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

SPOILERS

Back in February 2011, I was needing some new manga to read as the Kodansha Comics takeover of most Del Rey manga titles caused some delays in titles I was reading at the time. Fairy Tail had come up discussions about Negima! and since I knew Kodansha Comics had a pro-Japanese honorific policy in place, buying the manga carried no major risk there. But would it be as interesting as some folks claimed? I decided to find out for myself.

The Story, in Brief

The manga’s story begins with a Celestial wizard named Lucy Heartfilia who’s out looking for new Celestial Keys to acquire. She encounters a motion sick Dragon Slayer wizard named Natsu and his talking cat Happy, who accidentally save her from falling under a charm spell from a wizard calling himself Salamander. After dealing with this character, Natsu escorts Lucy to his wizards guild called Fairy Tail. Lucy is accepted into the guild and begins adventures with Natsu. Eventually they are joined by the Ice wizards named Gray and then by the powerful, S-class Requip wizard Erza.

As time goes on, Lucy, Natsu, Gray, Happy, and Erza help deal with a traitor on the Wizard’s Council, help with a war with another Wizard’s guild, deal with a rogue team within Fairy Tail, deal with evil, unauthorized Wizard’s guilds, ally with good Wizard’s guilds, participate in an event to test for S-class rankings, have half of the guild suspended in time for a year after which the guild participates in a tournament. They team up with other guilds to deal with dragon attacks, they deal with a village where giants have been frozen, then the breakup of their guild before it reforms, they battle artificially created demons and finally an attack from another continent by Wizards lead by the evil wizard Zeref, who’s played a role in some way or another from early on in the manga.

There were other things that happened, but you get the point.

A Different Kind of Magic

One of the early things I found somewhat interesting was the different kind of magic system Mashima-sensei introduced in Fairy Tail. Instead of wizards/mages learning traditional fantasy magic and spells, the world of Fairy Tail has magic be very specialized, more akin to a fantasy ninja or samurai special technique. To that end, wizards fall into a wide range of categories such as Ice magic, Water magic, Requip magic (where one can summon armor and weapons at will), Celestial magic (where one summons Celestial Spirits to combat), various Dragon Slayer magics, etc. This makes for an interesting take on magic usage, but also has its limitations.

For a character like Erza, her Requip magic makes her a very powerful melee combat fighter as she can summon any armor or weapon, depending on whatever need she has at any given moment. For a Celestial mage like Lucy, her magic was less useful for combat, based on how it was initially established. (More on the retcon factor in a bit.) Freed’s Jutsu-shiki magic has very limited usefulness in that he has to establish written rune-traps and such well ahead of time. As such, many stories had to be crafted in such a way so that people with useless magic abilities could do something.

The Early Years: Comedy

One of the things that stood out to me about the early volumes of Fairy Tail was the comedy aspect of the manga. I had not read Rave Master, Mashima-sensei’s prior successful manga series, so I had no idea how his writing style would be. So it was a pleasant surprise to see so much humor injected into the story at different times. For example, when Natsu had to battle Toby (prior to Toby and his group joining the Lamia Scale guild), he didn’t go for the cliched shounen battle that would plague Fairy Tail’s later years. Instead, Natsu tricked Toby into using his paralysis power against himself, which had me laughing out loud. I loved it.

Another very memorable combat moment was when Fairy Tail was in a guild war with Phantom Lords. Juvia was an S-ranked Water wizard for Phantom Lords and tasked to take on Gray, Fairy Tail’s Ice mage. Gray and Juvia face each other in traditional shounen style, but after Gray spouts his cliched shounen nakama gibberish, Juvia initially decides to concede the battle ’cause she finds Gray attractive. I laughed and laughed about this. Even now, going back through this chapter in volume 7 gives me a chuckle.

As time went on, I found the comedy pretty much died as well. Once in a while, Mashima-sensei would pull an old gag off the shelf, but even those would become few and far between by the manga’s end.

