#6000th post

I don’t get how people come to the conclusion that Fairy Tail has gotten to where it has within the past few years. In fact, I’d argue that Fairy Tail has, to some extent, always had many of the elements that people complain about it having now.

It was around the time of the Tartarus arc that people were saying that Fairy Tail was getting darker. However, Fairy Tail has always had dark elements to it. In Chapter 1, Lucy’s almost sold into the human trafficking ring and branded. By the time we get to the Morning of a New Adventure, we’ve dealt with stuff like childhood slavery, demonic activity, childhood neglect and torture. We know about the utter mess Gray’s backstory is and how it’s affected Lyon and Ultear, Wendy’s first guild is revealed to be a lie, and Happy and Carla was tricked into thinking they were originally supposed to kill their Slayers.

You know, light-hearted stuff. Mind you, that’s not even everything bad that happened before Tartarus came and Fairy Tail “got dark”.

The villains in the series were kind of better in the past, but not by much. Consider that most of the memorable villains of the early series (Gajeel, Juvia, Jellal, Lyon, Laxus and Oracion Seis) end up being good guys by the end of Tartarus. All they needed was a good beating (two if you’re Oracion Seis) and they’ve ready to change their ways. Of course, that’s kind of an oversimplification of the situation of multiple characters and, depending on how you see Laxus or Jellal’s case, kind of not entirely true. 

That said, how many memorable villains are there that stayed villains? Zeref and kinda Ivan. We don’t see all of Raven Tail and Flare has a change of heart after getting beaten by Laxus. Aside from the anime-exclusive stuff, what do we know about Erigor other than “he wanted to kill the council”? Duke Everlue was an evil rich guy who imprisoned Kaby’s dad to make him write a novel for him and that’s pretty much all we know about him. I’m not seeing a huge following for any of the other Element 4 in this Fandom. 

And that’s not even mentioning fights. There have always been terrible fights in this series. I feel like Gray has had fairly consistent fights throughout the series, and some people have definitely had worse fights as the series progressed. But there have always been terrible fights.

You’re not going to see Lucy winning a ton of fights on her own with no outside help. The only exception to this is probably when she beat the robbers in Love and Lucky. I’d count the first fight against Sherry, but Erza takes out her mouse thing.

As much as I love Natsu, he’s had some pretty bad fights. You might be thinking of his fight with Zancrow or his solo bout Sting & Rogue later on, but I’m not even sure the fight against Jellal was all too fair. Even knowing everything we know about Natsu now, it still feels weird that he was able to go into the spirit world and come back to help beat Virgo and the Duke. And going in to beat Brain after taking a beating from Cobra wasn’t all too bright of him. He got fire from Jellal to help, but even that feels weird to see.

Speaking of Natsu, he hasn’t had that consistent of a character. I feel like this is more relevant for another post (that I’m working on for another day), but Natsu hasn’t had much of a character arc. There isn’t a whole lot of growth he goes through in the series. There were amazing times for it to happen, but nothing does.

People complain about fan service being bad now and they’re right in that it’s more prevalent. But there have been some pretty bad fan service moments in the beginning. Our introduction to Lucy includes a failed attempt to seduce a shop owner before we even know any of her personal aspirations outside of wanting a somewhat useless key. The second armor we see Erza in is basically a fancy bikini top with a fancy skirt made of metal.

As terrible as this arc is, it’s not like stuff from the past was always spot on. I’ve held for the longest time that the worst arc was Galuna Island. Other than helping Gray’s character arc, the entire thing was kind of pointless. About the only other thing to come out of it is Lucy getting Saggitarius’ key, but that could have been done in a number of other ways.

Mind you that’s before any of the filler arcs in the anime (which I don’t seem to hate as much as everyone else) and Grand Magic Games, considered by many to be one of the worst arcs.

And do you really think that this arc was the start of characters coming back from the dead by terribly explained means? 

It might shock you that this post didn’t start as the revelations of a disillusioned fan realizing a series he’s enjoyed for so long isn’t good. I started thinking about this as I worked on a post involving characters dying and coming back even before Lisanna. All this other stuff came to mind later.

Look, I love chapter 100, but I’m not a huge fan of the way Erza was saved. It seemed very clear that she died, but apparently, she wasn’t because Jellal redirected Etherion into the sky with his body. Kind of weird on its own and weirder if you consider the only thing Jellal got out of it was a bad memory for four arcs in the manga.

Heck, you could even count discount Shikamaru as the first death fake-out. He gets stabbed and they think he’s dead. Natsu brings him along with them and we think he’s stupid for it. Why would he bring along a dead person? Well, he wasn’t dead and we learn Natsu was wrong for doing it for another reason.

Now, I know what some of you guys are probably thinking. “Okay, Fairy Tail was probably always bad, but Rave Master was definitely better than Fairy Tail.” As someone who has read Rave Master, let me tell you that you are right.

Kinda.

Rave Master is no doubt better than Fairy Tail. However, many of the problems that are present in Fairy Tail also show up in Rave Master. There are weird fan service moments in that series as well. Some of the arcs weren’t well written. And don’t even get me started on characters coming back from death. And while Fairy Tail does most of those things worse than Rave, they are in fact in Rave. You’ll also see them in Monster Soul, another series Mashima made.

As much as I love and enjoy Rave, the more I think about it, I get the feeling that this series was good enough to be considered a cult classic, but nowhere near required reading for manga fans. There’s no reason that someone should necessarily put this next to stuff like Hunter x Hunter, Fullmetal Alchemist, Berserk, One Piece or the like as something you definitely need to read.

And if I’m perfectly honest, I think the worst arc in Rave Master was probably also its last arc. I don’t want to spoil a whole lot of it because I know better, but, as I think more about it, I can’t believe that certain things that happened during the arc were canceled out and I didn’t think much of it when I first finished it.

I joked about Monster Soul awhile ago, but there is a huge disconnect between the two volumes of the series. Again, not trying to spoil much, but it's clear that Mashima wrote the content in one volume without thinking much about the possibility of a second volume. And some of the problems you’d probably have with Mashima are also in this series.

In Conclusion: