[MechR]

Originally Posted by Krono

They're wizard, not athletes. The games don't care if their power comes from their training, or from some artifact like Erza Knightwalker's spear that they found on a recent mission, something they bought in a store, or some dangerous ritual to give them a new power, like second origin. All of those things are normal possible power sources for a wizard. Heck, while you're at it, you might as well discount all of Pantherlily's future feats because he stole his current sword, and instantly became more powerful with it.

Most of those things are actually earned with a commensurate amount of effort; even buying stuff from a store, assuming you worked for the money. Second Origin just subjects you to lots of pain for, what, a few hours? To permanently double your strength? That's cheap as hell by shounen standards.

For the record, I also think Lucy hasn't properly earned any of her gold keys since Leo, and even that one was kinda quick.

As for Lily, he had a sword to begin with; Gaz just broke it. And then he got gimped by coming to Earthland. Looting a new one off a defeated foe in a life-or-death situation is fair enough.

It's a "last-minute quickie gimme" that replaced three months training that they would have gotten otherwise. You can argue that the whole sequence of events is bad writing, but that doesn't change that it's ridiculous to whine about the outcome, and wish they'd gotten the training instead, when the outcome would be the same either way.

It changes the subtext of their victories, and makes a reader grimace every time e.g. Natsu shouts "let's show them the results of our training!" with his pants literally on fire.

So now we're inventing imaginary rules that this breaks?

Any shounen series with training arcs (i.e., most of them) is basically promoting hard work. Moreover, whenever "hard work vs talent" explicitly comes up, hard work is always the underdog to root for (ex. Naruto, Eyeshield, Ippo, etc). This is the positive message that shounen manga, nay Japanese society, likes to convey to young readers.

The sudden loss of training time was clearly never intended to be a serious problem for them. It was introduced at the end of one chapter, and solved by the end of the next chapter. You're treating a problem that was introduced, and dealt with, within 20 pages, like something that was a massive long running problem that was suddenly solved just as the tournament started.

It was a week in real-time. Sort of like Azuma temporarily beating Erza: first shock, then a week of fervent speculation as people got used to the idea, then massive disappointment.

We have no idea where Sting and Rogue got their lacrima. For all we know, Gemma was the buyer Ivan was hoping to sell Laxus's lacrima to, and Gemma was the one that bought Sting and Rogue's lacrima and implanted them to make his guild stronger. As for Laxus, as long as you're trying to pretend they're athletes, I'm pretty sure sports organizations don't give a pass on performance enhancing drugs on the grounds that they're needed for medical reasons. It's not "ancient history" it's something he still has.

I'm reminded of Oscar Pistorius. Double leg amputee from infancy; wears prostheses to run in able-bodied competitions. There was debate about whether the blade legs gave him an unfair advantage, but eventually the sports regulators decided there wasn't enough evidence about it to ban him.

The second generation DS's are stronger, because they're stronger mages period. Cobra and Laxus could stomp Natsu for the same reason that Natsu was able to stomp Sting and Rogue, just flat out being stronger. The entire "generation" thing is essentially meaningless as to what their actual power is.

Sure; I'm just saying you'd normally expect a "genuine" thing to work better in some way, but so far there's been no visible difference.

Max never did get stronger than Natsu, he'd only almost reached Natsu's level.

They sparred for at least two rounds, and Natsu was being overpowered until he pulled out the lightning mode, which also drained him in one shot.

Nor was the point of that fight that the average level in the world had risen to the point where the average person like Max was as strong as Natsu. The average level of the world has gone up, but not nearly by that much. The point was that there would be a new generation of people on Natsu's level, and that people that had been on Natsu's level would now be stronger.

The key question is where Max places on the new power scale. Even if we accept FT is underrated, the implication still feels like he isn't especially high; whereas Natsu on the old scale was tangling with elites from the strongest guilds.

And "the country's bottom guild" is entirely meaningless. It's been made clear that Fairy Tail wasn't at the bottom because they were genuinely weak. They were at the bottom because their second stringers had bad luck in the tournament the first few times, and gave it up even though they became strong afterwards.

Still, they aren't gonna be secretly top-tier; I see them as a decent sub-S-class lineup with a big power vacuum on top that kept them from attracting good jobs.

Gray didn't show any benefit because the very nature of the game restricted him from doing anything big. Any AoE attacks on his part would hit a massive number of clones and lose him a massive amount of points. Ice Make doesn't enhance his physical abilities, so simply having more power does not make it easier for him to dodge sneak attacks. And any hit regardless of power would automatically result in him being down, and losing a point. Even so he easily tanked all the blows Narpudding hit him with without being hurt, and Jet and Droy remarked upon the power of the one attack we saw him use.

His ice hammer looked spikier, but that was it. Writing-wise, he could've performed exactly the same without the powerup.

Lucy would have been curb stomped by Flare if she fought without being powered up. Lucy's spirits get stronger when she gets stronger, and Flare was easily able to go 1v1 versus Taurus and Scorpio. Pre-training and Flare would simply tear through the single spirit Lucy was able to summon at a time.

It'd be easy to grant Lucy dual summons anyway, and just say she got strong enough to do it naturally. Then it'd just be a more desperate fight that doesn't make Flare look so wimpy, up till Lucy pulls Uranometria for a comeback but gets cheated. (Or she could just be curbstomped; either way, she lost that fight anyway.)

It wouldn't be a tougher fight, it'd be a curb stomp once Sting and Rogue went Dragon Force. Sting and Rogue are roughly the same age Natsu and Gajeel were when they vanished. Assuming a similar starting point, and similar growth curves, base Sting and Rogue would be about the same level as Natsu and Gajeel pre-training.

This is assuming my ideal system, right? Because in the current canon, Sting and Rogue should be stronger than that, otherwise Max could kick their baseline asses, which makes no sense.

If their training is removed, Sting and Rogue stomp. If just Gajeel gets training and Natsu doesn't, then we get Gajeel soloing instead of Natsu, which I suspect you'd find acceptable.

I think Natsu could still do something useful with lightning mode. It'd be tough, but his fights usually are. Gaz soloing two Dragon Force users would still be ridiculous, so Natsu should pitch in too. Maybe have Natsu double-KO with Sting before he can pull out DF, leaving Gaz and Rogue to finish up.

So, no, Dobengal could not have kicked his ass without the power up, unless he can kick Sting's ass in base, which is unlikely.

In the canon setup, I assume pre-powerup Natsu < Max <(?) Dobengal < Sting < post-powerup Natsu. Dobengal could be a place or two lower, depending on how much Gemma was looking down on Natsu.

The bottom line in all this is that you can't just remove the training, and get the same outcome, only somewhat more difficult to achieve. You have to then change around, and weaken the power level of all the opponents they face to get the same result.

No, that's basically what my ideal scenario is: The world average didn't go up quite so much, so all the opponents are "weakened" enough for things to still work. Baseline Natsu would be around baseline Sting, or slightly higher so he can hang with White Drive.