Fairy Tail, Chapter 544: You're the King
So the final battle in Fairy Tail ends up basically being Acnologia chanting "destroy destroy destroy" and the good guys chanting "we're friends we're friends we're friends" in a huge ripoff of the final fight against Majin Buu -- and even in Dragon Ball Z it's not terribly interesting but it made sense there because of how the Spirit Bomb works. Does it make sense here? Really? Unless you're going out of your way to defend a pile of shit, I'm not really sure why you would even remotely consider this sensible in any way, shape or form. I really wanted to make a longer, more concise review of the chapter, but really there's not much to say beyond me mocking on how generically bland everything is from the art to the script to even the panel work. Oh, and I keep saying about how Natsu always wins every single fight with a single punch wreathed in fire? Yeah, guess how the very final battle in Fairy Tail ends? A big punch made out of fire. A single punch. Yep.
Why did Acnologia randomly acknowledge Natsu as the king? Who the fuck knows, it's the same erratic jumping that was behind the Zeref/Mavis "story", I guess. Which is, in other words, a fucking, hilariously horrid piece of shit of an excuse of fiction starring a conflict that makes no sense, introduces deus ex machinae that end up contributing nothing, with a generic art and fight scenes with no creativity whatsoever and it makes me genuinely angry that this motherfucking piece of shit manga actually gets more sales compared to things like Kingdom or Tokyo Ghoul. Truly, the example of lots of quantity, zero quality.
Like, I know my Fairy Tail reviews and deconstruction are apparently the most popular thing on the blog, so I'm probably going to gripe about it when I have actual energy to do so, but really today I just want to do something else instead of write five pages on a crappy manga. I mean, Acnologia's hand randomly disappearing (or was it just not shown in the entire fight? It's not like I actually pay attention to the uninteresting battles) may or may not be some random deus ex shit and I truly do not give a rat's ass either way. Because this chapter doesn't even have any shitty plot inconsistencies for me to talk about -- it's just a boring, badly-written fight that seemed like it's written by a five year old playing with toys in his room.
Also, didn't Eileen turn the princess into a frog? The fuck's she doing back as a human? Also why is Chelia even able to participate?
After seeing all of this, i can see in fairy tail the perfect textbook example of a bad final boss(the other being toriko). i mean, when we see the final boss being such a fooder, i dont see a epic victory, just that everybody in their universe is a moron.
ReplyDeletethis chapter has also helped me to confirm that it exist just two type of fan:
-the shipper(who dont give a shit about quality)
-and the other that honestly believe that this trainwreck is good(i have never see people be so happy for eatingt shit)
and otherwise, not interested in black clover? it's cliche but pretty nice
I don't mind Black Clover at all. It does a lot of generic shonen stuff but by simple comparison to this, it's not bad. I didn't care enough to catch up to it before doing so with like, everything else. If it did, though, it'd probably be lumped with the 'weekly reviews' thing that I do sometimes.
DeleteNeo-Acacia's pretty bad, too, isn't he. But at least with Neo he did some other things in the fight beyond 'punch stuff' and 'laser beams', and they tried to give both of them some semblance of backstory. It didn't end very well in my opinion, but compared to Acnologia, or Kaguya from Naruto... Neo and Acacia are kind of like a worse version of Juhabach as far as villains go. The backstory's unique enough for the setting, but they spend so much time telling us what happened that they don't develop Juha or Neo as characters at all. With Acno, though, the flimsy bullshit backstory they gave in the movie which I've only read via comments on this blog is literally contradictory to what we actually see Acnologia does. And all he does is shout "I wanna destroy the world" all the time.
Thank god there's only one more chapter of this dung left.
I think when Eileen died all her enchantments died with her. Like the when she warped the world, it turned back when she killed herself. I don't honestly know it's hard to keep up.
ReplyDeleteI'm so sorry. In ref to Hisui being a frog.
DeleteIf I were to guess why Blackjack doesn't keep up with those things, it's because of two reasons, (A) they're comparatively small details for characters who's relavence is little to none, and (B) all the other crazy shit the series throws at us either preoccupies the mind or just numbs you so much that you care about nothing else besides wanting it to end.
DeleteBoth A and B. Also my apathy for the series and the bad writing in general -- a better manga would have shown us a brief scene of Hisui turning back into a human for a panel when Eileen died instead of like fifteen panels of Erza and Wendy's reaction.
DeleteAlso I only really read Fairy Tail anymore to mock it on this blog. It's entertaining for both me and apparently you guys as well.
Expect a full review rant on like Monday or Tuesday -- I'll do a mega review where I go through the chapter and talk shit about every single irrelevant side character in the manga as they pop up in the DBZ montage.
Well, actually, the manga did have a scene of Hisui turning back into a human (also, turns out she was a mouse, not a frog - go figure) back when Universe One was undone. It's just that said scene was on a panel barely 1/12th of the page and was the first time since than that we even got reminded she exists, let alone that she was ever in the arc.
