Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest

Episode 19

With the Aldoron arc in the rearview mirror it's time to move onto something new, and I'm looking forward to seeing what the next adventure will bring. Still, I suppose it wouldn't be Fairy Tail if that transition wasn't done in the silliest way possible, and we end up getting a non-stop barrage of gags, callbacks, and of course, fanservice. While not all of it manages to land, it does at least manage to come together well enough to make for a good starting point for what's to come.

As you can probably guess at this point, we end up starting with the fanservice part of that equation, as the girls all hang out in a nearby bath until they're interrupted by Brandish. She decides to have some fun by using her magic to shrink them, but gets bored and leaves before remembering to turn them back. Teir attempts to track her down end up being about as wacky as that would imply, with the most memorable (or cursed) bit, being Juvia ending up inside Gray's mouth when he tries to keep the others from seeing her naked. With how many kinks are already on display in this series, I'm kinda shocked it took this long to get something vore-related, but Juvia doing her usual simping while using Gray's mouth like a pillow sounds like a horrifying mental image to you, it's nothing compared to how this ends. When Lucy finally does run into Brandish, she gets turned back to normal size just in time to end up on top of Natsu in public, while Gray literally pukes out Juvia, and the latter will no doubt haunt my memories for the rest of my time on this mortal plane.

While all this is going on, the White Mage finally wakes up, and is none too happy about how badly her hunt for the Dragon Gods has gone. She claims to have been hunting down powerful wizards in service of a place called Elentear but before we can learn what that means, she tries using one of Touka's spells to go there. However, this ends backfiring and she instead ends up on Edolas along with Team Natsu, who landed in a different part of it than she did.

This gives us the chance to catch up with the Edolas versions of the Fairy Tail guild members, who have grown a lot in the last nine years and now have their own families. Edolas Gray and Juvia have their own son, while Edolas Natsu and Lucy have a daughter, and between this and the whole gag with the “Fairy Nail” versions of the latter pair, it feels like Mashima is just teasing us out of spite (especially since even this far in the series, Lucy still seems embarrassed at the idea of her and Natsu being a thing).

Romantic quibbles aside, this revelation does at least give us the incredible gag of Natsu and Gray butting heads when it looks like the kids of their alternate selves might have a thing for each other, and the thought of those two becoming in-laws sounds hilarious, so I can only hope that this sequel ends with that happening for real. What's a lot less funny are jokes about Wendy being envious of her counterpart and later an older version of Coco for their cup size, and while that's another one of those weird gags that I've somehow gotten used to, it doesn't make the bit any less exhausting and I wish Mashima would move on from it. Only slightly less exhausting is the gang reuniting with Mystogan and discovering that the Edolas version of Erza has since become his submissive maid-err…”loyal soldier,” and while it is kinda lame seeing a previously intimidating villain asking to get stepped on for the sake of a joke, I guess it's at least an improvement over Kiria trying to make Erza her dog, so it's less irritating comparatively.

However, it's thanks to that last bit of silliness that we finally get an idea of what's going on. When they go to visit Mystogan, he reveals to the others that when Edolas had come up with their plan to drain other worlds of their magic, they had another world on their list of targets besides Earthland. That world was Elentear, and it also happens to be the home of the Moon Dragon, who possesses the power to hop between dimensions. Assuming that Touka and the White Mage both originate from there, it would at least explain why there are Exceeds that Carla doesn't know about, and also give us an idea of how the White Mage and the Moon Dragon are connected, so I'm pretty interested to learn more about that as things go along. Still, while I'm not too opposed to Fairy Tail doing a second arc involving alternate worlds, I'm at least hoping that it doesn't lead to getting fourth variant of the Fairy Tail guild, since there's only so many times that joke can be exhausted. That potential fear aside, though, this seems like as good a set-up as any for the next leg of this adventure, and while I'm not super optimistic about how well it'll pay off, I'm hoping that it'll at least be a bit more rewarding than the last one.

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