Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest

Episode 8

When last week's episode ended on the cliffhanger of Erza running into a lookalike of her, I foolishly assumed the show would use that for something serious. After all, this isn't the first time the series has dealt with doppelgangers of the Fairy Tail crew. We even had an entire story arc centered around that idea with all the Edolas stuff, so even if this wasn't directly connected to that, I was expecting a crazy left swerve out of the whole deal. Instead, this weird coincidence is used to talk about, of all things: romance. While romance is a hot-button topic within any series, Fairy Tail sits in a unique position in that department as Mashima's tendencies to rely heavily on character-specific gags as well as maintaining some degree of status quo with the main cast means that the quality of romantic relationships in this series is something of a mixed bag. The results vary pretty wildly. It's something that's bound to have frustrated fans of this series at one point or another, so with that subject being put on the table, I suppose it's only fair that I get to drop my own opinions about it.

Following up on the coincidence with Erza's lookalike, we learn that she, and the Fairy Tail guild she belongs to, are all actually a guild of actors—and all unsurprisingly bear some resemblance to the Fairy Tail members. As is the way with this series, this leads to a bunch of gags pointing out how different or weirdly identical each of their lookalikes behave (shoutout to Elfman's being a makeup artist of all things)—with the biggest contrast being Natsu's lookalike being a narcissistic actor where Lucy's is his manager who has to deal with all his verbal abuse. But when Lucy decides to give Natsu's lookalike a piece of her mind for being a jerk, she accidentally walks in on the two of them doing the nasty—because they're a couple and this is just their way of showing affection. It's a strange gag on the surface but perhaps a little less so if you've seen some of the surprisingly spicy art of Natsu and Lucy that Mashima was posting on his Twitter account following the initial end of the series (and given some of the parallels between the dynamic of these lookalikes and said art, you can't convince me that Mashima didn't use that as his source of inspiration for this joke). Funny as this is, it does further point out how slow things are moving between the actual Natsu and Lucy as the most we get with those two here is a quick joke about Natsu accidentally setting Lucy's clothes on fire when he tried to stop some guys from hitting on her—which weirdly enough, is somehow progress on his part. It's a little frustrating to see things between them still moving this slow after all this time, but short of his thing with Lisanna coming back to the forefront (which I'm still kind of annoyed got dropped as soon as she was resurrected) or him otherwise getting dragged into becoming a little more mature, that's the nature of the best at this point, and I've come to accept it.

For all I've said about Natsu and Lucy though, the actual romantic focus of this episode is centered on whatever the heck is happening with Gray and Juvia. When Gray encounters a lookalike of Juvia who decides to tease him by taking him out on a date, he starts projecting all his feelings towards Juvia onto her and we get a clearer idea of where he stands. He's started falling for Juvia but isn't ready for an actual relationship with her because he still feels guilty about the injury she suffered on his account. His current goal is to become strong enough that he can protect her. It's a cute sequence for Gray in isolation but I've never really been the biggest fan of Gray and Juvia as an actual item. Juvia's one-sided obsession with Gray was at least funny initially but that never stopped being her default personality setting—even when it was actively going against some of her character development in other areas. (She is still antagonistic towards Lucy over some falsely perceived interest in Gray and that feels like it's getting in the way of their friendship at this point.) Even if her antics have been generally harmless, it's a little weird that things shifted towards an actual romance between them without Juvia going through at least some kind of notable change in her behavior.

Thankfully, there is other stuff beyond the will-they-won't-they shenanigans, as the gang runs into the real Juvia on their way to encounter the Wood Dragon God. However, something seems off about her (the biggest sign is that she isn't constantly fawning over Gray). While she does give them all a cryptic warning about the White Mage, all of that gets put to the side for a while when the gang learns that the town they're currently in is sitting on the hand of the Wood Dragon God. The dragon is so massive that it has several cities across its body, Xenoblade Chronicles style. It's a pretty neat concept, especially since this form of co-existence between the dragon and the locals means that it's another situation where Natsu and the gang can't just solve the problem by beating him up—but that's not the biggest shocker of the episode. The real bombshell comes when one of the locals takes the gang to a nearby church, where they discover that all the members are devotees of the White Mage and that the devotees in question are all of the other Fairy Tail members.

I'll admit, I was hoping that the mystery of what happened to the other guild members would be left up in the air for a little while longer but credit where it's due: this is a pretty solid twist. The others have been possessed by Touka and we don't know how or why. Even knowing that this will all probably get reversed before long, it's a strong enough hook that I want to see where the story goes. The real surprise here is that a twist this major was dropped in an episode that was otherwise frontloaded gags and teases at romantic progression. I had fun with this episode, and its ending certainly has my attention, so while this wasn't the show's strongest outing this season, it at least managed to avoid putting a speed bump on its momentum.

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