Fairy Tail Review

 

Fairy Tail is a series I've had an interesting relationship with. I've been in communities where liking Fairy Tail made you a target for mockery and it's also true that some of my closest friends have been massive fans of Fairy Tail. For a long time I saw lots of negative references to FT and these days I see lots of positive references to FT, without me searching in either way. It seems Fairy Tail is a pretty polarizing series and as I've just recently completed the series with one of my friends, I wanted to give my feelings towards the series. 

Spoilers for Fairy Tail as well as PG-13 imagery below. Also, I would like to say first that Fairy Tail is a series aimed at teenage boys and I'm an adult woman, so I recognize fully I'm not the target demographic. 

While normally I would say the three things I like most and the three things I dislike most there is something this series is rather known on I feel I should comment on, even though I feel neutrally towards it.

Something I am neutral on:

Fanservice: Fairy Tail has a bit of a reputation as "the Fanservice Shonen." When I first started watching I thought the reputation seemed exaggerated. More fanservice-y than the average Shonen, sure. But the reports seemed a bit extreme. That said the series seemed to get more fanservice-y as it went along. For the most part, I've never been particularly concerned with fanservice and FT is not an exception. FT's fanservice ranges from good to terrible (I'll get to it later) but for the most part, the Fanservice is basically revealing clothing and camera angles which are things my mind kinda just glosses over. Sexuality as a topic and a theme has always interested me and if you look at my favorite series you'll find I'm really into series with confident female protagonists who own their sexuality. Very often the fanservice in this series puts the girls' in a much more passive light than that, though for a male writing for teen boys, I don't expect the pinnacle of powerful female sexuality. The writer Mashima also does seem to try and include manservice as well. I don't know how well he really succeeds at the task, but for a (presumably) straight male writer writing primarily for a teen male demographic, the attempt is appreciated. As such this part of the series is not one that usually adds or detracts from it for me.  I also liked BL as a teen and don't have much ground to stand. 

Three Worst Parts of the Series:

These are from worst to best.

1: Tasteless Sexual Harassment and Humiliation: 

I wanna be clear. This is, by far, the thing I hated most about Fairy Tail, as well as probably the least controversial thing to complain about I'd imagine. Fairy Tail consistently uses a joke where female characters, generally Lucy, are sexually harassed or humiliated. I HATED these parts, with some being genuinely hard to watch for me. Disgust is the single most unpleasant emotion to me and violations of sexual consent triggers both physical and emotional disgust. I don't understand how anyone can find these parts either sexy or funny. I like to think I'm pretty reasonable about this. Fairy Tail's a 328 episode series taking all the parts. If this happened once, I could dismiss it as an outlier, twice and it would be an unfortunate coincidence. But it happens, on average, multiple times an arc, enough that it's a very clear, very unpleasant pattern. It's not like it even serves a purpose or anything, almost every time it shows up, it could easily be written out of the story with nothing changing. It is meant to be appealing in and of itself, something that I find baffling. This is probably at its worst in the Macao Arc. The Macao Arc is the very start of the series and very short, yet the series STARTS with Lucy looking for the guild of Fairy Tail almost being brainwashed by the wizard Bora into becoming a sex slave (later retconned in the anime specifically) with Natsu having to save her. This to me seems a really bad way to introduce a new viewer into your world and to your main female lead. And I don't think Hiro Mashima is a bad person for writing it, I don't know the guy. Nor do I think anyone who enjoys these scenes for whatever reason are bad people for it. But if you're asking if I personally enjoyed it, I would say 'No, I couldn't stand this.'" If the ultimate test of quality for a series is how willing you'd be to re-experience it, I know this is by far the biggest obstacle for me being willing to rewatch the series, moreso than the length or either of the other problems. 

