I'm beginning to lose interest.

I've been reading the manga and am up to date on it. The anime is currently telling the story in manga chapter 360, give or take. The manga is now at chapter 443.

The anime is now into the Tartaros arc -- and that one's a real bummer. It gets bad and then it gets worse, and worse, and ultimately Fairy Tail wins but it's not a happy ending. Makarov dissolves the guild, for one thing. And Natsu and Happy disappear, leaving a note that they're going to spend a year training. And Lucy suffers a permanent and very important loss.

So I'm not actually very eager to watch new episodes of the anime because I know what's happening and it's a downer.

As to the manga, well, spoilers below the fold.

A year later, Lucy is working for Wizard's Weekly. Jason approached her and asked her to model, which wasn't any straing for her because she's done it before. And she sure as hell has what it takes.But she wanted a real job and asked Jason to let her become an editor.

Lucy is gorgeous, but she's also well educated in a time and place where education is far from universal. And as a reporter for a tabloid about magic guilds, she has some genuine advantages. First, she's known. Second, she's respected. She isn't the most powerful mage around but she's no weakling, and people know it. She has friends in a lot of guilds, and quite frankly her beauty can open doors too. Finally, she is a hard worker and she doesn't complain. So she's actually a pretty good fit for being a reporter for a tabloid about magic, and the evidence is that she's actually been doing a good job.

There's a one-year skip in the timeline, during which she's been working at the tabloid, but she's also been training and increasing her power and versatility. Then Natsu shows up and they begin a quest to find other people who used to be in the guild to try to recreate it.

Natsu's power is massively upgraded. So is Lucy's. When they find Wendy, she has the ability now to achieve Dragon Force at will, which is the Dragon Slayer equivalent of becoming a Super Saiyajin.

There's a terrible group trying to plan a mass murder, and our central four characters (Natsu, Gray, Erza, Lucy) take on an army of 4000 followers plus a core group of powerful wizards -- and clean them. It gets even easier when Wendy and Juvia show up, and even easier when Levy, Gajeel, and Pantherlily arrive. The head bad guy summons a war god -- and Natsu takes him out with a single punch.

And they do end up connecting with a whole bunch of members of Fairy Tail and go back to Magnolia and rebuild the Guild Hall. By popular acclaim Erza is selected as the new Guild Master.

Because Makarov is gone.

So team Natsu goes on a mission to find and retrieve him -- and this is where I'm getting pissed. All these members of Fairy Tail are twice or three times as strong as they used to be, and as of the most recent chapter (443) we find out that the new enemy is preposterously strong, enough to make everyone Fairy Tail has ever faced look small and slow by comparison.

In other words, we're suffering from the Sorting Algorithm of Evil. Our Heroes are now a lot stronger than they used to be, so isn't it amazing that their new opponents are stronger than any they've ever faced?

This is a scripting peril for all shonen fighting stories. Either the characters don't improve and the audience gets bored, or the characters do improve, and their challenges must get harder too. DragonBallZ is famous for that. At the beginning it takes all Goku and Piccolo have to defeat Raditz who was a wimp, and Goku died in the battle. By the end of the Majin Buu arc, the Supreme Kai -- that's the most powerful being in the universe, or once was, recruits Goku and Vegita to help him defeat Buu, because the Kai cannot do it alone. And then in the reboot this year Goku becomes a "Super Saiyajin God", yet another power boost.

Most fighting series don't climb the power curve at such a ridiculous rate, but they all do to some extent. The only really satisfactory way to deal with this is for the story to end before it all gets preposterous, which is what happened with Negima, and Ranma 1/2.

Up to now Fairy Tail has been handling it pretty well. But this new stairstep isn't satisfactory. I'm happy to see that Lucy is stronger now and I look forward to seeing what kinds of surprises she has in store for us. Or I would, except that I'm losing interesting overall.

What good does it do for her to train like mad when she's up against enemies, yet again, who are too damned strong for her?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:33 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 822 words, total size 5 kb.