Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest

Episode 11

After spending the last couple of weeks facing Mirajane, Elfman, and Lisanna, the battle ends with Lucy jobbing yet again….sort of. Just as Lucy comes up with a new plan, their fight gets interrupted by the Dragon Eaters, and in the confusion, Lisanna manages to sneak up on Lucy and attempts to turn her into another one of the White Mage's servants. I was about ready to call foul on this, but fortunately, Lucy managed to escape. Getting first-hand experience with how the White Mage's possession works helped her to come up with an idea to save the others. I'm glad she at least didn't add another outright loss. Still, the fact that she got interrupted right as she had come up with a viable strategy of taking out Elfman and Mirajane (even if the latter required being a little underhanded and trying to get a cheap shot in) speaks to Mashima's weird refusal to let Lucy win anything. I pray that someday this curse will be broken, but for now, I guess she still can't catch a break when it comes to fights.

Meanwhile, Erza's battle with Jellal turns into a three-way frenzy when she finds herself having to deal with him, Laxus, and Kiria, who shows up looking to take on all three of them. Erza tries to use the confusion to take one of the Wood Dragon's orbs and run. Before she can, she gets stopped by Jellal who still can't think about anything but her, and decides to take her away, leaving Kiria with the misfortune of a one-on-one fight with Laxus. Jellal's lovestruck escapades are still pretty funny for the most part, but I worry that the whole gag could start wearing thin if it's dragged out for much longer, so however that ends up resolving, I hope that happens by next week's episode.

The big point of focus here is on Natsu's fight with Wraith, the Ghost Dragon Eater, as it ends up going south when Wraith manages to remove Natsu's soul from his body. The shock from this sends Natsu into the afterlife, and it's there that he has a surprise reunion with Zeref. According to him, Natsu didn't land in the afterlife but rather his vision of it called a Beta-Heaven that reflects what he subconsciously thinks happened to those who passed on (though it was pretty funny that Natsu immediately assumed he must have landed in hell because he ran into Zeref here). In this Beta-Heaven, Zeref is living peacefully with Mavis, who has since become his wife, as well as Lacarade and August, who have reverted into children, and that same peace has been extended to all of Natsu's long-departed enemies and allies, including Acnologia. Since Natsu is a guy who never thinks about anything except what's in front of him, learning that some part of him wished for Zeref and Mavis to be happy is surprisingly heartwarming (even if it is a little weird he extended that same wish to Acnologia when he killed his foster dad right in front of him.) It's nice to know that he can be at least a bit more thoughtful than how he generally acts.

Unsurprisingly, this trip to the not-afterlife also has Natsu reuniting with Igneel who encourages Natsu to keep fighting. While Natsu has no idea how he'll be able to handle a guy who's a literal ghost, Igneel's encouragement inspires Natsu to think outside the box. Before Wraith can start chomping down on his soul, Natsu starts fighting back and learns a new kind of magic for being able to separate his soul from his body. Using Natsu's near-death experience as an excuse for yet another new ability largely unrelated to primary Dragon Slayer strategies cheapens the impact of the previous scene but given how static of a character Natsu tends to be in terms of growth, this is the most amount of development we've gotten out of him a while. He got to restart the fight as a goofy little soul cloud, which was a funny enough image that it's kind of hard to be genuinely mad at it no matter how wonky the reasoning is. With the two on equal footing, Wraith tries to use Happy as a shield by possessing him, but to his shock, Natsu has no real qualms about decking Happy in the face.

After that backfires, Wraith decides to find a new body to possess since he needs one with a high amount of magic power, and that's been on the brink of death to fully sync with it. He ends up hijacking Makarov. Had it been anyone else, this twist might feel a little more ominous, but instead it's unintentionally hilarious. If anything, that whole “brink of death” requirement just draws attention to how many times Makarov cheated it during the original series, even during multiple instances where the story would have benefited considerably from him kicking the bucket. It'd be weirdly ironic if this encounter was the one that did him in after all this time. Still, if he hasn't been killed off before, I wouldn't expect it to happen now, so this mostly feels like an excuse to get an unexpected match-up between Natsu and Makarov. Cool as that could be though, I am already starting to get exhausted by this current string of fights, and they've been going on for a while. Thankfully it's still not dragging out too much but I'm ready to move on to whatever else this arc has in store. Hopefully, we get to that sooner rather than later.

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Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.