The Early Years: Fun Adventures

In the early volumes of the manga, Fairy Tail‘s lack of any major overall plot allowed for random adventures to happen. Lucy, Natsu, and Happy were established as main characters and thus the Natsu x Lucy romantic ship was established. Gray soon joined them, followed by Erza after her introduction. When the adventures were limited to them and maybe a few others (such as when Juvia joined them on a mission after leaving Phantom Lords but before being accepted into Fairy Tail), they were mostly mindless fun with a bit of comedy and shounen action on the side.

From time to time, we’d get tidbits on Natsu’s quest to find his missing “father” Igneel, the giant Fire Dragon King. This was the limit to any overarching plot the manga had. Some adventures would flesh out members of the team, but not always in a good way. More on that in a bit. Unfortunately, as the years went on, Fairy Tail became bogged down with too many characters, causing stories to become muddled, tiresome messes. Further, the fun adventures disappeared for tedious tournaments, guild wars, other multi-guild action stuff, and ending with an intercontinental war. It really became quite tedious.

Oddly enough, when Mashima-sensei broke up the Fairy Tail guild, performed his second time skip in the manga series, and had Natsu and Lucy go around attempting to put the guild back together again, the series briefly returned to the fun adventures I had missed. Unfortunately, as soon as Fairy Tail was reformed as a guild, we went right back to the massive problems of too many characters.

The Retcon (or Repurpose) Problem

Mashima-sensei’s writing style is one where he writes whatever he feels like for any given story that he designs. As such, he had no problem retconning things whenever it suited his purposes. For example, Lucy’s Celestial magic required her to own the key to a Celestial Spirit. She would then sign a contract with said Celestial Spirit to be able to use that entity on certain days or at certain times of the day. That made Lucy a laughably weak person to have around in combat as Lucy could only summon her most powerful Spirit (Aquarius) on Wednesdays.

Eventually, Mashima-sensei dropped the whole notion of a Celestial Wizard having a contract with a Celestial Spirit. Instead, providing the Celestial Mage had the Celestial Spirit’s key, said wizard could unlock the gate at any time and summon the Celestial Spirit for as long as the mage had the magical power to support the Spirit. Toward the end of the manga, Mashima-sensei retcons things again so that Lucy just has to use a key and gains a battle suit with the power of that key’s Celestial Spirit.

While I can’t prove it, I’ve long suspected that some characters were created, then retconned to serve another purpose. For example, when the character of Loke is introduced, he was just the playboy wizard of Fairy Tail. Later on, things are told in a retcon way to say, “Oh. Yeah, he’s not really Loke. He’s the Celestial Spirit named Leo.” Mashima-sensei then writes an expose on how this can be true, but it still smells of a retcon, whereby Loke was repurposed so that Lucy could have another Celestial Spirit.

The worst of the character retcons was Jellal/Siegrain. Initially, this plot twist was one that I just took with a grain of sand (that the villainous Jellal created a solid thought projection named Seigrain who became a Wizard Saint and member of the Wizard Council). However, when Mashima-sensei decided to explore Erza’s past and put Jellal as part of it, things became even more unbelievable and convenient. It was clear that Mashima-sensei was going to write whatever he wanted to serve the current story arc, and if that meant retconning, sobeit.

Even a character I like, the first Master named Mavis, is a massive retcon. When she’s first introduced, it is on an island where she’s supposedly buried. That’s why the island is sacred to Fairy Tail. But then she’s NOT buried on the island, she’s sealed in a giant crystal at Fairy Tail HQ in a basement, which somehow has survived the destruction of the guild HQ on more than one occasion. And for no reason, she just shows up and starts becoming Fairy Tail’s strategic advisor. I love Mavis’s character, but she was just thrown in ’cause “reasons” and then she was kept in ’cause Mashima-sensei fell in love with her.

The Redemption Problem

One of the reasons there are too many characters in Fairy Tail isn’t so much that the Fairy Tail guild is large. It is more the fact that nearly every one Fairy Tail encounters gets redeemed. Once redeemed, they become allies of Fairy Tail. Once allies and friends of Fairy Tail, naturally they want to assist in any fights Fairy Tail gets involved in.  Eventually, I was going, “Enough already!”