2: Lack of Consequences: 

A lot of the time when it comes to consequences, Fairy Tail wants to have its cake and eat it too. FT wants to have big dramatic emotional scenes constantly. However not coincidentally, the fallout of said scenes tends to be hard to write and creatively risky and time-intensive. So Fairy Tail very often tries to have the big dramatic moments but remove the consequences or brush past them in order to try and get the emotion from the viewer without having to bog down in the consequences. The most obvious manifestation of this is the "fake-out death scenes", particularly of Makarov, though the problem extends past that. Plot Points in Fairy Tail are often introduced and made out to be a big deal either to be retroactively expressed as not actually that big a deal or sidestepped. There's a part where Makarov disbands the Fairy Tail Guild on shoddy logic and everyone just falls apart, people don't keep in touch, don't reform the guild themselves, they just let the people they care fall into disarray and despair for a small arc IMMEDIATELY narratively after of them getting back together. Even the sexuality of the series can be viewed as part of this. I like series that examine sexuality as a theme but sex isn't a THEME of Fairy Tail. Sex isn't used to develop the character's relationships and rarely to characterize the cast's personalities. Sex is omnipresent in Fairy Tail but surface deep with most of the main characters, a group of mostly independent extraverted adventurous youths in confined space with each other often wearing revealing clothing not implied to have any real romantic or sexual relationships with each other. Sex in real life is actually a rather major thing but rarely seen in public while in Fairy Tail it is seen everywhere but MEANS nothing. The arc that really suffers most from this in my opinion is the Alvarez arc where constantly things are hyped up as important but come to very little. There's a point where Erza is highly weakened and her opponent Irene summons a large meteor to kill everyone on Earth including Erza. Erza then jumps up and smashes the meteor and resumes fighting Irene who ends up killing herself because she can't bear to kill Erza. Erza's injuries are treated like an important point but then they just aren't. Irene is willing to kill Erza with a giant meteor which is treated as important, and then it's not. And Irene is one of the most important, strongest villains in the series history. For lesser villains, this happens with greater frequency. The reason this is a problem is that the reason these big dramatic moments are hypothetically impactful is BECAUSE they will have consequences, they have meaning. If you don't believe that they will amount to something then these moments that are meant to be dramatic are instead boring and indeed I found a lot of Fairy Tail I was clearly supposed to find exciting to be rather boring because I didn't believe Mashima. The moment that really got me was when Lisanna was brought back from the dead through a really convoluted method. There was no narrative reason too, nothing of note is done with her for the entire rest of the series but it showed me Mashima was not willing to commit to the consequences of his writing if he thought some of his readers wouldn't like it. That was the point that a lot of the series lost excitement for me because it accidentally taught me not to trust what the series was telling me. 

3: Lack of Nuance:

Nuance is one of the most interesting parts of art. The things that tend to make art is the way you take two opposite character ideas and have them simultaneously in the same character or two emotions and have them in the same scene. Fairy Tail constantly chases a huge emotional high, it wants every scene to be big and dramatic but in doing it sacrifices the nuance and subtler joys. The primary antagonist of the series is Zeref the Black Wizard and the series makes a very big deal about his status, cursed by the Curse of Contradiction that makes him like a paradoxical contradictory existence and his will to contradict with his desires. But that's just the nature of human beings, that's how most people in the real world are. At one point in the story Gray is forced to fight his forced to fight his father Silver and Juvia ends Silver's life, freeing him, Juvia's love for Gray causing her to do something that is good for him even when it's not what he wanted. Juvia goes after to talk to Gray. This is a case where what is realistic is actually what is also narratively interesting. There are a lot of emotions for Gray to feel here: Anger or even outright Hatred at Juvia for killing his father, Guilt and Shame someone else had to do it for him, Sadness at having his old wounds opened up, Embarrassment at being as seen as so weak, and Happiness/Gratitude towards her for doing what he needed her to. Gray only feels one emotion, the last one, which also happens to be the easiest to write. And that's a scene that's still on the better side because it says something kinda interesting about Gray's character but it lacks any of the nuance that should be there. Natsu is especially a problem for this. Right before Makarov disbands the guild both he and Lucy go through a traumatic event individually and Natsu just abandons everyone for a year to go train. When he gets back Lucy kinda scolds him a bit, but forgives him instantly when he makes an immature gesture of making things better. The series is on the verge of realizing Natsu is and has been a dramatically immature and irresponsible person who seriously hurt his family but it's not willing to get into the emotional maelstrom of it. The place this is at its most prominent however is at the start of the Grand Magic Games Arc. Almost every single episode, the majority of the scenes in this arc are either "Fairy Tail is so awesome and cool" or "The Villains are evil and cheaters." There are ridiculously over-the-top scenes of Erza solo-ing 100 monsters in one round of a game that was supposed to many rounds for all the teams or Natsu single-handedly beating up Sting and Rogue, who were supposed to be rival Dragon Slayers to Natsu and Gray, even after they powered up... scenes like that just made me really bored because it's just like hammering the same point home over and over: "Fairy Tail SO strong, Fairy Tail Coolest" like a DM who inserts their overpowered DMPC into a game. Broadly speaking a lot of Fairy Tail could have, in my opinion, used more emotional depth and complexity. Lucy is probably the best character for emotional depth. There's a random one-off episode where Lucy reconnects with her estranged father after he fell from prosperity. It doesn't impact the plot but it's pretty sweet and it makes the later ep when Lucy has to come to terms with the death of her father more impactful. But for a lot of characters and scenes it feels like the writer is afraid that every scene is not immediately hugely impactful on a single emotion, that people will lose interest. 

