©真島ヒロ・上田敦夫・講談社/FT100YQ製作委員会・テレビ東京
After several weeks of struggling with many battles, things are finally starting to slow down a bit. For the most part, this episode really revolves around Erza's fight with Laxus and Naruto and Happy's encounter with Touka, the latter of which offers a few revelations that are sure to be extremely funny or a bit disappointing depending on point of view your. of perspective. While this makes things a lot simpler than the last few episodes we've seen, that's certainly not a bad thing, as the focus is more on the shot of the arm that this one needs to got me excited about where it's going again.
Let's start with Erza's fight with Laxus, because that fight is pretty simple. I've previously complained about the level of stability in the power scale between guild members that Fairy Tail has managed to maintain since the early parts of the series (especially since it's largely borne by Lucy ), but one positive is that Erza and Laxus have been portrayed as more or less equals from the start, so there's really no telling how the actual fight between them will end. All of that led to this, as there was a lot of back and forth between the two of them, and it gave us the greatest focus we've had from any of our recent fights. . I'll score some points if Erza reveals a new ability in the form of learning Wendy's enchantment magic and enchanting her blade with Naruto's fire and Gray's ice, as that could be a cheap way to win, but Laxus got to keep the whole weird blood lightning thing he got in the Alvarez arc, so that helps balance things out. Plus, we do all this action in the middle of the show, throw in a fun new song, and come up with some incredible fight animations by the show's usual standards, so I That's not to say it didn't succeed with the presentation. Surprisingly the match ended in a draw, it seems a bit odd that everything was ready for Erza to pull this off, but her overwhelming win rate tends to make some of her fights She's a little too predictable, so this is a nice way to show that she's still not invincible without forcing her to endure any form of lame and/or horny humiliation to do. that, so it's a decent compromise. Unfortunately for both of them, this was the perfect outcome for Kiria, as this left her free to destroy another orb of the Forest Dragon and left them both at her mercy, so I I don't know how they will get out of this.
As for Naruto, Happy, and Touka, things get pretty weird when we learn the truth about Touka's identity: She was actually an Exceed all along and fell in love with Happy rather than Naruto. , as she confused the two when they first rescued her. She's also Happy's type, and he decides to make it his goal to do whatever it takes to help separate her from the White Mage. I can see how this twist could become an anti-story given how much the show has been building up to a reunion between Naruto and Touka, but to Mashima's credit, we clearly saw Touka rise out a tail not too long ago, and she was talking about her knight in shining armor riding on a fiery dragon, so you can't say the joke hasn't been passed along throughout time passed, and I can't pretend that it wasn't at least a little funny. However, that seems to have lost a bit of its potential as her love directed at Naruto could have created enough momentum for things to progress a bit more between Lucy and Lucy (which the show even even joked at the beginning of the episode when Juvia and Cana teased Lucy about having some competition), and while I'm not the biggest Happy/Carla shipper, their dynamic is easy enough so hurtful that it's hard to imagine that turning it into a love triangle would do much other than drag it down. I'm still pretty interested to see where the rest of the show goes with Touka, but I also hope she doesn't turn into Happy's Juvia, because that seems unnecessary.
However, there isn't too much time for Naruto and Happy to grapple with the implications of this particular twist, as the White Mage eventually regains control of Touka's body and attempts to possess Naruto. Before he can, Happy recalls that she mentioned not being able to touch the Wood Dragon's orbs with her own power, and when he throws one of them at her, his body's reaction her body which implies that she may not be who she appears to be. declared so. However, it might be a while before we get the answer to that little mystery as it looks like the show will dial things back a bit next week to adapt a side story. Normally, I wouldn't like that kind of interruption, but after how long the last few episodes were, the show could use a bit of a change of pace and this seemed like a good point to hit the pause button, so I wanted a little distraction.
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Fairy Tail: 100 Year Quest is now streaming on Crunchyroll.