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of characters being redeemed. Although Jellal was retconned left and right, to say nothing of being brought BACK to life after being dead (more on that in a bit), I did appreciate him forming a guild filled with those looking to do good and attempt to make a positive contribution. Unfortunately, Mashima-sensei felt that he had to include these redeemed characters into future stories. That lead to Fairy Tail manga becoming bloated with tons and tons of characters who weren’t members of Fairy Tail, all vying for face time.

For me, I would have liked to have seen Fairy Tail members get the focus. Unfortunately, only Natsu, Erza, Lucy, Gray, Happy, Wendy, and Carla get any focus from Fairy Tail. All other members are mostly reduced to cameos if they are lucky, including Mirajane, who is sadly underused and after Mashima-sensei finally allows her to be unleashed, she becomes mostly worthless for the rest of the manga, if she shows up at all.

I keep thinking that if Mashima-sensei hadn’t been so focused on bringing back redeemed characters, we might have been able to better explore other members within the Fairy Tail guild. Alas, that was not to be.

The Dead Return!

When Mashima-sensei wasn’t redeeming characters, he was bringing them back from the dead. The first character to get this treatment was Jellal. After the whole Siegrain-Jellal thing was done, Mashima-sensei had Jellal redeem himself by sacrificing his life to save Erza and Natsu. “And there was much rejoicing. Yay!” Apparently, Mashima-sensei couldn’t bear to be parted with Jellal, so he retconned things so that Jellal could be brought back to life. This pretty much killed the impact of Jellal’s earlier sacrifice, so Mashima-sensei has Jellal show up frequently with his guild of former villains to do good works.

Then there’s Lisanna, the little sister of Mirajane and Elfman. Lisanna was dead at the start of the manga, having died years earlier. The event shook her two older siblings to the core. Ah, but then Mashima-sensei retcons her to life, making up some BS about how Lisanna got sucked into another universe and lived there for years. After that, Lisanna was mostly on the shelf except for the odd cameo, so basically it was a worthless story, even though if my brothers or sisters had died and returned, I’d be happy about that.

I didn’t mention her earlier when I went on about retconning, but Ultear may have been the most retconned character in the entire manga. One can debate on if she ever really died, but she too was supposed to sacrifice herself, but then returned to life, howbeit as an elderly woman. Her battle babe self returns at times as well via some BS excuse.

I have previously mentioned Mavis being dead, then alive after a fashion. This too is a type of returning from the dead. However, she and Zeref do actually die at the end of Fairy Tail, only to show up back from the dead, sans their former lives. It is supposed to be a touching moment, but I just rolled my eyes.

Oh yeah, there was also Gray’s father, Silver, who’d been killed, but then came back to life so he could battle his son. 🙄

Nakama Solves Everything!

Often in shounen manga, the concept of “nakama” is used for the MC and his (or her) friends to overcome some adversity. For those who don’t know, nakama is the Japanese word for a close and trusted group of friends/colleagues/teammates. In the case of the Fairy Tail manga, nakama applies to the Fairy Tail guild. The members of Fairy Tail may bicker and argue about who killed who, but at the end of the day, nakama trumps everything, meaning everyone is like close family again.

While the concept of nakama was in Fairy Tail from the start, it became the defacto deus ex machina way for any Fairy Tail guild character (primarily Natsu, Lucy, Erza, Gray, and Wendy) to overcome an impossible situation against a foe of supposed superior power.  As such, you can have the powerful Erza utterly defeated in combat, captured, stripped, bound, and brutally tortured, yet despite all of this, nakama power allows her break her bonds and defeat her foe. And the same is true for any of the other characters in similar situations. Their love for their guild and guildmates is such that they can triumph over anything, even death!

Using this nakama thing once or twice is OK. Using it constantly to get your characters out of the fire to defeat their enemy is tedious and boring. I literally missed the days when Natsu used his wit to defeat an enemy without nakama power or even raising a fist.

Characters Don’t Really Grow, Except in Power

Speaking of power, this is about the only growth characters in Fairy Tail receive. OK, some characters get redeemed, so you can call that growth of sorts. However, what I’m referring to is proper character development. I will give credit to Mashima-sensei for exploring the core characters’ past, but unfortunately, this often came with a big side of retcon. But these events of the past have little to no impact on the characters outside of a specific story arc where the story is written to force it to have impact.

