(L) Fairy Tail Manga Discussion Thread

[kitten320]

Originally Posted by ImperialFlameGod8190

@kitten the problem is Natsu was overmatched and then something happened and he one this was his first true win from start to finish but yea Gajeel and Juvia really get the crappy end especially Gajeel he hasnt won a fight since he joined FT in the manga.

Exactly, it's like he degradated once he joined FT.
I don't mind Natsu winning as long as others get their share too. And Gajeel is a powerful dragon slayer just like him, he does not deserve to be trashed like that.

GundamFan
If that happened I would be throwing bombs at the manag right now. Mashima should have kept it that way. Gajeel gets Rouge and Natsu gets Sting. I don't mind if Gajeel were to have more difficulty than Natsu. It would show that both are strong ye Natsu is still superior. There was no need to take Gajeel out of action all together and give Natsu even more strength than needed.

It is always like that for any action movie/series. MC gets trashed around and then bam! He finally wakens up and smashes bad guys skull. Always hated this over used pattern.

Ah yeh there was that guy... but few moments later he kicked the butt of a 10 times stronger opponent so his previous lose barely has any impact.

n0m@n
As I said those loses are of no real impact since few minutes later he kicks the bad guy or someone even stronger make that previous lose insignificant.
Can't believe I'll be saying it but Ichigo's first fight with Grimm jaw is pretty good example of what I want. Ichigo actually lost and had to reflect on what happened. Yeh Tousen did take Grimmjaw away before Hichigo could awaken but invincible Ichigo still lost, the fight ended there and it took awhile until he defeated Grimmjaw or anyone stronger.
Natsu didn't have such moment even once. everything was resolved in the same day and even hour.

Krono
Powerful weapon is one thing. Even for athletes a lot depends on their gear like bicycles, spears and etc. If they are not properly maintained, they'll lose. Horse riding, if the horse is not taken care of and is weak there are higher chances of losing.

What Ultear did can be considered as doping. Clearly it is not something everyone does.

The point was that Natsu never had a major lose that affected anything. I don't want him to be emo but he really should reflect on some of his actions. He is getting off the hook too easily.

Well I like Natsu, his actions are not annoying like for example Gon's from HxH. Now that's the guy I want to suffer and I don't care that he is a kid. His dumbness needs some straightening up.

Ah well, I'll leave it at that.

Sabertooth needed to get of their high horse.

[Randrak42]

Originally Posted by kitten320

The point was that Natsu never had a major lose that affected anything. I don't want him to be emo but he really should reflect on some of his actions. He is getting off the hook too easily.

Don't forget Natsu vs Gildartz where Gildartz owned him and taught him a good lesson.

Not even following the conversation, but this caught my eye.

[Kafriel]

What Ultear did can be considered as doping. Clearly it is not something everyone does.

It's something that nobody does, because the ark of time is lost magic :P Still, it has been hinted that Erza may have already had her second origin unlocked in the first place, so others could have reached that level of magic as well (look @ Jura and his 8.5k MPF, when Laharl says that 365 is enough to be a rune knight squad captain)...if we are to take Lucy as an example, she just skipped some time of meditation to increase her magic power normally, but she would have gotten to that point anyway.

[Hisoka??]

Originally Posted by kitten320

Krono
Powerful weapon is one thing. Even for athletes a lot depends on their gear like bicycles, spears and etc. If they are not properly maintained, they'll lose. Horse riding, if the horse is not taken care of and is weak there are higher chances of losing.

What Ultear did can be considered as doping. Clearly it is not something everyone does.

The point was that Natsu never had a major lose that affected anything. I don't want him to be emo but he really should reflect on some of his actions. He is getting off the hook too easily.

Well I like Natsu, his actions are not annoying like for example Gon's from HxH. Now that's the guy I want to suffer and I don't care that he is a kid. His dumbness needs some straightening up.

Ah well, I'll leave it at that.

Sabertooth needed to get of their high horse.

Not really taking part in the debate, but just to point out that advanced equipment like full body swimsuits were banned.

Similarly almost all sports have rules on the equipment so that all the participants are almost similarly equipped barring some small personal preference. Even F1 is going down this route...