Three Best Parts of the Series:

Unlike the worst parts these aren't in any particular kind of order, they're just the three things I liked most about Fairy Tail in general. 

1: A Large Well-Rounded Cast of Female Characters with Agency

I have seen a moderate amount of Shonen before. If you ignore the sexual harassment stuff (which is a big if), I would say of them Fairy Tail has some of my favorite writing for its female characters period in the genre. A lot of Shonen to me seems either to have a very small female cast who are perfectly enjoyable and do have impact but there's just not a lot of them or have a extensive female cast but they don't have much agency in the story or development. Fairy Tail is the only Shonen I've seen that has both. Fairy Tail has a lot of female characters that are genuinely as important to the story as the male characters. Many people wonder if Lucy is not the main character instead of Natsu and there's a genuine argument for it. The cast is fairly evenly gender divided with the main team of Fairy Tail outside Happy being Natsu, Lucy, Grey, and Erza and when you look at the most important characters after that you still get a pretty even gender distribution. Beyond that the female characters have a lot of agency. Numerous character arcs are focused around them. The Tower of Heaven Arc was focused on Erza, partially Phantom Lord and Loke Arcs heavily involved Lucy, Cana and her relationship to her father Gildarts was a major focus of the Tenrou Island Arc, etc. Lucy and Wendy have in my opinion the best and I definitely think the most development over the series both as fighters and as people, the overarching Big Good of the series Mavis is female... like Fairy Tail girls have a ton of agency. The Girls do most of the heavy hitting in the final arc and that's something I've never seen before. With a lot of Shonen, if you don't like the one important girl in the plot you're kind out of luck. Personally, I wasn't a big fan of Juvia. I found her obsession with Grey annoying. But that's the thing, because Fairy Tail has an extensive cast of Female Characters, that's not really a problem. If you're not a fan of Lucy, maybe you will be of Erza, or Wendy, etc.. Even when it comes to the fanservice, outside of the unending torment of Lucy for the most part the female characters in Fairy Tail are depicted as being sexually confident and wearing attractive clothing because they want to. The playfulness and confidence the female members were allowed to have without it being seen as a stain on their "purity", is something I can only praise full-heartedly. It applies to a lesser extent to his villains too. Several of his villainesses have very high agency even when they are technically working for someone else such as Ultear, Seilah, Kyoka, and Irene, Irene being probably the Spriggan with the most Agency and Attention and Seilah being my favorite villain in the series. I would say Mashima does have a tendency of excusing his villainesses doing terrible things because male character(s) did something bad to them in their backstory which kinda takes a bit from their agency, but that's definitely not a him-specific problem. Fairy Tail has a lot of fanservice but if there's one thing you can't accuse Mashima of, it's viewing his female characters as just sex objects, they clearly have as much care and characterization as his male characters. 

