(I mean it's shounen, so who gives a crap ...)
Hey! Remember that fun, light adventure anime with lots of humor, no bullshit recap, satisfying action, one liners and lots of badassery? Yeah, me too! So where the fuck did it disappear to?
This review is written solely for people who've watched original series (but then again ... if you didn't watch the original, why the hell would you be looking this one up? damn man, you're weird) and will reference, what I consider to be, two halves of one Fairy Tale. Pun indented.
Fairy Tail is somewhat of a guilty pleasure to me. It's an anime I'd oftentimes turn on just for laughs and chills and some Natsu badass moments. It's something you can always watch and relax. Sure, it had its "dramatic" moments, but they were extremely light. The anime knew what it was and never really tried being anything more. It was mindless fun and it was great as it was. So what in the flying flip of fucks happened? Where did the theme of light adventure go? Why are the fun characters replaced with brooding morons who spit out 'woe is me' lines more often than Bella from Twilight? Why the fuck do we have 8 minutes of recap each damn episode? Well, let's try and figure it out. Here's my theory on what happened:
The writer of the Fairy Tail decided he'd like his next manga to be darker and more mature, but first decided to experiment his bullshit ideas on Fairy Tail. Well, he obviously fucked it up, and what was supposed to be a fun anime you can just randomly turn on to relax, switched into something so annoyingly boring you might as well re-watch 175 episodes of the first season, 20 of the 2nd, and leave the 60 to rot in hell where they belong.
Villains in Fairy Tail were always cartoony and over the top. They were annoying, would spit bullshit left and right, but you were able to tolerate them mostly because they either looked cool or had cool magic or whatever. People like Jellal (please, just kill off this character; he's literally a walking depression at this point), Hades, Zero, etc.. They were all over the top, but hell, it was enjoyable seeing Natsu whoop their ass with some fire. But "villains" in the aftermath of Magic Games Arc (hell, even during it if we're being honest) are just flat out annoying. They're not intimidating, you don't really want to see them dead, you just want to see them gone because they annoy the crap out of you. The arc that the anime is currently in brings forth set of 9(10) new "villains" out of which LITERALLY 0 have any intimidating presence or cool magic. They're running joke. Unless this "END" bullshit demon turns out to be the coolest shit in the world, I'll literally call last 30 episodes of this anime the worst in its history (didn't read the manga, stopped a while ago).
I still actually haven't touched on what really happened to the show, so here it is, brutal truth: Fairy Tail has always been a pussy-out type of a show, meaning that nobody dies. After a while you just kind of accept it and roll with it. This also meant that it underlined all the potential heartbreaking moments, but you weren't watching Fairy Tail for that shit. In addition, the anime was always about Fairy Tail kicking someone's butt, about hyping the newfound, random powers that came out of nowhere, but you dealt with it because that shit was cool. Here's the anime past Magic Games Arc (and somewhat during it): pussy-outs are everywhere. Characters "die" every 2 episodes, and each time they're supposed to "die", they are given about 10 minutes of sobbing and crying. Even when it so happens that it looks like 1 of them will die (not even a main character), turns out she won't die, Lucy just won't be able to summon her again. Everything is now dark, everything is about gloom, about revenge, about this, that and stuff Fairy Tail was never about. Author tries to make his story more "mature" and "epic", but fails to realize that we know he can't. He doesn't have balls to kill anyone off. Hell, he doesn't have balls to make Fairy Tail lose. We're talking about a dude who literally made an entire arc that lasted nearly 40 episodes just to bring a single character back to life. Remember that.
Moving on from the story which is just a plothole shitfest even a 5 year old mentally challenged kid can dissect into pieces, let's talk about the characters. They're 1 of 3 reasons I liked Fairy Tail. There are a lot of them, and each has its own merits: Lucy is a straight man, Happy and Natsu are just Happy and Natsu, Erza is Erza, etc. Each character was fun on his/her own, but was also fun when set up against the others. So what the fuck happened? Gray is literally a walking flashback now. Each time this dude appears in the show, we get a flashback about something that happened in 10th episode of the 1st season. I swear, in the past 30 episodes, he had more flashback than in the arc that was MADE ABOUT HIM. You might as well pit him up with Jellal and have a walking disaster as they would make depression a virus that spreads faster than piss with the wind. Natsu turned into a fucking wuss. Dude gets beaten up left and right (during Giants arc or whatever, he gets beaten up with a dude wielding a fucking mechanical hand), has 1 relatively badass moment in 40 episodes (which was against a random flying thing or whatever; let that sink in. Actually, that might as well be called the most badass moment in the past 50 episodes. Against some random animal that had no tie-in to the story. Let that sink in) and offers nothing else. There's this scene during the last arc whereas he finds headquarters of this dark guild and busts in. You expect something like what happened with Sabertooth, for him to go badass mode and do something, but nope, he gets captured in like 10 seconds. You might as well rename Laxus into deus-ex-machina, Erza into "I'll beat you but first you need to whoop my ass for 20 minutes for no reason", Lucy into ... well, let's face it, she's always been bouncing boobs really. But hell, screw that; Lucy had the most badass moment of all during the arc against 9 demons of hell. Please, just think of that for a second. Just for a second. Lucy. A character who was literally made to be a fanservice cow.
Speaking of fanservice, I want to give this anime some credit. In manga, there were a few scenes that were just brutally dumb, honest to Satan retarded, but anime managed to work them out somehow. Props to literally telling the mangaka "dude, like, this ain't no hentai bro, chill down".
The only even remotely interesting character at the moment is Wendy. I mean, the little girl has her own badass moments here and there. Who would have thought, right?
Humor is scarce nowadays in Fairy Tail. You'll encounter it a few times in the episode, while the rest is about either flashbacks, atonement for some random shit, speeches about how humans are weak, shit and rely too much on emotions, speeches about how that's what makes humans strong not week, pointless "I'll save everyone" speeches that literally overshadow any action. I swear to the sweet holy Satan, there hasn't been a single interesting fight in this anime that was actually exciting and looked cool visually since Natsu vs Two Dragon dudes. The closest this season came to having that was Natsu against random flying cat-looking thing. No, not even Natsu vs Rogue. It was about 90% speeches and repeated animations and about 10% anything remotely interesting. Not even Celestial King vs Underworld King. That in itself should scream awesome fight but nope. Not even Gray vs his dad (o yeah, get a load of this "amazing" storytelling here man, it'll shake the foundations of literature), nothing, zero. Even animation has somehow dulled from the last season. To this day, I still think that Natsu vs Zero had by far the best animation, followed closely by Natsu vs Jellal (and that shit was literally years ago). I don't know. I'm really close to just throwing my hands up in the air and saying "Fuck this shit".
Music is still here though. It's good and you can easily listen it outside of anime and have good time, but that's about it. This anime literally turned into a random experiment because no one has a clue on what the fuck they're doing with this thing. Fairy Tail's world was never set out for serious storytelling, deep characters and exploration of humanity and humans. It was about fun, light adventure with decent one-liners and badass fights. What did it turn into? A walking mess of woe, characters acting like a five year old throwing a fit because you didn't buy her iPhone, and so many cop-outs, random power-ups and sudden "revelations" that it trumps over its previous season, Naruto and Bleach combined. Holy crap this is one hell of a mess.
Anyway, if you're thinking about watching this, I'd rather just watch, what I call, "the Good half of Fairy Tail". Things kind of went astray after the 7 years speed-forward, but it still somewhat held it charm during the games. Now everything is just ... sigh ... whatever. Fuck this thing.
