#be ready to be on the recieving end of several months worth of grief and anger

[tokkias]

Lucy, Brandish, Aquarius, and The Wasted Potential of Chapters 74 & 75 - A Meta Analysis of 100 Years Quest (sorta)

I don’t usually do these sort of posts, but I've been having a lot of thoughts about this, and strangely enough it’s giving me a lot of writers block, and I feel like I can’t get myself back to writing fics until I’ve got this out. I’m going to preface this with the fact that I love Fairy Tail, I always have, and I’m sure I always will. I acknowledge that it is far from perfect, and I generally tolerate its flaws, so this post isn’t coming from a place of hatred or malice, but from my own personal frustration with how these chapters played out, and the lost potential it had. I feel that Fairy Tail thrives upon its characters and their relationships, but the way these chapter play out, in my opinion, do a disservice to them.

Obviously, all my opinion and interpretation, feel free to disagree with anything I say, but also just know I’m not here to argue with you if you do disagree.

Chapters 74 and 75 are the Yokai Lucy vs. Natsu fight, which in theory, could have been an incredible fight and a great moment for character development for both of them, but I feel is is taken away by having Aqaurius show up.

The reason I feel this way goes all the way back to chapter 13, where Lucy and Brandish meet again for the first time since Alvarez, and we find out that Brandish is also out to find Aquarius’s key. At first I think this came as a bit of a surprise to me, but it makes sense; Lucy and Brandish are really parallels of each other, and one of the ways we see this connection is in their connection to Aquarius in relation to their mothers. It makes sense that Brandish is also looking for Aquarius’s key because much like Lucy, Aquarius is the last thing that Brandish has of her mother. 

In these panels we are seeing the setup to a friendly rivalry rather than a genuine competition between the two with incredibly high stakes, even though they’re both competing for something that means a great deal to the both of them.

So why am I bringing this up? Well, when I first read this chapter, I theorised that this rivalry would somehow cumulate in Lucy either finding or retrieving Aquarius’s key first, but inevitably giving it up to Brandish, because I think, knowing what we do about Lucy, this is the most in character choice for her to make. We see in the Grand Magic Games arc when Yukino tries to give up Libra and Pices to her, that Lucy doesn’t care about having all twelve golden gate keys, but rather she cares about the happiness and feelings of the spirits. Time and time again we see that Lucy is incredibly selfless, and is willing to put others before her, regardless of if that person has wronged her in the past.

Lucy’s selflessness is not the sole (or even primary reason) that I think this is the best course of action for this plotline. Lucy goes through a lot of character development in the time since giving up Aquarius’s key. In the year between Tartaros and Alvarez, with Aquarius gone, Natsu and Happy on their journey, and Fairy Tail disbanded, for the first time in her life, Lucy is truly alone. Lonliness is something that was obviously not foreign to her, she went through a lot of it after the passing of her mother and the subsequent neglect from her father, but even then she still had Aquarius; after Tartaros, she has no one. Lucy is (somewhat) able to adjust to her new life, she throws herself into her work and her search for her guildmates, as well as trains to become the strongest that we’ve seen her up until that point. Up until this point, Lucy has always needed Aquarius for both her protection and her companionship, but with the growth that she experiences since first losing her, she no longer needs either of those things. What I think she does need, is a sense of closure, and a true goodbye to be able to truly let go and move on. When Lucy sacrifices Aquarius to summon the Celestial Spirit King, they never get that true goodbye. 

Aquarius is the one who gets to thank Lucy, but in her urgency to save her friends, and utter grief at the thought of losing Aquarius, we never get to see Lucy give her goodbyes to Aquarius. Even when Aquarius shows up in chapters 468 and 469, their “goodbye” is more along the lines of a see you later.

Brandish on the other hand, does need Aquarius, much more than Lucy does, and I believe that Lucy understands that. While Lucy has long since mourned and come to terms with the death of her mother, Brandish spent her whole life resenting Layla for Grammi’s death, unable to let herself move past it, to the point where she was willing to kill Lucy to get her revenge. Of course, killing Lucy wouldn’t have made any of those feelings go away, because all of her frustration and anger comes from not having closure of her mothers’ death. Having the companionship of Aqaurius gives Brandish someone to share in the memory of her mother with, and from there, she may truly be able to start to feel her grief and mourn in a healthy way, and be able to move on. I feel that Lucy deeply understands and empathises with what Brandish went through/is going through, and would be willing to give up Aquarius after a tearful goodbye, if it meant helping Brandish go through what Lucy knows to be a horrible and traumatic experience.