2: Fast Pace and focus on Emotional Appeal: 

I've given some critique in this review to Mashima's style of writing focused on big dramatic flashy events without regard for consequences or nuances, but let's not pretend he does it for no reason. The upside of that writing style is a very fast-paced writing style that focuses on immediate emotional engagement or "hype." I do greatly appreciate the desire to not waste the viewer time. For me, I found after analysis of my tastes that one of the five things I want most in fiction is for things to move at a fast pace and compared to its contemporaries Fairy Tail does always keep things moving. What I find interesting about this is I'm not actually a person who really gets the feeling of hype. It's difficult to excite me without significant buildup and I find transient emotional highs to be a shallow feeling. It's not that I enjoyed FT's high octane dramatic plot structure per se, it's that in striving for it, it cuts a lot of excess other works might have that generally do nothing for me. I think the arc that most benefits from this is the Tartaros Arc. There's a lot of plot points in the Tartaros Arc, a lot of fights, some parts I liked and some I wasn't as fond of such as Erza and Kyoka's last fight or the return of Jiemma but the arc moves at a really fast pace meaning that the parts that were exciting had the additional benefit of feeling like they had a lot of momentum and the parts I wasn't as fond of didn't overstay their welcome. The art starts with the destruction of the Magic Council, the suddenness emphasizing the new and dangerous threat level of the villains and the actual deaths emphasizing the new tone of the arc. Some people dislike the quickness of the series' final fights each arc and while at times it can be a bit extreme, I found that it made them feel much more dramatic to not be dragged out over several episodes. Stuff like this is all over the series, things that could be several episodes are in one episode and things that could be an episode being part of one, helping keeping the series efficient to the point that the most notable point the opposite happened (the second half of the GMG Arc) it was actually rather notable. It amuses me that this series is apparently compared often to One Piece when the most common complaint of One Piece is precisely the opposite of this point. 

3: The Themes of Loyalty and Devotion

This point was the hardest to write, not because I had trouble knowing what the third point was, but because it was hard to put it into words. In our modern world that is so vehemently anti-hierarchal, a certain sense of beauty has been lost, the feeling of loyalty and devotion towards another and viewing them as your higher. This is one of my favorite things about fantasy works in general, capturing such things as the loyalty of knight to his king or queen, of chivalric romances, of a lady's devotion to her lord and so forth and I think Fairy Tail does a really good job of capturing that feeling. The notion of loyalty and devotion shows up a lot in Fairy Tail and particularly when it comes from a humble character or is dignified in its quietness do I appreciate it. When I think of my top 5 favorite scenes from the series, the first one is a great example of this. Mystogan the ultra-powerful member of Fairy Tail seems to not have showed up to help them in their battle against Phantom Lord, though Phantom Lord didn't use 50 of their subdivisions. It is revealed that Mystogan took them all down by himself without ever mentioning it to the rest of the guild. That kind of silent devotion is one of my favorite things to see, both in real life and in fiction. It also leads thematically into the Edolas Arc which most benefits from this theme in my opinion, an arc which deals a lot with the idea of personal loyalties and which has another of my favorite moments where it's revealed that Happy and Carla were born to bring the dragon slayers to Edolas to have their magic drained and Happy refuses the reason he was born because his loyalty to Fairy Tail and Natsu specifically is that strong despite being a tiny not very strong cat relatively speaking against the entire world he was in. I would say the devotion the members of Fairy Tail have towards each other is the real heart of the series and when I think of the smaller differences between the more mild positives and more mild negatives, it comes from whether or not there was a sense of personal loyalty and devotion. For instance, I liked the character of Fried due to his devotion to Laxus, Seilah was my favorite villain partially due to her devotion to Kyoka, I liked August most of the Spriggans due to his silent devotion to his unknowing father Zeref, etc. The theme of loyalty is one of my favorite themes and easily my favorite in Fairy Tail.  

