The Fairy Tail anime didn't stop at a satisfactory point; it just stopped, right in the middle of a story arc. Still, I commend them for it. The problem was that they had mostly caught up with the manga, and to proceed they'd have had to start writing their own story. And my experience in the past with shows that did that has generally been poor.

So the anime production team this time decided to take a break, after 175 episodes, and wait for the manga to get ahead a bit more. (Reportedly restarting again, soon.)

But I heard that the most recent story arc had finally finished and I was curious to know how it came out. So I went online to see.

I thought there was a bit of a ruckus a couple of years back where they were going to come down like a ton of bricks on web sites which carried manga chapters. Did I imagine that? Because MangaHere had the full run of Fairy Tail and I didn't run into any problems at all reading it. And MangaReader has it all, too.

The latest chapter is 344, which is at the beginning of a new arc. So I got comments, spoilers, below the fold.

I'm not totally pleased with how it came out. Crux transmitting critical information to Lucy at a critical moment came off as a serious deus ex machina. On the other hand, having Yukino and Lucy join hands and summon the entire Zodiac at once to close the gate was pretty cool -- except that it should have killed them both. Yukino and Lucy are both powerful enough to summon two each, but 12 should have been too many. Volume discount? Economy of scale?

How in hell did Milliana end up with Lector?

So none of the dragon slayers actually ended up killing even one of the dragons? That was seriously disappointing.

Acnologia and Zeref are still out there, somewhere, waiting to be beaten in future (probably in different arcs). I had kind of hoped that they were going to be part of this story arc, too. On the other hand, it was interesting to learn the real story about Acnologia.

We never got told what happened to Yukino. I have a sneaking suspicion she went back to Sabertooth, but that's not confirmed.

We never saw what happened to Minerva. We know Erza beat her, but where is she now? (I wanted to see her die. Bloodthirsty, ain't I? But Minerva is a seriously nasty person with, apparently, not a single shred of empathy for others.)

I liked what happened with Sting (except that his reuniting with Lector didn't make any sense). I like it that he's the new guild master, plus that he's changed so much. Very good (except for that one point).

A lot of good action, and a dollop of fan service never hurts, but the whole story line felt just a bit contrived.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Engineer's Disease at 06:14 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
Post contains 501 words, total size 3 kb.