Are you happy with how your favorite canon muse was portrayed in canon?
✧ ┆ Accepting.
Yes and no.
I think Jellal was treated better than most by FT's standards. He wasn't a part of the main crew and thus had fewer instances of being boiled down to a joke/otherwise demoralized. For being a tertiary character, his arc was executed well in terms of:
Showing who he was before the possession link & manipulation.
Showing how deeply those things affected his personality and morals.
A rare case of "amnesia turns the bad guy good" being tolerable (which I personally headcanon as him returning to his baseline personality and moral standing once the possession link was broken.)
Jail. Deserved.
Fully owning up to the impact he had on countless lives, accepting that he will never deserve forgiveness from so many people, and still choosing to dedicate the rest of his life to preventing others from falling into the same trap he did.
Having him actually face most of the people he directly impacted and not make excuses for himself. He didn't try to explain himself or show how much he'd grown because he understood that, to them, none of that mattered. I could actually go on and on about this forever.
On a more superficial level, I also just really appreciate the sincerity of his character in later arcs.
However, there are plenty of scenes that I pretend do not exist for my own sanity:
Ryuzetsu Land & every other scene that involves him acting like a horny teenager around Erza. Sits wrong with me. Also, he's 27-28 years old for most of those scenes. Have some decorum. Act like you've seen a tit before, guy. You're embarrassing me.
Nuking the Oracion Seis during their battle. I stand by my assertion that the fight was more or less unavoidable. I don't see a world where OS wouldn't have attacked him. However, I think he should have stayed on defense for the entire fight and only aimed to protect himself/nullify. Sema was overkill and felt icky. He could've gotten his point across without dropping a star on them. Crushing his own eyes was sick, though I wish there would have been some kind of permanent repercussion for it, otherwise it feels like a hollow sacrifice. Still contemplating adding consequences for this to my main verse (corneal scarring or something similar).
Neinhart fight was fine up until, "Here and now I shall commit just one more sin." NO. Sorry. I understand that it was for emotional impact and he was acting out of grief and rage, but NO. I'm not buying it. I'll have to articulate my thoughts about this in depth another time.
Jura vs Jellal was robbery. We could've had more of Jellal using Mystogan's magic & instead we got Jellal being a very silly goose. Weird time to get competitive, my guy. It's hard for me to buy that he would nearly blow his own cover & potentially get FT disqualified (and likely much worse) over a matter of personal pride, only to then forfeit in a much more humiliating fashion than just. Y'know. Losing because he's using magic he only had roughly a month to train with. Comic relief, I know, but that only works if it's actually funny.
August stomping on his head. Only because that's my son. I'm obliterating August with my mind.
Every time he gets nerfed via concussion. There's enough trauma in that head. I promise.
I'm sure there are other things that aren't coming to mind at the moment.
