Also yeah Universe One is super pointless.
Insanity doesn’t really equal changing motivations every second chapter, though. Some great insane villains get by simply being super-unpredictable, or super obsessed, or they sober up a little over time. Zeref? Zeref just flip-flops from one goal to another, trying to look mysterious and using “oh I love my brother Natsu” and “oh I am lovers with Mavis” for vague and nonsensical justifications for every random thing he’s doing.
It would have been a better way to kill off Eileen and build up Acnologia properly. But of course, FT's been guilty of wasted opportunities a LOT, especially in this arc - for example, when I first learned about Brandish's abilities, that they could work on the organs and her grudge with Lucy's family, I though it'd be cool/interesting if they made it that she was the one who killed Lucy's father (he seemed to have passed away from natural causes - aka, a stroke or heart failure - in-series, but shrunken arteries could have forced a heart-attack).
DeleteThe series has always looked scared of having anything else but these unrealistically tidy and neat endings for every issue every single time. Hell, even insanity is used the same way - like we've both said, Mashima really seams to think saying "they're insane!" is an excuse for them to have no stable goals. Even the Joker in Batman arguably had at least one stable overall goal at a time, crazy or otherwise - or at least was more consistent in it than Zeref has been.
The Joker's actually relatively stable in that while what he DOES is random -- like he'll go from laughing gas to creepy circus hideouts to grinning fish to social experiments -- but he doesn't suddenly decide to pull entire reinventions, like, you don't see Joker suddenly transform into a different brand of crazy like Riddler or Two-Face.
DeleteWith Zeref he goes from 'super-powered nihilist demon' to 'tragic villain looking for love' to 'well-intentioned extremist trying to slay the world-ending threat' to 'I will invade this other country for reasons' to 'caring for his subordinates' to 'not giving shit about anyone but Natsu and Mavis'.
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DeleteTrue. IDK if Mashima just thinks insanity equals schizophrenia or split-personalities or whatever, but Zeref and Eileen before (or after, depending on where you start from) seem to indicate he thinks saying they're nuts is an excuse to, as you put it, keep shifting brands of crazy - and then have an excuse to pull a heel-face turn when said insanity gets cured by love :P
DeleteStill, one positive was that looking at this actually made me realize something; quite a few people have started accusing FT of ripping off other series as of late (GMG's Future Rouge part was accused of ripping off Fire Emblem: Awakening with the "time travelers save the future from evil dragon(s) and fight destiny" theme)... and I now realize that this stuff with Natsu being E.N.D. feels really, really similar to what I saw in D.Gray Man (both the manga and the anime. IDK if you've seen the series, though, so I won't specify - but let's just say I think the END and Zeref stuff has a pretty heavy resemblance to it). Now, how is that a positive? Simple - it made me laugh at how openly-pandering and desperate the series has become.
Come on, now, there's no resemblance between this pile of nonsense and D. Gray Man, whose story was well-crafted, well-told and generally awesome. ;)
DeleteWell, actually there is a resemblance in one (possibly) superficial regard; the main character is the reincarnated brother of the main antagonist.
DeletePeople have said that FT's ripped off several other series for material as of late. Basically, my own submission to that ring is that Allen Walker's relationship to the Millennium Earl as his reincarnated sibling and who's "true identity" is basically his world's equivalent to a demon was copy-pasted, or at the very least was drawn off of for inspiration, by Mashima as the basis for Natsu being Zeref's brother & E.N.D.
However, whereas Allen's nature as a reincarnated Nea actually was something he had to work through and slowly ate at his memories and eventually his personality regardless of successfully suppressing it or not (not to mention was a long-standing aspect of his character that we saw developed throughout the series)... Natsu has his brief moment of madness and then simply goes "I pick option deus-ex" almost as soon as the issue even becomes an issue, and that's seemingly the end of it. D.Gray Man made it an actual element of character progression, but Fairy Tail threw it in seemingly just for shock value (and I use the term "value" loosely here considering how it turned out).
