English Dub Review: Fairy gone “Fellow Traveler”

Free and Marlya split up in a so-so episode of Fairy gone.

Overview (Spoilers Below):

While walking through the city and admiring the new and improved artificial fairy soldiers, Free and Marlya happen to be around when it malfunctions. Starting to attack other people is just one of the side effects, but this occurrence isn’t random. Someone is controlling the fairy remotely.

Free continues to investigate the rogue soldier while Marlya teams up with Clara to track down a part of the black fairy tome called the Black Four. After a harrowing chase involving train tracks, they manage to catch the perp and recover the merchandise.

Our Take:

About a quarter of the way through its run, Fairy gone keeps on delivering solid episodes that, when they work, work alright. There’s nothing revolutionary or spectacular here on display, but what is there is fairly entertaining, if not super enlightening when it comes to characters and motivations.

The show keeps on bringing back the focus on the fairy soldiers, which definitely makes it feel like it’s trying to comment on technology VS magic, maybe? Right now the conversation isn’t very nuanced, mainly just relying on feelings of oddness and impropriety when comparing the artificial fairies with the real ones. At this point, it looks like the show is going to come down with a hard line against using artificial means to produce the new fairy soldiers, but maybe the dialogue will gain nuance in future episodes?  An interesting observation I had was how easily the fairies are commanded with a different pitch of whistle… almost like they were built to listen to different commands from commanders of different ranks in a particular order of operations.

Marlya and Clara getting some time to hang out were appreciated. While I do enjoy Free and Marlya’s dynamic, pairing Clara with Maryla gives them a chance to get to know each other better. We learn that Clara joined Dorothea when she was very young and that she has memories of her parents despite this. Marlya, on the other hand, has no such recollections of her family unit and feels kinda bad about it. Luckily Clara is a kind, understanding type of person.

This week’s dub was pretty darn good! Free and Marlya are definitely the standouts, although I liked Clara a lot in this episode, too, especially with the line about her parents: “Even though I lost mine, too, at least I have memories.” I was half expecting Marlya to reveal something we didn’t know about her past, but for the most part, they just break off their discussion with the reveal about the animals getting to wait.

The sixth episode of Fairy gone wasn’t the best, nor the worst. It doesn’t have a whole lot of big action moments or intricate schemes for stealing power, but it does add some new wrinkles to the standard episode, like Marlya’s new team-up with Clara and Free’s investigation into the artificial fairy soldiers. Sometimes Fairy gone can get gone in its own head, but with 24 episodes in total, maybe stopping to over-exposition us isn’t the absolute worst thing that it could do.