#teamlobster

Exactly. It feels like Mashima was just checking plot points off a to-do list. “Invel. Check. Gruvia moment. Check. Gray vs Natsu. Check. NaLu and Gruvia, check.”

The worst part of all of this is that none of these plot points have any lasting impact. Eileen got dragged around for literal months and at the end of the day nothing in her arc has any relevance to anyone or anything. She didn’t do anything that had any lasting effects - she didn’t get Fairy Heart, none of her enchantments stuck, she barely assisted her army, no one cared about her backstory, she couldn’t catch Acnologia’s attention when he was literally around to kill Dragon Slayers and, most damningly, she failed to make Erza give half a damn about her. It’s really kind of sad. 

Natsu vs Gray? Despite the hype Mashima absolutely refused to give the matter any depth - the fight ends because Erza says so, and that’s that. Even the “Natsu’s tumour” mess got dealt with as anticlimactically as it started. First Brandish gets rid of it for reasons, then it comes back, and then it turns out that Natsu can get rid of both his dragon and demon seeds because he wants to, and that’s fine! Slap some NaLu at the end and no-one will care!

Sticking some shipping fodder onto the tail end of the issue to distract the shippers from the fact that what they saw was garbage and then just moving on seems to be Mashima’s main strategy this arc. 

What’s really sad is that, stupid and contrived plot points and subarcs aside (eileen), some of these plot points could have been decent if Mashima had actually spent any amount of time on them. Natsu vs Gray, the demon/dragon seeds, God Serena and Dimaria… there is some potentially decent stuff in this arc, and had Mashima bothered to spend more time fleshing out those ideas and working on them they could have actually been decent. Between the potentially decent ideas being rushed through one or two chapters and the terrible ideas they’re crammed between, this arc feels like it’s got too many things being crammed into an eighth of the time they need to be developed decently.

I’m sure that’s definitely part of it. I bet he also feels guilty for betraying her/not being able to protect her/not being able to stop her vendetta/her not using him against the heavens and finding another shinki to do so (since he doesn’t know about the god’s greatest secret so to him it just seems she abandoned him)