If it's Mashima's attempt at ripping off other mangas, then he's doing a piss-poor job at doing it. I kinda-sorta only see it because it shares some broad strokes, but Fairy Tail lacks so much of the buildup, character development and discovery that Allen and the Millennium Earl has over the series and honestly calling Fairy Tail copy-pasted from D. Gray Man does the latter series a disservice.
DeleteI'm honestly unconvinced at all -- sure, they share some superficial elements, but if you squint hard enough you probably can make as good a case as, say, Fairy Tail ripping off Goku and Raditz being brothers that don't know each other, or Ichigo and Juhabach as some weird reincarnated godlike family member with an army. Fairy Tail's main plot at the moment is just so bland and without identity that you can shrug and make an argument that it's similar to some other series and you're probably right -- because that's all Fairy Tail is reduced to at this moment. A bunch of manga tropes loosely glued together with bad fight scenes, friendship speeches and an undeserved amount of hype thanks to good marketing for its anime.
Except Goku and Raditz were just separated at birth, whereas Juhabach and Ichigo were figurative "father and son." Natsu, however, shares Allen's distinction of being the reincarnated-from-death little brother of the main antagonist, which makes it a bit hard to say it borrows from anyone else in my opinion.
DeleteAllen overall seems more heavily copied from right down to Natsu declaring his identity is his own no matter who else he was supposed to be - from the "forgot your true self" plot to the "this is your destiny" subplot" to the crazy powers his reincarnation gave him; he even had "superpower sealed arm" for a few brief chapters. Furthermore, his big brother is the series' main antagonist which his "nature" is to come into conflict with, leads a cadre of "the most powerful beings to rule the world", is famed for creating demons and corrupting people and is revealed to be off his rocker yet still has a "sympathetic side" to his followers.
The real differences is more that Natsu's version of the story was far more rushed and sloppily done then what it's borrowing from, and that FT did it all way more stilted and unrealistic. Hell, there's even some unintentional irony in that they've ended up voiced by the same person in the English Dub; Todd Haberkorn.
Eh, I'm honestly still unconvinced, mostly due to how... intricate the story is in D. Gray Man, and how transparently bland Fairy Tail has been with none of the plot twists being "holy crap what a huge revelation" and more "oh, so this is a thing now." I honestly don't care enough to figure out if it's just Mashima plagiarizing (and badly, if that) or if he's just trying to cram as many fantasy tropes as he wants to. The 'reincarnated from death' thing is probably the only thing that's unique to D. Gray Man, I concede that point, but the main villain being the brother/father/mother/sister of the main character is something that's done in literally every second piece of media you'll find; declaring "I am myself" is like something common to all protagonists; and the main villain being crazy-yet-respected and leading a cadre of super-powerful beings is something you'll be hard-pressed to NOT find in manga.
DeleteMostly because I don't even see a 'this is your destiny' or 'forgot your true self' subplot in Natsu, if you point it out... it'd be far too gracious to call what Natsu went through in the manga that. If the writing was better, sure, maybe I'll see it as trying to copy D. Gray Man. As it is, though, it's just bad writing.
But that's my whole point - that intricacy is the big difference Natsu and Zeref's dynamic to Allen's and the Millennium Earl; literally the sole difference is that with Allen it was utilized throughout the whole series, whereas FT threw it in for this one arc. Just because Mashima tossed it into the final arc for shock value/it's shorter and worse-done than the original, it's somehow no less a rip-off?
DeleteIt's precisely because the "reincarnated from death" aspect was unique to D.Gray Man that, again, seeing it used to the *exact* same effect on Natsu (he died, was brought back, than joined "the enemy" as a do-gooder and is now dealing with it). And like I just pointed out, it's the fact that the main villain sibling is explicitly the mentally-divided demon-creating world-resenting evil cadre-leading biggest threat to the planet that seals it; that the position being generic doesn't excuse all the other similarities. Same with Natsu - the declaration being generic doesn't instantly refute how everything else about his situation, from the (supposed) identity crisis to the risk of being overtaken by the "original self" to even his defiance against the idea there's no other option.