So Urza's weapons would be technological/ equipment doping. Taking the sports analogy

[Casshern]

Originally Posted by kitten320

As I said those loses are of no real impact since few minutes later he kicks the bad guy or someone even stronger make that previous lose insignificant.
Can't believe I'll be saying it but Ichigo's first fight with Grimm jaw is pretty good example of what I want. Ichigo actually lost and had to reflect on what happened. Yeh Tousen did take Grimmjaw away before Hichigo could awaken but invincible Ichigo still lost, the fight ended there and it took awhile until he defeated Grimmjaw or anyone stronger.
Natsu didn't have such moment even once. everything was resolved in the same day and even hour.

Imho FT just isn't that kind of manga. At almost 300 chapters there hasn't been a single training arc. It's not so much about the journey to achieve power, as Naruto and Bleach are, and more about enjoying the adventure as it comes, like OP.

[Kafriel]

OP also had something similar - a timeskip full of training for everyone, with just a glimpse of what they were doing, but in essence free powerups for the whole screw.

[kitten320]

Originally Posted by Kafriel

It's something that nobody does, because the ark of time is lost magic :P Still, it has been hinted that Erza may have already had her second origin unlocked in the first place, so others could have reached that level of magic as well (look @ Jura and his 8.5k MPF, when Laharl says that 365 is enough to be a rune knight squad captain)...if we are to take Lucy as an example, she just skipped some time of meditation to increase her magic power normally, but she would have gotten to that point anyway.

Well that's how doping works in most cases. It improves your physical state for a short while, with enough training you can get to that level yourself. Human body is capable of a lot of things.

What they did is called cheating. Once magic finishes it's effect, they'll be crushed. Doesn't matter that in few months time they'll get to that level. Right now they are not and are using cheating to win. If it is discovered they'll be disqualified and looked down on forever.

Look at all the sportists who were caught on doping control. Most of them lost all their titles and medals.

Hisoka??
Yep, cheating no matter how you look at it.

Casshern
You are slightly missing my point. I don't need training arc, they tend to get repetitive. I just want him to feel what is like to lose and look back on it.

Yes he did lose to Gildarts but he still passed. But it is better than nothing.

Anyway we can stop the debate about Natsu here, I calmed down but still am a bit annoyed^^
But nothing can be done anyway, just to accept. At least FT didn't fall to the same level as Bleach

[Casshern]

Originally Posted by kitten320

Casshern
You are slightly missing my point. I don't need training arc, they tend to get repetitive. I just want him to feel what is like to lose and look back on it.

Yes he did lose to Gildarts but he still passed. But it is better than nothing.

Anyway we can stop the debate about Natsu here, I calmed down but still am a bit annoyed^^
But nothing can be done anyway, just to accept. At least FT didn't fall to the same level as Bleach

I know what you mean, and you're right from that point of view. I'm just saying you'll enjoy it more and wont get frustrated if you look at it a little bit differently.

[kitten320]

I know, but sometimes it gets hard to ignore some things and they just make you explode after ignoring minuses for a while.

It just builds up and at one point you explode.

[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.

[Ermes Marana]

Originally Posted by Randrak42

Don't forget Natsu vs Gildartz where Gildartz owned him and taught him a good lesson.

Natsu is the one that taught Gildartz a lesson.

Natsu wanted to continue the fight, but out of respect for Gildartz he stopped (he would not have admitted defeat against an opponent he hated).

However, soon after Natsu went back after Acnologia, which went directly against the lesson Gildartz tried to teach him. Proving Natsu was right, Gildartz was wrong.

[DeadBonesDooM]

^ That didn't prove anyone wrong nor right. It just proved that Natsu is stuborn

[xKeir]

Originally Posted by Ermes Marana

Natsu is the one that taught Gildartz a lesson.

Natsu wanted to continue the fight, but out of respect for Gildartz he stopped (he would not have admitted defeat against an opponent he hated).

However, soon after Natsu went back after Acnologia, which went directly against the lesson Gildartz tried to teach him. Proving Natsu was right, Gildartz was wrong.

...Gildartz was trying to tell Natsu it's alright to lose, so long as you can pick yourself up. And that no one is 'strongest' in the world.

And he didn't stop out of respect. He knew he was outclassed. Gildartz even almost accidentally killed him, though in a somewhat comedic manner + how did you even come to the conclusion Natsu hates Gildartz... he loves him.