DeleteBut that's Fairy Tail for you; even when they go out of the way to remind you something happened, they like all the other Z-list characters are given so bare a notation to it that it barely even sticks. Comes with the territory of these characters being either unmemorable or so one-note that we'd rather forget them by this point XD
If I were to hazard a guess as to why these reviews get so much popularity than most of your other ones... it's probably because by comparison, all your other reviews already say everything that could or would need to be said. With this series though, it's like a never-ending onion - there's always some new layer of stupid to peel away, the extent of which can't ever be covered in any one review or viewpoint. For me personally, though, it also kind of serves as an interesting case study for everything NOT to do when making a story XD
ReplyDeleteHowever, I do have to give the series one single, tiny nod of approval in regards to Fairy Sphere - I was genuinely shocked when they didn't just try to asspull it working properly without Mavis and her "infinite magic"; Lucy's casting the spell wasn't anywhere near strong enough with just the Fairy Tail members involved, so having everyone else pitch in to offset the deficiency was one of the few times the main cast didn't just asspull the feat all on their own.
That being said, it's the how that pisses one off - reducing everyone else but the main cast to just being glorified batteries for the spell is par for the corse on this series, but than we get Meredy (who's been completely irrelevant to the story since Trenou Island) suddenly becoming more key to stopping Acnologia than the actual Dragonslayers by using her Sensory Link magic to let all the other guilds join in and restrict Acnologia. This not only freezes him in place, but appears to *cut off his power from his human body*, rendering hum vulnerable for Natsu to deliver the final punch. Also, Acnologia's arm didn't vanish - that shot was the stump of the missing arm Igneel took from him... which thereby implies Acnologia could have blocked it and not been killed had Igneel not taken his arm (even though that totally goes against how Fairy Sphere is implied to have robbed/sealed off human-Acnologia's powers, so it shouldn't matter either way - IDK).
To say the above tells a lot about just how little fucks are given to the concept of actual characterization is a gross understatement, when your manga author literally thinks any character can just jump in and save the day without regard to relevance, build-up or foreshadowing. Even if the idea makes sense in context (again, sensory-link magic tying everyone together to match Mavis's output), it'll still feel a glorified asspull if you just throw it in at the end all of a sudden. Acnologia's defeat can quite literally be solely attributed to freaking Meredy of Crime Sorcerie - a girl who's only other contribution this arc was to be fawned at by Lyon as his new ship-tease. Oh, and that's not even starting on how seven breeds of Dragonslayer magic (two of which are artificially-made) somehow works on someone who's implied to have combined ALL the breeds of Dragonslayer magic in his body to eat raw magic AND supposedly had space-time magic that we never once saw him use.
Long story short; FUCK. THIS. MANGA.
That's a fair assessment, I guess. Although honestly in this chapter and the previous one Fairy Tail's crappiness has kind of gone from "so bad it's funny" back to just "bad". Which circles around from why I stopped reviewing it back in, oh, the Avatar arc or whatever? With Fairy Tail it's honestly as if someone took every single trope about shonen manga, and then tried to do the worst possible version of each trope. Like a montage of supporting characters in the climax or friendship speeches or foreshadowing a big scary army or whatever are great tropes when used by a superior writer. But here? Everything is a fucking joke.
DeleteYeah, I'm generally all for minor characters getting the spotlight every now and then but Meredy (and Cobra, who's billed over the likes of Gray in this fight) has never been relevant since... since the fucking Grimoire Heart arc. She went from a boring antagonist to just someone who parrots everything Jellal and Ultear says, gets reduced to a prop for the rest of the manga... and with no foreshadowing she fixes the problem.
And honestly it's just so annoying how magic is portrayed here. No one here attempts to use their magic powers in anything creative so when Mashima actually remembers something his characters can do it makes the rest of them look even shittier in comparison. The flimsy excuse is that oh, the dragons cannot be hurt by magic so no one tries. Except when it does. Like Erza's swords. Or Fairy Sphere. Any particular reason why Fairy Sphere works? No? Anything that makes Fairy Sphere so special beyond friendship? Nothing about this makes sense. Like, the "combine magic powers of the nation to match Mavis" bit does, but it's to facilitate a stupid plot point. Just like how "Gray makes an ice boat" makes sense but it facilitates a stupid plot point of giving Acnologia a belly ache.
I got confused with Acnologia's stump arm because several times in the last two chapters Soul!Acnologia is drawn with two arms so I assumed the soul body just has the whole body restored. So not only is that a stupid fight, the manga is also inconsistent within its own work.
I wanted to rant on dragon slayer magic but I'll save it for Monday's review.
Actually.... that's a really damn good point; if Soul-Acnologia is the representation of Acnologia's spirit that has been *separated* from his body, why the hell does he have the injuries of his physical body/a missing arm? Shouldn't a brand-new body that's supposedly an avatar for his soul not have the injuries his body - or does that imply the wounds from Igneel were somehow spiritual as well as physical, like how Orochimaru's spirit being harmed by the Reaper Seal in Naruto gave lasting damage to his arms that was totally separate to the injuries of his physical body?
DeleteAt this point, it less that his body and spirit were split and comes across more like his human and dragon forms were split into two separate entities - and because of how Mashima insists that this is "body and soul separation" as opposed to becoming two linked entities, it breaks the plot almost as badly as how Fairy Sphere is described as "the ultimate defense" but is never given clarification to how precisely it does this.
No offense... but I sincerely wish you the best of luck trying to last through this absurd shit for when you do the major-review version of it. Because at this rate, it's gonna be a long, long dig before you hit daylight with this flop conclusion.