The same can be said for romantic relationships in Fairy Tail. While Mashima-sensei never really signaled much of anything between Lucy and Natsu, this became a fan favorite ship. The very rare occasion where Mashima-sensei would tease something, usually by having Lucy think Natsu was attempting to do something to indicate a romantic interest in her, only to have it revealed that Natsu wasn’t doing anything of the sort, is as far as that went.

Minor characters Alzack and Bisca were shown to be attracted to each other, mainly because Mashima-sensei wrote about this in their respective character pages. During the first time skip, he had the pair get married and have a cute little girl together. But alas, no stories were done to show this family’s life. (There may have been something tiny, but if so, that was it.)

From the moment Juvia was introduced, there was zero doubt as to her deep affection and love for her beloved “Gray-sama.” Gray acts like a little boy around her, trying to pretend to be disinterested. The relationship goes no further than this until the second time skip, when we learn Gray and Juvia were living together, though not in sin. Gray only shows his true feelings for Juvia when she “dies” toward the end of the manga. And then he kinda confesses to her in the final chapter, but then abandons her.

There were a couple of other relationships (Elfman x Evergreen, Gajeel x Levy), but here too, we are only given a glimpse, nothing more. If some shounen titles can go almost hentai in their nature, I don’t see why Fairy Tail couldn’t have included a romantic element.

Zeref, the Failed Villain

From the early days of Fairy Tail, the evil wizard Zeref was talked about. The demons he created as books were an interesting concept. Zeref was built up quite a lot. However, when he’s ultimately revealed, he’s not all that he seems to be. I was actually OK with this because Mashima-sensei was going against type. But then because Mashima-sensei went against archetype. it created a problem. Why was this evil wizard creating rampaging demons and monsters? Mashima-sensei’s answer to this problem was to make Zeref immortal, but someone who’s desperate to die, thus he created rampaging monsters to kill him. Hahahaha! Yeah, that meshes.

Mashima-sensei gave Zeref character background in the Fairy Tail Zer0 canon prequel manga, and in the process, attempts to humanize Zeref more. Again, I don’t have a problem with that per se, but in the end, Zeref went from this intriguing figure to someone I really didn’t care a wit about. Having him be in a romantic relationship of sorts with Mavis didn’t help. If anything, I never really bought into that pairing. It seemed forced, which ties back into the whole retconning problem of Mashima-sensei’s. I think Zeref was initially conceived as a certain type of character, but then Mashima-sensei decided to change things up and we are left with what I feel is a mess of a character.

“Huge Tracks of Land!”

Finally, one of Fairy Tail‘s big elements (pardon the pun) is having 99% of the female characters drawn with “HUGE tracks of land.” Obviously, battle babes with large breasts need to show cleavage at every opportunity. Further, they must get naked as often as possible, even if the nudity has all naughty bits obscured. And of course, there needs to be sexy poses at times, sometimes sexually suggestive. I understand that sex sells, but frankly, I could have done without it all.

Of course, not all of the Fairy Tail battle babes have large breasts. To appease the lolicon crowd, Wendy was introduced to the mix and Mavis was made a perpetual loli girl despite her great age. I liked Wendy and Mavis well enough, but I know why they were brought in the way they were.

Conclusion

I’ve only been working on this poor Fairy Tail manga review for a week and a half now, so I guess I should wrap it up and get it published. Fairy Tail starts as a fun manga with adventure, action, and humor. The stories are self-contained, but this leads to retconning if Mashima-sensei feels like writing another story and needs to tweak things that have already been established. As time goes on, the manga becomes more and more boring with more and more characters injected into the mix and battles becoming larger and larger, usually resolved with nakama power.

Further, character relationships don’t grow and characters themselves don’t really grow beyond being redeemed, if they were villains for earlier stories. As such, Fairy Tail ends up being a disappointment after showing early promise. Nevertheless, I will buy the final few volumes from Kodansha Comics to finish out the collection.