Some other Points:

Most Disliked Character: Flare Corona

Flare is to me the embodiment of Fairy Tail's worst qualities. She's a generic "insane girl" archetype who's needlessly superficially sexual so she can sexually torture Lucy in what's supposed to be to outsiders a fun sports tournament. No one but Fairy Tail cared about her and her guild's blatant cheating to keep Lucy from fighting back. In an arc that is constantly Fairy Tail winning easily, Lucy is put against someone she could clearly beat but made to lose in a humiliating needlessly erotic manner for "drama." Her fight with Lucy is maybe my most disliked scene in the entire series, encompassing all the faults of the series. And then the series gives her the most shallow attempt at being made sympathetic and redeemed. The minute the arc's over, Fairy Tail treats Flare's actions during the games as though she was just a particularly intense competitor even though she and her guild cheated to sexually harass and humiliate Lucy in front of everyone and emotionally torment her. No consequences for any of that, no nuance she's just suddenly not a bad person. Supposedly, Mashima intended for her to simply remain a villain and rival to Lucy but changed his mind but you can't just change your mind on that after you have them cross the moral rubicon and then cross like five more rivers. I can't believe she's still so popular despite all that. Is it literally just that people think she's attractive? There are other Fairy Tail characters I hated but there's no character where the sheer gap between how I'm supposed to feel about the character and how I actually feel is so enormous. 

Favorite Character: Wendy Marvell

I'll give you a moment to recover from your shock my favorite character is the Magical Girl. I like Wendy not for any one trait in particular or that I think she best exemplifies FT's good qualities (Lucy fills that role better) but I like her most because I liked her character development and I think she's the most versatile character in the series. She had an interesting backstory connected to another one of my favorite characters in the series Mystogan and she develops from a shy and meek wizard to one who can stand along the other Dragon Slayers. Like all my favorite characters in fiction, Wendy is a character characterized by internal paradox, she is a small cute girl who's actually one of the Dragon Slayers, the most important Mages in the setting. This is reflected by her fights, where she is normally not the physically competent but has elemental powers as versatile and potent as any, able to help even Natsu and Gajeel against powerful enemies. This versatility also shows up in her scenes that help balance out every arc she's in. Her fight in the Grand Magic Games was the biggest breath of fresh air, no pun intended. After an arc of  evil cheat-y villains and FT being over the top strong, Wendy has a light-hearted fight against her rival Sherria which is cute, comedic, and shows Wendy's development without making her seem over the top powerful. Yet in the next arc, the darker Tartaros Arc where Fairy Tail has been really struggling with the powerful demons Wendy has to the rise of the heroism level of her guild mates to defeat the demon Ezel and succeeds in another one of my favorite scenes in the entire series. That's the versatility of Wendy as a character, someone for whom both scenes feel equally true to her character and thus provides what the guild needs both in-universe with her combination of offense and support magic and narratively balancing out the tone of the arc. 

Most Mixed Character: Natsu Dragneel

Natsu truly is the most fitting face for Fairy Tail. Lucy represents the hypothetical viewer, someone newer to the world of magic who wants to be strong and wants to join a guild like Fairy Tail. Natsu in contrast represents Fairy Tail itself, the guild and the series. As the most main character in the series, Natsu has the most content. He is the focus of some of the series' more memorable good parts and some of the series' more memorable bad parts... sometimes in the same arc (Natsu's fight with Gildarts and Natsu's fight with Zancrow in the Tenrou Island Arc.) When Fairy Tail is good Natsu is good, when Fairy Tail is bad, Natsu is bad, and no matter what Natsu represents Fairy Tail the guild and the series, a fiery warrior driven by a love of adventure and devotion to his friends. 

Best Character Development: Lucy Heartfilia

Honestly I like both Wendy and Lucy's character development most, but Lucy's is definitely a lot more central to the series and I already went over Wendy. If Natsu represents Fairy Tail the guild and what it is, Lucy represents what it can be, a dreamer who seeks to join Fairy Tail like the hypothetical viewer and carries its underlying spirit as opposed to its reality. Lucy grows a ton during the series with some of the better "small" parts of the series reflecting that as she goes from a mage that has to rely on her few summons to having more summons then ever but fighting alongside them to eventually going so far as to embody her summons, fulfilling that notion that your friends make you stronger even when apart because their spirit resides eternally you. Her scene in Tartaros was great and when Fairy Tail was at its best she was probably my favorite character though I preferred Wendy overall because when Fairy Tail was not at its best it tormented Lucy for no reason.

