フェアリーテイル
Fairy Tail Manga Volume 10 Review

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SPOILER Summary/Synopsis:

After Loke confesses to Natsu and others of Fairy Tail that he’s in fact the celestial spirit Leo, he gives Lucy some passes to a luxury resort for her team (Lucy, Erza, Natsu, Happy, and Gray) to attend.  After spending a relaxing day at the beach, Erza takes a nap and dreams of her past.  That evening, the group goes to the casino, where Juvia joins a startled Gray, her shiny Fairy Tail necklace indicating her desire to join them now that Phantom Lord is no longer a guild.  Four wizards arrive in the casino looking for Erza.  Natsu ends up getting shot point blank in the mouth, Juvia gets smacked away before quickly returning to defend Gray, and all of the people in the casino are placed into cards thanks to a wizard named Shou.  Lucy finds herself bound up thanks to the cat-like wizard Millianna. The four wizards, Shou, Millianna, Simon, and Wally, were all companions of Erza when they were child slaves and they intend on bringing her back to the Tower of Heaven and their leader Jellal, whom was also a child-slave companion of Erza’s.

After they take the captured Erza and Happy away, Lucy manages to free herself with the help of a person in a card and discovers the body of Gray.  However, it is a decoy as Juvia had sealed him within herself to protect him. They quickly find an irritated Natsu and take off to pursue Erza and her captors.  Meanwhile, Siegrain tells the Magic Council that the forbidden “R-System” magic is still in place and that the Tower of Heaven was completed to revive the dark wizard Zeref. As such, he wants the Council to vote to use the Satellite Square, Etherion to destroy the tower and stop the threat.

Meanwhile, Erza is taken to the Tower of Heaven and placed in a cell.  She wonders what could have turned her former non-magical friends into wizards and manages to overcome Shou and free herself from the bonds that prevented her from using magic. With that, she decides to pay Jellal a visit while her companions arrive and infiltrate the tower, fighting their way up to where they encounter Erza who’s been fighting her way through.  Erza wants them to leave but Natsu isn’t going without Happy.  He takes off and while Erza is sure that Millianna won’t harm Happy since she loves cats, she still wants the others to leave.  They refuse on the grounds of friendship and so Erza relents, telling them of her past as a child-slave tasked with helping construct the Tower of Heaven.

Erza was taught about magic by an elderly slave who was a member of Fairy Tail.  Erza had killed some guards and had been brutalized for it until Jellal took her place. The abuse he received made him full of hate which made it possible for the spirit of Zeref to commune with him and then fuse with him.  Despite losing an eye, Erza leads a slave revolt which results in her elderly mentor being killed. Her anger over this caused Erza to unlock her ability to summon weapons and she fights her way to where Jellal is being held and frees him.  Unfortunately, he has turned evil and so to protect her friends, she’s forced to flee the island, never to return.

Thoughts/Review:

Well, our crew gets a day of fun before getting into the next story-arc and taking a defeat.  Interesting how Mashima-sensei is progressing in developing the central characters.  He started by giving Natsu a small amount of character development before moving to Gray and exploring his past.  Then he went and explored Lucy’s past.  Now, he has started exploring Erza’s past.  So, that leaves Natsu and possibly Happy to explore down the road.  ^_^

Anyway, now it is easy to see why Erza became such a “bad ass” if you’ll pardon the expression. Her life as a slave was completely unexpected and yet that hard life made her the tough woman she is today, made more so by the slave rebellion and the death of the Fairy Tail slave who mentored her. Its easy to see how she ended up at the Fairy Tail guild since she would have learned about it from the old man.  Then using Fairy Tail, I can see how Erza strove to become an S-Class wizard because of her experiences as a slave and no doubt a strong desire to never end up as one again.

Jellal and Siegrain would seem to be the same person somehow, unless the person claiming to be Jellal now is an impostor since Mashima-sensei is keeping Jellal’s face obscured.  However, since Jellal turned evil, I tend to discount that as a possibility of an impostor.  So, Jellal may have split himself into two people.  That seems possible considering that Zeref was known to be a very powerful dark wizard and Jellal would seem to have at least some of the power of Zeref.  The other possibility is that Jellal and Siegrain are not the same but twins, though the marking on the face seems to make that seem less likely.  Sure, twins could have been given the same facial tattoos but why?  Well, it will be interesting to see what comes of this.

It is awesome that Juvia is an unofficial part of the team for this story-arc.  It was humorous seeing her watching Gray from a distance but I liked how she basically decided to make her move in the casino to not only be with Gray but to also announce her intention to join Fairy Tail. That was just hilarious seeing her Fairy Tail necklace rather than her normal teru teru bouzu doll.  ^_^ I actually had expected Gray to want to put some distance between himself and Juvia with Mashima-sensei having the character follow a “don’t cling to me” attitude.  Instead, I am glad that Gray was immediately OK with the idea of Juvia joining Fairy Tail and hasn’t been annoyed with her addressing him as “Gray-sama.”

I also found Juvia’s perceived rivalry with Lucy to be amusing.  There was her double entendre remark about Gray being inside Juvia and not inside Lucy.  There was Juvia pointing out to Lucy that Gray had praised her work and not Lucy.  And then there was Juvia making a head bubble for Lucy that was smaller than the the ones she made for Gray and Natsu.

With Erza pretty much giving tacit approval of Juvia combined with Juvia’s contributions to the fight, I would guess that once this arc is over, she won’t have much trouble getting into Fairy Tail.  Hopefully, she’ll be made an official part of Erza’s team along with Lucy, Natsu, Gray, and Happy.

Finally, there’s the omake chapter.  Normally, I’ve passed on commenting on them when they’ve appeared because there hasn’t been much to say.  However, this time, the story was too humorous not to mention.  The story works because I think we’ve all experienced a situation where a person we trust tells us, “You know, I think So-and-So likes you.”  Inevitably, this “So-and-So” is someone we’d never considered in a romantic sense and so immediately, we start giving the person a second look and we start considering the possibility of “what if..?” as well as looking for signs that the person in question is giving signs of interest.  *lol*  So Mashima-sensei’s story of Mira planting the notion in Lucy’s head that Natsu might fancy her was quite enjoyable. ^_^

So, a fun, interesting volume here.  ^_^