#ch159

I think it’s either the translation in the anime or manga that trips me up here, but this line actually surprises me for how cold it is. 

Honestly, I just realized that in Fairy Tail, there isn’t actually a genuine criminal in it. Everyone was a victim of circumstance, and genuine ‘villain-turned friend’ characters are in other guilds. 

Fairy Tail itself doesn’t have a true villain-turned character in it. 

They were all children caught up in tragedies and made awful mistakes. Everyone in Fairy Tail starts in the good alignment and stays there, except Laxus, but I find it hard to call him anything in the evil alignment when Fairy Law explicitly told us he was a good boy all along. 

If there are any characters that are actually ‘evil’ with malicious, truthfully irredeemable intentions, like Lyon in Galuna or Sabertooth in GMG, they’re probably not in the guild anymore. Case in point: Hades, and the TOH trio: Sho, Millianna, Wally, all who were either members or were almost members.

So, it’s kind of ironic that Natsu says “we’re used to committing crime” when members of FT are rambunctious delinquents with godzilla-scale powers at worst. They never destroy things or cause trouble maliciously, they only do it as accidental collateral damage, or the injured were assholes to begin with. 

And as we've seen from Makarov's first speech when Lucy first joined, they are all unapologetic about it, and Makarov literally says 'fuck the council, we are free and proud mages'. So... I find it a bit iffy that Natsu says this here, because they don't feel any guilt for those "crimes" at all. It would be one thing if it was Gray or Erza, who blames themselves and both have severe survivor's guilt from mistakes they actually made. So Natsu doesnt feel like the right person to say that line. He does not consider his wanton destruction a crime.

Okay, but this smile after that line is fucking precious. You know he’s proud of his little brother.

They’ve been writing each other letters for a while, but I don’t know how long. From 159:

I’m not sure how Lau knew that Haku was sending someone to assassinate our earl, since Haku made up his mind to do so while Lau was in Marseille (ch160, and there’s a typo in the manga)...

...en route to England, but Lau might have been going on a hunch that our earl would become a target, thanks to some knowledge of what was going on with the opium industry in England... and our earl’s role in those changes.

From ch161:

Then later, in ch165:

Lau didn’t know who Owl actually was, but he probably would have heard about Haku’s amazingly talented and skilled sniper. And so he mentioned that in a letter, too.

I don’t know exactly how long ago they started corresponding, but it was after January 1886 (demon contract) and sufficiently before Lau arrives sometime in 1887.

From Mystogan, Wendy learned safety. 

From Jellal, she learned strength. 

Erza, too, gained strength from her past with Jellal. I think it would have been amazing if, when they went to Edolas in 100yq, Erza watched how Mystogan led his country in the face of strife, and learned something, anything, from it. 

Parallels of this Natsu vs Jellal and TOH’s Erza vs Jellal.

Natsu and Erza fight seriously, and it’s one-sided because both times, Jellal doesn’t seriously fight back. Erza falls for Jellal’s act, but Natsu doesn’t, not even for a second. (Except this time, Jellal’s “pretense of guilt” is genuine.) 

And while Jellal was ‘forgiven’ for a moment by Erza back then as they resigned themselves to death, Natsu refuses to accept or forget anything. 

Jellal isn’t even asking for forgiveness, he knows he doesn’t deserve it. 

And if course, the parallel to Simon... or actually, it’s Erza. In TOH, the one that unhesitatingly ran forward first was actually Erza, then Simon ran in front of her. 

(And before that, there was Grandpa Rob!)