Natsu going back to fight Acnologia isn't in anyway to 'go against whatever Gildartz' taught him..

He just couldn't bear to see Makarov die in place of them, like any other true member of Fairy Tail genuinely will feel.

[aliasxn]

Originally Posted by MechR

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.

I'd say they suffered quite enough for the reward they got. Fairy Tail was forced into a fight with one the 3 dark guilds who control the underworld, and then had to fight a dragon to boot. They only survived because of a spell that stopped time for them and basically gave every other guild a 7 year head start leading up to this event. They saved the world, they earned it.

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.

Pretty much all of her gold keys came from opponents she defeated in battle. Didn't you just say "Looting a new one off a defeated foe in a life-or-death situation is fair enough."


The rest is just nitpicking dude, sorry. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and thank god for that, but you are just mad that the story didn't go the way you wanted.

[MechR]

Originally Posted by aliasxn

I'd say they suffered quite enough for the reward they got. Fairy Tail was forced into a fight with one the 3 dark guilds who control the underworld, and then had to fight a dragon to boot. They only survived because of a spell that stopped time for them and basically gave every other guild a 7 year head start leading up to this event. They saved the world, they earned it.

This and that are separate things. Moreover, by "rewarding" them that way, it defeats the purpose of letting the world get stronger in the first place. Why even increase the world average if you're going to bump FT right back up with an instant powerup? You might as well leave the world average the same, and say FT's still competitive with their old levels, just no longer famous. Which is the alternate scenario I've been describing.

Pretty much all of her gold keys came from opponents she defeated in battle. Didn't you just say "Looting a new one off a defeated foe in a life-or-death situation is fair enough."

The thing is, she lost to Angel in the "fair fight" portion of their match, and was only saved by Hibiki downloading Deus Urano Metria into her head. For that she got three gold keys, equal to all the prior keys she had earned one by one since the series started. That was also her last chance to have a fair-looking fight with another Stellar Spirit mage, since afterward she would own 3/4 of the Zodiac.

After that was Leo vs Capricorn, which she didn't actually participate in, but still got a gold key out of. Of course there was a reason she couldn't participate, but the fact remains, that win was all Leo.

The rest is just nitpicking dude, sorry. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, and thank god for that, but you are just mad that the story didn't go the way you wanted.

I'm mad that Mashima's wasting all his timeskip's potential, after going to the trouble of shoehorning one in (actually, two). This was his big, one-time chance to shake up the setting, but he's casually discarded almost all his options: Zeref's done nothing, Acnologia's done nothing, Grimoire Heart's done nothing, Tartaros has done nothing. The world is revealed to have gotten stronger, but it's resolved with a quick powerup, just like that. Raven Tail, one of the story's few remaining long subplots, who had 7 years to prepare, gets soloed in one chapter. All that setup for a future Gazille/Luxus-centric arc, tossed right out the window.

It's like buying a pie, taking one bite, and throwing the rest away! Why would you do that? You can't get that money back!

[Kafriel]

Respect for giving Gajeel a role to play after taking out his tag fight. So, the final day of the games is a massive free-for-all? If Levi's diary is anything to go by, it will be a massacre...

Cliffhanger ending, would be funny if it's Ultear again.

[Xion Valkyrie]

Originally Posted by Kafriel

Respect for giving Gajeel a role to play after taking out his tag fight. So, the final day of the games is a massive free-for-all? If Levi's diary is anything to go by, it will be a massacre...

Cliffhanger ending, would be funny if it's Ultear again.

It's obviously Gerard!

[n0m@n]

Looks like it will turn more serious then the Tenrou-Island arc.
The Graveyard shocked me.....

And Levi was covered with scars when she was writing the diary.

[MAX_COLA_POWER!]

Wow, biggest troll ending ever, even bigger than this week's naruto one^^;;. Hmm, it's strange though, usually these types of cliffhangers would be left for 299 to the flagship 300 chapter. Ah well, on the bright side

Spoiler for 297:

Erza in a thong

and that always calms everything the fuck down^^.

[Avaricia]

Originally Posted by Kafriel

Respect for giving Gajeel a role to play after taking out his tag fight. So, the final day of the games is a massive free-for-all? If Levi's diary is anything to go by, it will be a massacre...

Cliffhanger ending, would be funny if it's Ultear again.

it's Nichiya