@Hinscher:
This is why so many of you are pissing me off. Seriously there are two types of time skips.
1. the main cast sits around and does whatever, trains, ect for the allocated time period and thus get stronger and age
2. the main cast is sent into the future as is with 0 time passing for them but the world did.
You guys OBVIOUSLY wanted number 1 in that the cast becoming stronger and changing physically. #1 didn't happen so you bitching.
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING CHANGED IN TERMS OF ANYTHING?
What the hell are you talking about. For one, the guild is a piece of shit now, that is a change. That is ALL we have seen. What is teh rest of the world doing? How did the rest of the world change? What are the dark guilds doing? what is Zeref doing? How has the magic council changed since their new leadership? What about our other ally guilds? What about the rest of the cats in the world? ect.
This is ALL stuff that we got no info on at all, and I'm sure all had big changes in these 7 years. But no, you guys are pissed cause the main cast looks the same and there was no rescue arc to save them. A rescue arc in this scenerio makes no sense. There was no need to rescue them. Mavis could have released them whenever s/he wanted to and they could have walked back to town. They had nothing to be rescued from. An ALLY had protected them. There were no enemies on the island, no enemies that would have been waiting for them at the islands non-existent locations, ect. A rescue arc woudl have made no sense. We woudl have been wondering "how the hell did this enemy know to be here at this time? Why does defeating this enemy save the cast? What does this enemy have to do with Mavis magic sphere?"
Hinscher, at this point, you're clearly defending Fairy Fail out of pure ego than anything else. Every other fan hasn't even tried defending this chapter. And why should they? It's terrible. We got the most terrible, pointless time-skip imaginable and yet you still blindly twist and contort yourself to quibble on trivial facts without looking at the bigger picture. You should really look at what you're writing.
"The guild went to shit, THAT'S A CHANGE! IT COUNTS!"
Yeah and how long do you think it's gonna stay that way now that team uber elite is back? Doh!
"But what about all those dark guilds and allied guilds and shit, who knows what they've been doing these seven years!!"
Who gives a shit. The world is so bland and uninspired, that it might not be there at all for all the crap the readers give. Just like we don't give a crap about the agefied Fairy Tail guild nobodies. Really, how are the cats doing? Really? Is this the extent of questions this world can provide for you?
More importantly, we didn't need 7 years for any of that. Mashima could have cooked up some plan by Zeref or Dark Guild antics and thrown them into the story whenever he wanted. A timeskip is for speeding up the progression of an event be it the characters growth or the upheaval of the world. it's not for jumping into whatever convoluted villain scheme or seeing former allies with longer hair. You mentioned the magical council changing. Why would it have changed? Have we seen it suffering some sort of political coup or something? You see we as the readers don't care about the changes in the future if we didn't see the prelude to such a change in the now so that we can follow the logical progression and the extent of the event can resonate with us.
And to the most important point, it's not that the characters look the same, it's that they haven't changed…AT ALL. They haven't gotten stronger, they haven't matured in the slightest, they're still the same bumbling idiots just with the backdrop of 7 years passing in a barely noticeable world. It might as well be a time-travel arc for all the difference it makes. Which would be fine except they're never going back to the past because the future became the present.
And it sucks. It really, really sucks.