ALL of Hiro Mashima’s manga are a rip-off of the one which came before. This man has only ever told one story, but that story isn’t called Fairy Tail, it’s called Rave. Rave is a generic, hot-blooded shounen action series about a guy with spiky hair and a blonde bimbo with big tits who go on a magical adventure to fight evil with the power of friendship. Rave was a massive, long-running success, and after it concluded, Mashima quickly launched a new series called Literally Who Gives a Shit, but seeing as this manga was not successful by any metric, it only ran for about a year. But Mashima didn’t give up, and in a matter of months, he came out with Fairly Tail. Fairy Tail is a generic, hot-blooded shounen action series about a guy with spiky hair and a blonde bimbo with big tits who go on a magical adventure to fight evil with the power of friendship. Does this sound familiar? Well, it did to the audience, because unlike Literally Who Gives a Shit, Fairy Tail was actually successful, and having learned his lesson, Mashima followed it up with Edens Zero: a generic, hot-blooded shounen action series about a guy with spiky hair and a blonde bimbo with big tits who go on a magical adventure to fight evil with the power of friendship. When Edens Zero first began in 2018, and I first saw people whining and bitching about the blue cat, Happy, being reused from Fairy Tail, I just laughed maniacally. The carrot-nosed Pillsbury Doughboy, Plue, was not only reused from Fairy Tail in Edens Zero, but was also a reused entity in Fairy Tail back from when he was a mascot character in Rave. So forget about Happy. This fucking guy rode through not two, but THREE of Mashima’s manga series. Are you seeing my point yet?
A month after the manga began, the scanslation site, MangaStream, dropped Edens Zero, stating via Twitter:
“In case you’re wondering - we decided to drop Edens Zero. FT was the series we first worked on, so we felt like we owed it a shot, but… Maybe next time [Mashima] should try creating original characters, not verbatim copies. Just sayin’.”
I'm sorry, but the main guy, Shiki, is a copy of Natsu? The big titty waifu, Rebecca, is a copy of Lucy? Then what about Natsu being a copy of Haru, or Lucy being a copy of Elie? I’m not defending Mashima’s shameless lack of creativity—far from it—but if people are out here acting like one of his cookie-cutter stories is better or more sacred than another because they have nostalgic bias toward one and not the other, then I’m here to remind everyone ALL OF IT is trash. It’s the most basic-bitch, bare-bones, clichéd, hackneyed, battle shounen drivel that there has ever been, including Rave, by the way, which people have been accusing of ripping-off One Piece since before many of you were born.
So, is Edens Zero good, yes or no? No, of course not, but it does have redeeming qualities. First of all, the animation is surprisingly alright. I’m not about to oversell this, but I expected absolute garbage, and that’s not what I got. The animation isn’t bad, multiple fights honestly look great, and the backgrounds are fine too. You wouldn’t think so with JC Staff, but this show had a fairly solid production, and their most impressive core staff like Kenichiro Aoki really got to go crazy throughout the whole series. The visual aesthetic almost ruins it, though, because the artwork is just so unbelievably bland. While Rave and Fairy Tail had pretty bad animation and subpar directors who never did anything visually interesting with them, Deen and A1 did an okay job with their presentation. This may be hard for you to appreciate in 2021, especially now that other shounen anime have spend years copying and exhausting their style, but the look and feel of both Rave and Fairy Tail fit their era perfectly, their art styles were memorable, and their colors had sprit. Edens Zero, on the other hand, looks dead inside. Everything about it feels deeply uninspired, even when the animation is nice. The music can be fun, but it’s largely unexceptional, especially in comparison to Fairy Tail which I think everyone agrees had a consistently fantastic soundtrack. But that really is what Edens Zero boils down to, isn't it? It’s just vacuous and forgettable. It has some technical merit, and I suppose it could be enjoyable if you just turn your brain off, rip it out of your skull, and throw it in the trash, but this is recycled plastic, and it barely even stands up to the original products, products which themselves were hardly amazing.
Thank you for reading.
