I don’t care how old her mind is, Mashima. Her body is a child so pregnancy is really awful to picture! Totally unnecessary creep factor. The numerous problems with how this baby was conceived and born, ranging from icky implications to outright plot holes, makes me suspect that this twist was very much not originally planned. So far it has done nothing but detract from the story so I’ve no idea why a Zervis child was even added at all at this point.

What the--! WHERE DID YOU GET THAT BABY?! HOW DID YOU--! 

UG so many questions. And not interesting “oh I can’t wait to find out!” questions. Irritating questions about plausibility and necessity of these plot developments.

What do you mean “mistake” did you somehow not have enough time to consider the choice? Neither light or dark? Okay then, WHERE’S THE PROBLEM? It’s a baby--raise it. Is there not a whole guild-full of people upstairs who would be totally down to raise the baby of their founder?

I....what. Abandoned? Again, WHY? Questioning whether to bring the baby to life was stressing him out but he’s cool with leaving it to die slowly in a basket?

Oohhhh you just will not stop being creepy will you and so many problems from one panel. Black silhouette children with magical intelligence beyond their years are always “fun”. How CONVENIENT that you remembered the parents you never met. I could have sworn that later in this chapter your magic turned out to be copying not memory magic so what gives? Who. Raised. You?

Why are you forcing such ridiculous amounts of nonsense into this Mashima???

Is he running with bread in his mouth? Whatever. I’m more grumpy about that fact that given this is FT, I expect most/all villains to get redemption but this would permanently and irrevocably alter a person’s personality in severe ways and as someone who doesn't even ship Zervis that much I’m shallowly bitter about this happening to their child.

Ah good, more cannon fodder for the “how many people does Zeref just HAPPEN to meet in the forest” post I’ve been meaning to make. Let me guess, August CONVENIENTLY had weirdly advanced tracking magic that helped him track down the father nobody told him about. 

Now....why would you mention Lucy so specifically at this time?

Better how? His curse maybe I guess?

“Hi I’m a four year old wild child with no education! Let’s build a country!”

He doesn’t even have a name so who know’s how he even learned to talk. Or developed a concept of what a country even IS.

Awwwww what a clean and well dressed street kid!!!!!

I think this is my first full ‘reaction post’ but it felt like fun to do for this chapter since it had so many wtf moments. The wtf is sadly not contained to this chapter but descriptive of this whole arc. Why is this happening? The unnecessary elements have been going on for far too long. Larcade was revealed as a Dragneel at least 7 months ago. His introduction went nowhere and the twist that the child is actually August adds nothing either. Especially including the Irene nonsense, this whole thing is causing other perfectly interesting material that had been set up for years previously to be neglected.

Uncomfortable situations and nonsensical developments abound. I’m not disappointed or angry because FT’s divergence from content I like has been going on for ages. I look forward to being able to look back on this arc when it’s complete and see if future developments make Mashima’s reasoning any clearer. Not that future content can “fix” anything; stories that take this long to develop need to be an interesting ride all the way through, not viewed as good only once they’re finished. 

Some questions are fine, good even, but the questions this chapter re-enforces just take the reader out of the story. I for one get a strong sense of Mashima randomly coming up with new ideas, failing to consider their impact on the narrative, and forcing them into the story with a startling lack of effort to mesh them properly with previous developments.