Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest

Episode 16

It's that time of the week again. That's right, it's time to talk about yet another weird little short because I guess that the show is just gonna keep opening with these for the foreseeable future. This one is a little more “plot relevant” than last week's as we get the explanation for how Touka actually got all of the Fairy Tail guild members to Team Natsu's location…by loading them all onto a cart. It's extremely funny seeing her have through the effort of moving them one-by-one, only to have no idea what to do about the likes of Elfman or Laxus, who are so beefy that she can't even lift them off the ground with magic. Eventually she just decides to possess Elfman and use him to move everyone like she should have the entire time, but seeing her gradually work her way to that conclusion made this bit a lot more amusing than I would have expected, and I'm willing to give this one my stamp of approval.

Speaking of things that turned out better than expected, the conclusion to this week's episode is a lot more wild than anything I could have possibly imagined, but before we talk about that, there's some other stuff to get to first. When we left things last week, Natsu had decided to use the God Seeds to create a Zeref clone, and it seems that Natsu's secret plan really was to use Zeref's curse to start wrecking all the plant life in the area. After seeing how much damage Zeref can cause, and Natsu threatening to make more clones of him if the God Seeds trying scanning his mind again, they move onto a different strategy. The most powerful God Seeds are sent out to deal with the rest of the Fairy Tail guild while Natsu gets dragged into a fight with their leader, who claims to be the main body of Aldoron himself. Seeing as this arc has been dragging its feet over the last few weeks as is, I can't really say I'm a fan of this particular twist, since it means that we have to go through yet another long string of fights before it's all through, so I can only hope that they're a little more entertaining than what we got from the last batch.

Thankfully that finally brings us to this week's biggest twist, and it's here where the episode truly shines. When Wendy's group runs into one of the God Seeds and Wendy is too exhausted to fight, Carla attempts to step in, which goes about as well as you'd expect and gets her hit with a curse that turns her into moss and will kill her after five minutes. But just when all hope seems lost, who should step in but…the background members of the Fairy Tail guild. I'm not even talking about Romeo, Macao or Wakaba, who are usually treated as jokes but have enough presence that you can usually remember they're there, but the ones like Laki or Max who are literally just here to fill out the roster, and are usually of such little importance that I can't even recall their names unless they're actively on screen (Does the dancer guy even have a name? I straight up forgot he existed).

Given that Mashima certainly isn't above having characters be jobbers for the sake of a silly punchline, I was expecting this scene to be a complete joke, and even Happy assumes these guys will probably be useless, but when Wendy decides to use the last of her enchantment magic to boost their powers, and the insert music started playing, I realized this was being played with 100% sincerity and I had a big stupid grin stretched across my face watching these guys all team up for a win. Sure, we get the usual speeches about how these guys might be weak individually but can show their true strength when fighting for their friends and all that, but it's hard not to give that a pass when coming from a group of characters who otherwise don't get to do much of anything, and helped salvage what would have otherwise been a pretty weak episode. Guess it goes to show that Mashima's penchant for unexpected swerves can be fun every once in a while, and while I don't expect the rest of these fights to pull off something this memorable, it does make me slightly more optimistic that they could be interesting and hey if they aren't, I'm glad that we at least we got this beautiful little moment in time, and these guys got their 15 seconds of fame. Too bad it'll probably never happen again.

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