Worst Character Development (within the guild): Makarov Dreyar

So the actual worst character development comes from a few villains that the series pretended to redeem with absolutely minimal effort but my least favorite character within the guild itself is Makarov.

Makarov is the poster child for Fairy Tail's lack of consequences with his several death fake outs being one of the most commonly derided points. Beyond that he's very clearly supposed to be the wise old mentor archetype but it seemed like he very rarely had much of wisdom to say, his actions as Guild Master ranged from decent to terrible (such as disbanding the guild), got quickly dispatched twice, failed to stop Laxus' rebellion, and despite being an old man and repeatedly referring to the guild as his "children" he has also sexually harassed a few of the female members of FT. Old Men in positions of power abusing that to hit on younger female members is a very serious issue. His archetype tends to die or retire for very good reasons and he never does stunting the potential growth for any character that would take the position after him like Gildarts or Laxus. 

Favorite Exceed: Happy

Already answered favorite Dragon Slayer with my favorite character so will say my favorite Exceed instead, which is Happy. Frosch is the cutest, but Happy is also really cute and by far the most important to the story, including being the center of one of my favorite scenes in the series. 

Also no Least Favorite Exceed because that's mean. 

Least Enjoyed Romance: Juvia x Gray

Thought the reason Juvia was obsessively in love with Gray was weak and I spent most of the series wishing Gray would either accept or reject her. I didn't really care which but it was broadly annoying watching Juvia obsess about Gray for most of the series without any movement. 

Most Enjoyed Romance: Erza x Jellal

Had some eye-rolling cliches but the two had the most chemistry together and had more on-screen development than any other pairing. Lisanna x Natsu had some early on but disappeared along with Lisanna and never returned and Bisca x Alzack was off-screen.  The ship also had a cute moment in the final episode. 

Worst Arc (Not including Filler): Avatar Arc

The arcs I dislike most are Macao, Grand Magic Games, Avatar, and Alvarez. Macao is the worst about tasteless sexual harassment using that as quite literally the introductory plot to the main female lead (arguably laying the groundwork for that to be her defining "joke") and to the world of Fairy Tail. Alvarez is the worst about Lack of Consequences being an arc that's full of anticlimaxes and memetic tier contradictions of what was just established five seconds ago like Irene killing herself to not kill Erza immediately after she just tried to kill Erza or introducing plot elements suddenly like the time vortex. I went back and forth between GMG and Avatar a bunch but GMG was mostly troublesome for being the worst offender of the lack of nuance with the same points being hammered home over and over and it did have its bright spots (Wendy's fight with Sherria, Ultear's sacrifice, to a lesser extent Gray vs Rufus.) Avatar Arc to me has some of all three of Fairy Tail's problems. It has one of the two worst scenes in the entire series for me (the brief torture scene with Lucy, a scene in the same league as Flare's torture of Lucy) despite being much shorter than GMG, the entire Makarov disbanding the guild and so them all falling apart was asinine showing a lack of consequences, and it also was pretty bereft of nuance. Its bright spots are maybe greater in number proportional in size compared to GMG but none of them were THAT good and the arc really felt like it lacked a reason to exist. 

If you asked me would I rather rewatch GMG or Avatar, I would say Avatar because it's so much shorter, but if you ask me to defend either arc it's a lot easier to defend GMG conceptually for me. 

Best Arc: Tartaros Arc

It seems like this is the most popular arc, and yeah can see why. I also liked the Zero, Sub-Zero Emperor Lyon, Loke, and Edolas Arcs, but Tartaros plays to Fairy Tail's best qualities while also having its own unique feel to it being darker and more atmospheric. Of my five favorite scenes in the series, three of them come from Tartaros namely Wendy and Carla stopping Face, Lucy saving the guild single-handedly, and the death of Igneel. This arc has the best atmosphere, my favorite villain, a strong opening, and while some of the latter part of the arc gets more questionable, the very end with Igneel is very moving and the reveal that Natsu is END is one of the biggest and most important twists in the series. Gray vs Silver, Mira vs Seilah, and especially Wendy vs Ezel were all great. 

