#no johns

Every weekend, I see glimpes of spoiler pictures, despite having spoiler tags blocked. So awhile back, I’ve devised a mental strategy: assume everything I see before the chapter on scan sites isn’t actually part of the chapter and be shocked if it all lines up. With the exception of a few chapters I read via spoilers, this rule has worked well for me.

So when I saw the spoiler pics for Nalu in this chapter, fresh off posting my latest anti-Nalu post, I figured I’d wait until the new chapter to see if this wasn’t a joke or something. People making fake pictures to help a ship is something that I’ve seen happen before.

But I think the fact that i’m making this post shows just how fake this was.

You know, Hiro Mashima is amazing sometimes. That may sound sarcastic but I really mean that. Every few weeks, I think to myself, “There’s no way he can make me like Nalu less than I already do.” And then something like this happens and I manage to find it in me to like Nalu less.

Forget anything and everything I said in that other post about Nalu not actually being planned from the start and their lack of apology making their relationship seem miraculous anyway. Forget that this isn’t the first scene like this we’ve seen from this series, let alone this year. Forget that I went into this chapter having given up on liking Nalu.

Why should I be happy over this?

This isn’t the kind of thing that I’d want to see ever.

Something feels incredibly creepy about seeing a naked girl laying on top of an dying guy with whom she has no established romantic relationship with. And that’s before you add in the incredibly stupid setup for the moment in the first place. Even more when the guy dying is my favorite character.

“You don’t understand. This is how people actually warm bodies up in the real world. She’s trying to save her life.”

Why is that what has to be wrong with Natsu in the first place? Why out of all the possible things Mashima could have written to be wrong with Natsu did he have to choose THAT specifically? Am I genuinely supposed to believe that this setup was done because it was completely intended to be an actual symptom of Natsu dying (almost forgot that was happening) and wasn’t, at least in part, an excuse to draw Nalu fanservice?

And that’s another thing. How is this actually supposed to help Natsu live? Sure, he’ll get warmer. But it’s not like this is going to help him actually live. If anything, this is going to help him die slower. Nothing we’ve seen and heard about this implies this will work. EdolasMD even says “It’s our last hope” and “We have to believe in the miracles that human warmth and human emotion can bring…”

WHAT!?!?!?!?

So there’s no real guarantee that, because Lucy’s keeping him warm, Natsu won’t die other than our FT knowledge that “no one ever dies”? (juries still out on Makarov) And this isn’t a forced fanservice moment?

Please, Nalu fandom.