Fairy Tail: Final Season

Episode 327

A good finale needs to do a few very specific things, regardless of the show. For one thing, it doesn't have to be just one episode, and Fairy Tail is wisely taking the several episodes approach, which gives it more leeway to cover the major and minor details required of a satisfying end to its story. Basically what needs to happen is that all threads must be gathered up and tied off, the series' recurring themes need to be addressed, and everyone ought to either get what they deserve or, in the words of Jane Austen, be restored to tolerable comfort. (And who would've thought I could work a Mansfield Park reference into a Fairy Tail review?) This episode shows Fairy Tail to be well on its way to doing most, if not all, of those things.

The biggest one is pulling through the series' consistent theme of friends and family being of the utmost importance. It's certainly made abundantly clear at several points of this week's episode: when Lucy assembles everyone from the guild to power Fairy Sphere, when Wendy enchants all the dragon slayers' powers onto Natsu to help him take down an increasingly crazed Acnologia, and at the end when Meldy comes through with a spell to give the entire world's magic power to Lucy to successfully cast her spell. While I could happily have gone through the rest of my life without seeing the butt guys again, having both good guys and bad be willing to contribute to the cause, basically everyone Fairy Tail in general and Lucy and Natsu specifically ever interacted with, come through when they're really, truly needed, is the kind of moment Hallmark movies only wish they could capture. The world, it suggests, is more important than the squabbles we have in it.

Conversely, it's the lack of this sort of coming together, this sense of unity, that doomed Acnologia way back when. When Doctor lost everyone to his dragon friend gone mad, instead of using his anger and sorrow to make sure that the others affected by enraged dragons wouldn't suffer, he opted to use it to fuel his transformation into some kind of psycho dragon killer. A piece of him must have understood that his way wasn't necessarily a good one, otherwise he might not have found it so fitting to name himself after the very dragon (monster) who turned him into the fiend (monster) that he became. When the trapped dragon slayers in the time rift remark that Acnologia seems to have taken leave of his senses and gone berserk, that's really just a statement about how he's been for a long, long time – in his isolation and anger, he became what he accused the original Acnologia of being – a heartless killer.

And that brings us to the idea of how this can end happily for everyone. Certainly it's more important for our main protagonists, but as we saw when we caught a glimpse of everyone Meldy asked to help, even former antagonists and one-off characters have a stake in what's going on. Even Zeref, although he's no longer in the land of the living, had his emotional connections that were ultimately fulfilled. So what does that mean for Acnologia? If we look at him, rather than Zeref, as the true Big Bad, maybe he doesn't deserve anything less than eternal torment. But that's not really how Fairy Tail works, and it will be interesting to see how it's handled and if there's any redemption left for the person who threw everything away to become who he despised the most.

In the meantime, we can bask in that one brief lovely moment when Carla reached out her hand to Sheria, who gave up her magic for Wendy. Not only did it help show us that she still has some magic power left, it was just a sweet, kind thing for the usually abrasive Carla to do, and one I feel certain that Wendy will be happy to hear about when she's brought home to her friends.

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Fairy Tail: Final Season is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.