Hello everyone! TOM at the top. Wendy to the right. Feels like old times. So, this is not an official review of the series, at least not in the capacity that I used to review chapters in nearly half a decade ago. No, I suppose this is just a quickfire blog on my thoughts about Fairy Tail. I'll be brief, but I figured now is as good a time as any. Why, you ask?
Now I know what you all are thinking.
"Aha, you magnificent bisexual bastard, what made you jump back into this cesspool of crap steeped in misery?"
Well, for starters, my friend Mangy and I have started a new fanfic! Thanks to the utter madness that is User:Arukana, we've begun a Wendy centric fanfic on Fanfiction.net. If anyone predicted it was Wendy-centric, you're not psychic, you just know me. The basic premise is that Wendy and Charle alone survive the assault on Sirius Island and she spends the next seven years defending Fairy Tail's reputation. If you all are interested, give it a look; Mang and I have been writing together for some time now (about five years now, and I think we compliment each other well). If you're interested, give it a look: we've got about eight arcs planned out with more on the way.
So yeah, the long and the short of it is, I re-read Fairy Tail for this fanfic because I realised I didn't know *shite* about the Universe anymore. My fanfic with Per was over long before we stopped writing it, and as anyone who was here when I did my blogs know, I quit Fairy Tail about four years ago. I just couldn't handle it, and it has the dubious honour of being the only series I have ever dropped. But, for the sake of my fanfic, I dove back into it, hoping to find something more out of it than I'd managed before.
And, as much as I am loathe to admit it, I did. To explain roughly, my history with the Fairy Tail series as an odd one. User:Perchan and User:Ash9876 were the ones who originally convinced me to read the series, and I did. I binged everything from start to the Sirius Island arc within the span of a week. I was really into it, enjoying it as it was something pretty new to me at the time. Then the timeskip happened. The timeskip completely and utterly soured my opinion on the Fairy Tail series. It wasn't immediate; it was graduate, but it cemented itself in the middle of the Grand Magic Games arc. It started around here:
and it really fucking cemented itself with Future!Rogue. I won't go into a rant on him but that guy was definitely one of the worst things about the Grand Magic Games arc. Discounting all of the bad writing, fake-outs, and other bullshit, Future!Rogue stands supreme, and I don't mean supreme above dragons. To anyone who is aware of the Naruto series, boy-fucking-howdy does Future!Rogue make Obito look reasonable as all fuck. I will never let it go that the man brought the apocalypse to the past because his cat died.
And don't even get me started on Mr. Walking Talking Bait and Switch himself, Arcadios. But this isn't about any individual arc. As I reread Fairy Tail as a whole, I actually managed to regain some strange appreciation for it. Honestly, Part I o the Fairy Tail series — so the Sirius Island Arc and earlier — is the peak of the series. If I had to rate Fairy Tail based on the first half alone, it'd score high; 8/10, maybe 8.5/10. It has its rockier moments, but I feel like Hiro really cared about his series, his characters, and his world back then. Once we get into the second half of the series — the Grand Magic Games and onward — is where everything begins to go off the rails. Inconsistent power scaling, the appeal and nuance of several characters just drops, and Hiro's inability to really kill anyone just begins to shine through in this second half.
Add to that a proclivity for lifting moments from vastly superior manga (One Piece, Dragon Ball, Hunter x Hunter, to name a few) and transplanting them into this second half, and it just begins to feel grating. But this isn't to say I didn't enjoy the second half of the series either. Oddly, it gave me quite a bit to enjoy; the continued development of Gray, who has wound up being far more appealing as a hero than Natsu. Everytime his past comes up, chances are, the chapters get more serious and there's always some sort of pay-off, even if it isn't always good. I'd never admit to Ash unless he sees this but I was wro...wro...wro...I may have misjudged Gray. Gajeel as well, continues to be far and away my favourite of the Fairy Tail guild who isn't Wendy (who will always be my favourite), while Makarov, Lucy, Wendy, Juvia, Wendy, and even Natsu shine at various points in the second half.
Far be it from me to not mention the fanservice. I'd gone on record somewhere as saying that Fairy Tail has too much, and that is true, but that isn't me saying I don't enjoy it. I don't paper my walls, overload my phone, and commission ecchi and hentai because I'm admiring the female form, I'm a goddamn pervert. My main gripe is that Hiro isn't honest enough with himself; I wish his magazine was one that allowed nipples, and this series had the sort of fanservice High School DxD or To-LOVE Ru Darkness has. I'm not saying there's too much fanservice; I'm saying Hiro didn't commit enough to it, if he was going to include as much as he did.
My re-read of Fairy Tail has given me the ability to see that it had a lot of potential. Hiro introduced an amazing world with a prospective future that was wasted, but it certainly was one of limitless possibilities. And there are many characters I've come to enjoy; I already mentioned Gray, who I did not like when I left, but even the main villain himself, the Emperor Spriggan (known better as Zeref but I prefer Spriggan) shone in the second half. His introduction in the first half didn't amount to much, but his connection with Mavis, his history, his motives and end goal...it's very hard to say that Spriggan did not grow on me. He's basically a combination of two villains, Utsuro, who is fantastic, and Yhwach, who is at least good on paper, and surprisingly? It works. His death, as much as I didn't care for Natsu overpowering infinite magic, was touching, made my cold, dead heart beat again, and honestly felt like it should have been the finale, though it's hard to say Acnologia wasn't a hell of a send-off too.
There's something to be said for a series like Fairy Tail. Unlike BLEACH and Naruto, both of which I see as vastly better series, I can't say Fairy Tail completetly changed. Yes, Part II has issues that Part I didn't have to contend with, the friendship speeches get old, the fanservice should have gone big or gone home, and everyone's inability to die grated on my last nerves...but it's like Mangetsu told me. I wouldn't be so frustrated if I hadn't felt something to begin with, and honestly, I feel like Fairy Tail, for all of its flaws, welcomes you home. It shares that feeling with One Piece (ironic in that I call it a Poor Man's One Piece), and while I will never consider the series perfect, I don't believe it is as bad as I used to think.
There's the good.
There's the bad.
And somewhere in between, there's the enduring spirit of Fairy Tail.