For the other arcs I liked, Zero had a really good twist and ending, Sub-Zero Emperor Lyon had a really sweet backstory for Gray and symbolism about moving on from the past I thought was wholesome, the Loke arc was one of the best for Lucy until Tartaros and had pleasant characterization for both Loke and Lucy, and Edolas Arc is a very underrated arc focusing around Mystogan who was my favorite character at the time, has the Edolas FT Guild who I really liked, and had the great scenes of Happy's defiance against the Exceed system for his friends followed by him and Carla with Happy's parents. Compared to Tartaros Zero and Loke are both very short arcs so they simply don't have the time to build up to anything like the Tartaros Arc, the Sub-Zero Emperor Lyon arc took a while to get going for me and had some questionable bits... Edolas to me is the real competition. Both arcs start good, get great by the midpoint, and then go downhill towards the end though with the very ending bits of Natsu playing Demon King for Mystogan and Natsu reuniting with Igneel being very good. The main differences are that Edolas feels somewhat disconnected and different from most of Fairy Tail and also doesn't use most of the cast while Tartaros felt far more connected to Fairy Tail, far more like what the rest of the series was going for, and had some of the most comprehensive usage of the cast of any arc. 

Most Mixed Arc: Tenrou Island Arc

The arc I have the most mixed feelings on, this arc has several things I really disliked (Kain Hikaru vs Lucy, Lucy and Cana's fight against Bickslow and Fried, Ultear's backstory, Natsu vs Zancrow, Erza vs Azuma) and several things I quite liked (Lucy and Cana's relationship in general, Cana's reconciliation with Gildarts, the introduction of Zeref and Acnologia, Natsu's fight with Gildarts, the very surprising ending) this was definitely the arc that made me go up and down most. 

Conclusion:

From what I've read of Hiro Mashima and from my experience of FT, it seems like he was anxious about making a decision that would be particularly controversial such as killing off the "wrong" character. It is ironic then he  ended up creating a series so polarizing as FT. But somehow it is fitting as well, it is the power of contradiction. If the loneliest people are the kindest, the saddest people smile the brightest, and the most damaged people are the wisest, then surely it is fitting too that a manga that seeks and is about acceptance should be a series of controversies.

When I've heard people talk why they love Fairy Tail it's because they felt like they gained a sense of family and belonging from it. Fairy Tail as a guild and a story represents an ideal, a particular attempt to bridge chaos and order in the form of a family where you are accepted unconditionally and free to be whoever you truly are inside while still belonging and having the security of heart to know wherever you journey people will be watching over you. What I find about both these reviews and the series itself is they present a fairly one-sided view on the topic. Fairy Tail is an idealized establishment. It is simply assumed you will feel a kinship to the guild and it is simply assumed that people being their true selves will only result in an acceptable level of chaos. In our real world, we live in a complex social game where we must be take on many roles for as many people, where there is a time and place to bare your soul, and a time and place to take on the role others need you to be. But I suppose it wouldn't be Fairy Tail if it didn't throw itself wholeheartedly into the ideal: no nuance, all heart.

If I am honest, overall I am not a fan of Fairy Tail. It has its positive aspects but its negatives, in particular the repeated tasteless usage of sexual harassment, weigh too heavily on me. I can see why someone might like it certainly, but it's clearly for someone of a different temperament to me. I can connect with my masculine side or my teenage side, but not both at once. I can appreciate its good qualities, the heart Mashima put into it, his desire to create something that would be appealing to many people from many angles, and the way he grappled with his personal tragedies through his art. That said my impression of the series was being focused on keeping audience attention through flash and superficial appeals even to the point of tastelessness.

Fairy Tail at its best is the purest manifestation of a type of storytelling and an ideal of friendship that, to me, is like looking into a different world. At its best it showed me why people seek that thing I don't, and when it was its worst it showed me more about what I care for that its picture didn't have in it. It is somehow both a series devoted to a singular ideal, a singular spirit, yet at the same time a series of contradictions to me. But perhaps the most paradoxical of loves born is the love born from contradictions. So if you are on that eternal quest to find out if fairies have tails, I hope you find belonging and companionship in that spirit.