Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest

Episode 21

So I came down pretty hard on last week's episode since everything we learned about Selene ended up severely diminishing my expectations for where the rest of this arc could be headed. Still, if there's one thing that's truly reliable about Fairy Tail it's that it moves from one thing to the next very quickly. I didn't come into this one feeling like the odds of it turning things around were particularly high, but it didn't feel like too unrealistic of an expectation either. I was hoping to walk away from the episode feeling more optimistic. Unfortunately, that turning point hasn't hit yet. If anything, I just felt soured on this arc further as I'm increasingly unsure of what the end goal is.

After getting teleported to Elentear, and split up by a giant hand (just roll with it), it doesn't take too long for everyone to get caught up in fights with Selene's minions: the Moonlight Divinities. Since Selene herself doesn't have much going on beyond the chaos angle, I was hoping her miniboss squad would be a bit more interesting, or at least funny, but they aren't much of an improvement so far. Their core gimmick is being an all-female squad who are all varying degrees of perverted, and while jokes like Natsu and Gray getting attacked by ice clones of all the ladies in their lives (which, in Natsu's case, is every girl in Fairy Tail rather than Lucy only. It seems like them never being a thing is the joke now) or Lucy fighting a buff lady who keeps getting distracted by her ta-tas aren't exactly un-funny, they don't have enough going for them to make up for how lame the fights are otherwise. The most exciting thing we get is Irene teaching Wendy how to use Spirit Arts rather than regular magic to adjust to Elentear's environment. That may sound cool on paper, but the attempt to distinguish the two feels like an info dump. It also doesn't amount to much, since Wendy and Erza lose their fight regardless. It might be important later, but I can't say it left me feeling all that curious about it.

As lame as that outcome sounds, it's nothing compared to Lucy's fight, which somehow manages to set the already low bar for her fights even lower, easily the most frustrating bit of this episode. While having her fight largely centered around boob jokes is already a lazy punchline at this point, the real kicker comes when her opponent comments that the reason why Lucy's spirits have been unreliable to downright useless throughout all her fights is because she's apparently too weak to be able to use them to their full potential. Now in isolation, something like this sounds pretty par the course for most battle shonen and would be a turning point for Lucy to start getting stronger, but the problem here is that we're getting this moment a fair way into Fairy Tail's sequel series, and the idea of her still being weak enough to suffer this kind of problem just kind of feels like a total slap to the face for her character.

Sure, it holds water if we're just squarely looking at her fight record, but outside of that, we've seen Lucy get better at using Celestial Spirit magic throughout the series, whether it was learning how to summon multiple spirits at once or gaining a few new transformations. With how many new tricks she's been given already, I can't imagine there's anyone left who really thinks her lack of improvement in the combat department is a lack of motivation to get stronger. The issue really does seem to come down to Mashima refusing to let her catch a break in a fight no matter what the circumstances, and if this was his way of trying to explain why she keeps coming up short, I can't exactly say it's satisfactory. Now, I'd be willing to give some benefit of the doubt here if I felt like this could actually result in Lucy being portrayed more competently, but between the aforementioned issues of her abysmal fight record and just how far into the series this is getting dropped, I have no real reason to think it'll go anywhere and it comes off as an especially cruel punchline after seeing Wendy get a random new ability just a few minutes prior, which I would say implies some clear favoritism, but Mashima has gone on record as saying that Lucy is his favorite character, which just makes everything about this even weirder.

While that is where the episode more or less bottoms out, that doesn't make the rest of it any less frustrating. After getting thoroughly thrashed, Natsu and Gray get captured and strung up to be playthings for Selene and her minions, and while it's nice not to have this sort of humiliation gag happening to the female characters for once, it doesn't really make it feel any less exhausting. It also doesn't really help that the scene mostly just reinforces how lame of an antagonist Selene is, as she doubles down on the idea of acting purely for her own amusement. Now she claims that she's interested in seeing what will happen to Elentear if it overloads on magic, but since she proudly declared an episode ago that she wanted to take the planet for herself, it just makes her motives feel increasingly contradictory. I've got nothing against hedonistic villains, but it would be nice if her goals felt at least somewhat consistent. Right now, having her constantly flip-flop like this is just killing any interest I'd have in her character beyond her eventual defeat.

If you're wondering what happened to the rest of the gang during all this, we eventually discover that one of Selene's minions decided to use her magic to transform them into yokai, and pits Natsu and Gray against them. In Gray's case, he ends in a fight with Wendy who has been turned into an adorable little monster girl, while Happy and Carla have been turned into giant killer tigers (the latter of which is probably the sole highlight of this entire episode). As for Natsu, he ends up in a battle with Lucy, who has been turned into a Lamia, and that ends up being about as fanservice-heavy as you'd expect. With how much the episode has already gone out of the way to dunk on Lucy, this seemed prime to drive the final nail in the coffin, but I actually ended up being more on board with this fight than I expected. Partially because Natsu nearly getting crushed to death by Lucy's snake tail and boobs is objectively the spiciest thing to ever happen between those two, and while it does suck to get a second Lucy fight in this episode that centers around fanservice, that knowledge makes it a little hard not to laugh along with this (especially since these two will probably never have a moment like this again). What almost ends up making this whole thing work though is that the transformation also somehow strengthens Lucy to the point where she can actually keep up with Natsu (which I hope isn't going to be the “solution” to Lucy's apparent lack of power, but we've gotten enough similarly weird power-ups that I can't totally rule out the possibility, so hopefully it doesn't go down that way) and since the two of them point out that this is the first time they've actually ever fought each other, seeing them so excited to exchange punches end up feeling strangely sweet in its own way.

But as tends to be the case when the words “Lucy” and “fight” are in the same sentence, there is always some weird caveat to keep her from being involved in a straightforward brawl, and the one we get here is a real doozy. The fight ends up getting interrupted by none other than Aquarius, who steps in to help Natsu, and as nice as it should be to see her again after all this time, I'm mostly just confused as to why she's even here. Even though the fight was getting to the point where Lucy was actually starting to overpower Natsu, it didn't feel like he was in enough danger to warrant any outside interference, so the interruption just felt mostly welcome. It also comes off as strange in the grand scheme of things as Lucy's current goal has been to track down Aquarius's key, and I can't really understand the purpose of having Aquarius just randomly show up like this. Sure it might be nice to get a moment to reaffirm their bond or something, but we already got something like that during the Alvarez arc, and doing it a second time just feels like it could cheapen the impact of their official reunion later down the line. Hopefully whatever this leads to will be something worthwhile, but with how frequently Lucy just can't catch a break, it's hard not to think that the result will ultimately be at her expense.

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