English Dub Review: Fairy Tail “Natsu Revived!”

The title sort of gives away the twist, don’t you think?

Overview (Spoilers Below)

Wendy and Sherria are trapped fighting Dimaria in a time-stopped dimension of their own world. Since Carla has taken lethal blows from Dimaria, the remaining two Slayers have to beat her to save their friend from death’s grasp. To aid them, Ultear has arrived to offer them the power of the Third Origin, which will give them immense strength at the expense of all their magical power when the spell is through. Wendy accepts this burden and goes to fight Dimaria. She’s taken aback by a powerful hit from Dimaria and is surprised when Sherria comes to save her, powered up by the Third Origin. Sherria, turns out, offered to take the Third Origin instead of Wendy since she knows that this won’t be the last fight Wendy has to save the country. Once Sherria enters the fray, she’s able to use her vastly enhanced magic to fell Dimaria and return them both to the real world. Teary-eyed for the tragedy of her friend’s loss, Wendy saves Carla with her magical healing.

Back at Fairy Tail HQ, Mavis is concerned about the two members of the Spriggan 12 on their radar who haven’t moved in some time. Her fears are confirmed when Jacob Lessio, the Assassination Mage, shows up at the door. After engaging with some witty banter with the Fairy Tail mages, he makes all of them vanish save for Mavis, and explains that they’re now in a void realm, and only Mavis can save them by offering the Fairy Heart to him. Mavis suffers as Jacob starts to beat her, but soon Lucy shoots out of nowhere in battle dress and kicks Jacob. She’s strong, but not strong enough to defeat Jacob. Natsu then jumps in to aid her, having recovered from his wounds fighting Zeref.

The two of them start going toe to toe with Jacob, but his vast powers and ability to turn invisible make him a formidable foe. He forces Natsu to the ground and makes him watch as he makes Lucy’s clothes invisible as a form of torture. (What?) When Natsu is unphased by this, Jacob calls him deprived, but it gives Lucy and Natsu an opening to land a solid kick on his face.

Our Take:

You gotta take the good with the bad when it comes to Fairy Tail, a show that never seems to be on solid ground. On the one hand, you have this impressive fight with Wendy and Sherria that seems to get right at the core of Fairy Tail’s themes of friendship and overcoming challenges. On the other, you’ve got this bizarre fight with Jacob Lessio that has almost no sense to it and ends in a bizarre, shoot-footing kind of way. There’s a lot wrong here, in addition to the structural problems the show has demonstrated this season. It seems like every episode of this anime is need of a rewrite, some more than others. We would definitely put the second half of this episode into the “some” category.

What I enjoyed about this episode comes entirely in the first 10 minutes, where Sherria makes the ultimate sacrifice for her closest friend in a dire situation. What really makes this moment work is that it feels earned. We’ve seen the extent of Wendy and Sherria’s relationship, not just in arcs past, but fairly recently. They’ve had moments together staring at the stars, talking about how much they love magic and their friends, so when Sherria gives it all up for Wendy, we feel that love as an audience. It makes for a great moment that finishes out a pretty good fight.

The trouble comes when Jacob Lessio, a character I’ve always had reservations about, shows up to play. The concept of him using “Assassination magic” makes very little sense to me, because it’s an incredibly vague power that could mean basically anything. Making everyone “disappear” in the first moment of the fight save for Mavis is a cheap way to set up a battle and doesn’t make sense in the long run. Why doesn’t Jacob just do that again when Natsu and Lucy show up? We’re led to believe he’s an incredibly powerful mage, so why does he act like such a dumbass? What’s worse, is that all the emotional tension is sucked out of the scene when the show decides to use Jacob as a punchline for an awkward sex joke that is neither funny nor appropriate for the moment. In fact, it seems like a shoehorned attempt to get Lucy out of her clothes again, which is a sin that this show commits quite often.

Fairy Tail is a chore to watch. It’s constantly going back and forth with what it wants to do, not committing to any one thing or developing out a fight or its characters beyond just an episode. There’s so much more that could be done here, so much more to size up the conflict, add some finality to the characters’ relationships, and make for an arc that truly hits epic magnitude. As it is now, it’s just frustrating, even when it manages to get some things right.