Okay, finished.
Reading this reminds me of why One Piece is so amazing. After I finished I went and read this week's chapter of One Piece and laughed from my gut more times than FT's 78 chapters, could appreciate the image detail in a whole new light and have renewed love respect for Oda's sense of artistic and story flow.
There's nothing wrong with Fairy Tale, it's just that there's nothing great about it.
I think there were two moments where I was genuinely interested in what was happening:
A. When flame was used to dispel the wind armor
B. When Loki's origin was revealed
Everything else just sort of 'happened' which isn't a bad thing at the start of a comic. But we're far from the start of the comic now and by Chapter 78, OP was already blowing me the hell over with 'Bellemere-san'.
The villains are also seriously lacking as are the main villains and their motivations. I actually liked the first two sets of 'major' villains over anything we've seen since the S-Class arc started. I know the author really tried with that Iron Dragon Slayer but…he just didn't hit me as anything other than Random Shonen Villain X.
I guess that's the problem, it just exists on the line of shonen comics. It doesn't dare to go anywhere else.
Some other picky-points that aren't important but bother me:
The author draws fire like shit. What's with those awful-looking balls? It looks terrible. Like he's hitting his opponent with pom-poms. If you're going to draw fire, make it awesome or at the very least threatening.
I'm having a hard time figuring out who the main character is supposed to be. You need to have an anchor for a series like this and there's no way Lucy is interesting enough. She's essentially an avatar for the reader experiencing new things so she's difficult to be attached to or even look up to since for the most part she is equivalent to us. Then who else? Natsu? He was actually very interesting in the very first two chapters and it all went downhill from there. He's just a character that kind of steamrolls through the story and everyone looks up to in one way or another. That's usually the role of the main character but besides looking for his dragon, there's nothing remotely interesting that he's done since the start besides pummel people with pom-poms. Actually, what he did with the Reaper guy was awesome. I was hoping for more stuff like that, but no.
The fights come down to just pouring more shit against each other until eventually one person's shit is better. Bleach's author is a pro at doing things like that. While that's essentially what's happening, he has a much more interesting take on HOW it unfolds via power-ups or unique tactics. Sure, sometimes it's just lame, but compared to Jubia VS Grey which was LITERALLY, 'Take Water! Take Ice! Take more Water! Take more Ice! TAKE MORE WATER! TAKE MORE ICE!', it leaves that in the dust.
Enough with the 'friend' bullshit.
God-fucking-damnit! I thought OP was bad with that shit! Every single large close-up panel that has a 'poignant' quote from a character is the same thing every-single-time.
"Because…..they're my friends....."
"Because......this is Fairy Tale...."
"Because.......we work together in Fairy Tale....."
"Because.....I won't let anything happen to Fairy Tale....."
ENOUGH! WE GET YOUR JAPANESE SENSE OF UCHI-SOTO, SEMPAI-KOUHAI, NAKAMA BULLSHIT! CHRIST! TRY EXPANDING YOUR DAMN HORIZONS ONCE IN A WHILE! There hasn't been ONE quotable or poignant line in the entire series that I haven't seen somewhere else.
Also enough with the breast bullshit. God, I guess I should stop complaining about Oda's dumbass SBS replies just so long as he doesn't rub it in our faces in the manga pages like this freak. It's one thing to talk about it every once in a while but do we constantly need the breast jokes in addition to them being displayed anyway? What a pain in the ass, no wonder so many Japanese males have SEVERE mother complexes.
Again, these complaints are just personal dislikes and really don't mean much. As far as returning to an unbiased critical look at the series, it would be unfair to compare this series to OP or even call it a poor-man's OP. It's shonen manga to the T. It doesn't waver, it doesn't cross any lines or build new paths. It does exactly what is expected of it. In that respect it's good, but when series like One Piece raise the bar so high, it's hard to waste time reading things like this, even though every few months I'm sure I'll come back to it to see what's happening.
I agree so much with everything you just said, it's like I know you personally, and was complaining to you about it, lol, I feel the exact same way, One Piece really does set the manga standards high, and Fairy Tail needs to come up a whole lot if it wants to even compete with top mangas like ONE PIECE, naruto, bleach, etc. The artist needs to do a whole lot more.