Now, I have my isssues with Aquarius’ appearance in 468 and 469, but I feel since she is so interwoven within the story of Lucy and Brandish that her showing up is justified, and plot wise, this was the best course of action to resolve this part of the story.

Aquarius showing up once to solve a problem is fine. Twice is a copout. 

What irritates me most about Aquarius’s appearance in chapter 75 of hyq, is that, not only was it not the only course of action to resolve the fight, I don’t even think it was the one that made the most sense.

In true Fairy Tail fashion, we see the resolution to this fight being the power of friendship. I have no problem with nakama power in Fairy Tail, I wouldn’t have gotten this far into the series if I did, and actually, I’m quite fond of it. But to me, it’s weird that Mashima decided that the way to nakama power Lucy out of her Yokai state, was to bring in Aquarius, when Natsu was literally right there.

Now it’s no secret that despite being the main characters and best friends, Natsu and Lucy have had very few meaningful interactions across 100 years quest. In a way, it does make sense, they have a lot more pressing matters on their hands, but in chapter 74, we have them in the same room, forced to fight each other for the first time. 

By now, we’re all aware that Natsu is a punch his problems until it goes away, type of guy, but he’s absolutely not incapable of thinking his way to a resolution. Yeah, Natsu is a dumbass, but being a dumbass and being smart are not mutually exclusive actually. In chapter 53 Natsu is able to pretty quickly come up with a really clever strategy to defeat Aldoron that doesn’t involve fighting at all. It’s a scene that I really like because it shows that Natsu has grown from the reckless person who would put himself in danger with no forethought, to someone who is capable of thinking strategically.

So we know that, with a little push, Natsu is able to come up with a clever solution, and there is a push for a solution in the fight with Yokai Lucy.

I believe that the reason that Natsu is so willing to fight her is the same reason in which he’s fine with absolutely pummeling Aldoron’s Happy in chapter 52, in that yes, it looks like Lucy, and it sounds like Lucy, but he doesn’t percieve her as actually being his Lucy. So when Lucy pulls out the “Natsu! It’s me!”, and he’s caught off guard, because yeah, it’s still Lucy.

It foreshadows how Aquarius is able to bring her back, but why couldn’t it have foreshadowed the same for Natsu?

From here is where I go from really liking chapter 74, to really not liking it.

By having Aquarius come to break Lucy out of her Yokai state, she takes away an opportunity to give Natsu another moment to show his character growth from someone who never thinks about anything other than fighting, to actually being able to independently think of his own solutions. Instead we get... another Lucy and Aqaurius moment that doesn’t really give us anything more than what we had seen in 468 and 469 of the original series. To me, it doesn’t make sense that Natsu would want to continue fighting Lucy, we know that he cares deeply about her and doesn’t want to see her hurting, and by that point he knows that he is out of his league in that fight. We have already established growth in Natsu to be able to think things through, so why can’t we see him pivot here and go the same nakama power route that Aquarius goes?

Now one could argue that, “oh it’s because Aquarius uses her stream of memories to get Lucy back to her old self”, but I don’t really think that it holds much ground in the first place. To me, both having Aquarius show up because celestial spirits don’t need to be summoned with keys there, and then now this stream of memories feels half-baked. If you’re going with a half-baked solution to forward the plot, I believe you might as well go with one that furthers the characters in a way that we haven’t already established. I wouldn’t care if it was some other half-baked power of love and friendship or whatever, or if it just forced Natsu to use his words for once, I don’t think it makes much of a difference, but at the start of the chapter, I was led to believe that it was set up as a Natsu and Lucy moment, so I find it weird that that’s not how it ended up.

In chapter 22, it’s Lucy who is the one who breaks Natsu out of his rampage, so while these two circumstances aren’t on equal ground, I believe that having Natsu be the one to break Lucy out of her Yokai state would have been something of a full circle moment for them.

The second reason I don’t like Aquarius showing up, circles back to Lucy searching for her key: What is the point of Lucy going on a journey (both literally and figuratively) to find her key if Aquarius is just going to show up to save her whenever she needs it? Regardless of if my theory that Lucy just wants to have a final goodbye with Aqaurius, having her show up whenever Lucy needs saving, takes away from the emotional impact of when they finally get to see each other, when/if Lucy finds her key. I feel that Lucy is ready to fully move on from her life and who she was before Fairy Tail, and letting go of Aquarius is part of that. Aquarius will always be an important part of Lucy’s life, and they’re both always going to care for each other, and with a potential friendship blooming between her and Brandish, I don’t see it being goodbye forever between them, but I think it would be a satisfying ending to their partnership, and a good way to close their character arcs together.