Just the last chapter (titled "Will Destiny Go Up In Flames"), we had Zeref point out that it was basically Natsu's "fate" to face him, whereas the chapters before had Natsu going through flashbacks to recover his original memories. My point was that it feels a *bad* attempt to copy D.Gray Man.
The thing is, I'm not going to super-quickly point out that just because Fairy Tail is bad is that it's ripping off D. Gray-Man specifically. Like, yeah, there are lots of similarities, but there's also enough differences to really make it go either way. Could've been Mashima trying to rip off D. Gray Man, could've been Mashima ripping off something else, could've been Mashima just actually thinking up of this sorry excuse of a plotline himself.
DeleteI mean, I haven't really read every other piece of fiction out there so accusing the manga of being copying D. Gray-Man directly is something that, well, might be true, might be not. Which honestly doesn't change anything either way (and plus, while I wouldn't mind reading D. Gray Man, I honestly don't wanna really think about FT that much to compare it) because whether this is plagiarized or not, this is still shit either way. Like, there are ways to make plagiarism at least be entertaining, but Fairy Tail's crap. So.
Still, it just seems far too convenient for my tastes, even just based on the sheer number of similarities (or even precise mirroring in some aspects) between Natsu and Allen's situations, and the differences just aren't enough to wave off the feeling that Mashima tried to shoehorn said rip-off into the final chapter. Hell, the dissonance of plot in how these "revelations" about Natsu and Zeref feel divorced from the rest of it are what make it stand out so much.
DeletePart of the reason I'm so inclined to believe the aforementioned ripping off is largely because of the sheer amount of unoriginality that I've seen in what Mashima does nowadays. It doesn't seem like he really has any creative spark (or any good one) anymore, which makes both new and old ideas fall flat. He, for lack of a better word, doesn't seem to care or able to care anymore.
Agree to disagree on the fact that Fairy Tail's ripping of D. Gray-Man?
DeleteI do absolutely agree with the sheer jarring gap between the Natsu/Zeref plotline with the rest of what's going on, that's for sure. And I definitely agree that Mashima hasn't been creative for a long, long, long time now. If he's not ripping off his older work, he's ripping off general tropes if not outright other manga.
I guess so, yeah. I'm just not going to be able to shake the feeling that Mashima's shoehorned stuff from other series into the last arc, just to try and make it appear interesting. Although I do admit it might just be because I personally don't have any faith in Mashima's sense of originality as a writer - or lack thereof, as it were.
DeleteAs it stands, Mashima's already done the "family as antagonists" trope to death before, but it's usually been with parents - Lucy's father Jude hiring Phantom Lord (though he wasn't necessarily evil; just selfish), Laxus' father Ivan being a dick to him and than beaten in the GMG, Minerva's father Jennma also being a dick, Gray's father Silver being a reanimated corpse for the bad guys, and now Erza's mom Eileen being insane-evil-whatever. Oh, and now we have Zeref killing his "son" Rakheed/Lacarde for interrupting his fight with Natsu (by the way, that's what it looks like happened this past chapter, since Zeref blew a hole in Lacarde with his death magic - chalk that up to another character, Mr. "secret weapon against Acnologia", that seemed plot-important but bites it like nothing :P). And that's just /one/ of the tropes Mashima seems found of - it's not even counting the whole slew of others.
fairy tail is so terrible that nobody can turn theirs head and ignore it. it's like a red fire truck on fire .
ReplyDeleteand otherwise... what do you think of the latest chp of black clover ?for me , the "super powered evil side" in it was rather well executed after all and the backstories of thread girl , if simple, is not to terrible (and it actually explain why the character is a alcoholic who is dressiong like a call girl. i know that it sound silly , but a actual reason for fanservice and stupid cloth is always nice ).
Haven't read Black Clover since... a couple months ago when I last read it, so can't really comment that much.
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