Fairy Tail: Final Season

Episode 314

At this point, I feel like the Natsu's-two-seeds drama is being drawn out unnecessarily long. There's a good chance that the anime wants to end the cour on it (or start the next one so as to compete with glossy new shows), but with a series as established as Fairy Tail, that doesn't feel strictly needed. As it stands right now, it feels like we're getting crumbs of the more interesting storyline while being served heaping helpings of mediocre battles, and I have to admit that it's getting tedious.

On the other hand, Wendy gets some great moments this week. Now that we've established who and what Irene is, it's time for the real final showdown, and no shounen series worth its salt would cram that into only one (or two) episodes. Irene is getting truly desperate at the end of this week, and it isn't hard to see why – she's waited four hundred years to get a new chance at life after events conspired to screw up her previous one, and with Wendy right there in front of her, it's too good a chance to pass up. Not only does Wendy's Sky Dragon magic work similarly to her Sage Dragon magic, Wendy's dragon seed has been repressed by her dragon mom, meaning that no matter what, Wendy (and the other dragon slayers) won't undergo the same transformation Irene did. With her mind warped by centuries of wallowing in self-pity and misery, Irene sees this as her gods-given chance, and damned if she isn't going to take it.

What she doesn't count on, however, is that although Wendy is younger and less (obviously) powerful than she is, the girl's still got the strength of will to resist being banished from her own body. Much like Erza, even in utero, could repel her mother's attempts (and whatever other explanations there are, I do believe that Erza's own stubbornness inherited from Irene prevented her takeover in part), Wendy is too secure in who she is and attached to her life as a member of Fairy Tail to so easily give in. She's also far more clever than Irene gives her credit for – in her hubris and enthusiasm, Irene forgets that not a minute before she took over Wendy's body, she announced that she and Wendy were using the same level enchantments. Followed through logically, that means that if Irene has the power to take over Wendy's body, Wendy has the power to take over Irene's. And since Irene has more magical energy stored up, Wendy's perfectly able to use that to her advantage once she's there.

To a point it is easy to see where Irene's coming from. She's had centuries to stew in her anger and no one (except maybe Zeref) to tell her that none of this is designed to specifically torture her. It feels like it, sure, but a terrible series of coincidences and actions taken advantage of by people like her ex-husband don't mean that the world was out to get her. Rather than be proud that she created an entirely new school of magic, Irene resents the younger dragon slayers for not turning out just like her. She's angry at her own daughter for not suffering the exact same hardships she did. In Irene's anger-soaked mind, the world owes her, and she's not only going to collect, she's taking interest.

Does this excuse her actions? It didn't when she tried to kill her daughter and remove Wendy from her body, and it doesn't now that she's trying to wipe Fiore off the map with a meteor. It does make for a decent parallel between she and Erza, with one representing selfishness and the other selflessness, something we can also see between Zeref and Natsu, and she shows another side of the slower transformation that made Zeref who he is today. On that level, this storyline succeeds, and all the weird shots of people gliding rather than running or the slow drag of the Natsu storyline can't detract from that.

But on another level, can we please get more than three minutes in a row of what's going on with Natsu?

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Fairy Tail: Final Season is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.