#negativity ?

[sidhewrites]

Some people can just eat with headphones on and I’m like how dare you flex on me like that

This post brought to you by the misophonia / audio processing disorder club

[peachesareaguysbestfried]

I keep thinking about the season 3 finale. Where Quentin basically tells his dad that he’s turning magic back on, knowing that means his cancer will come back. 

And then this season, his dad actually does die. 

Like that’s a part of Q’s depression we don’t talk about. But closing in on himself, that’s not just missing Eliot. It’s a whole ton of crap just pilling onto him - like, yes, Eliot being posessed. And also - rejecting him before that. And also Alice betraying him, betraying them - and he’s the one who brought her back, right? 

It’s like no matter what he does, there are these really real, terrible consequences, and the fight feels endless. And he’s sacrificed so much to it. And he’s willing to die trying to fix what he feels he’s broken - not that it’s his fault. The system was rigged from the start.

And like, even if he does hook up with Alice in 4x12 - after being reminded of the person he used to be, the person who’d just discovered what it’s like to have friends, a community, magic, a sense of purpose - how would that not make narrative sense? 

The more Q and Alice interact, the more I feel like the writers are telling me that they’re over for now. Doesn’t mean they didn’t happen, doesn’t mean they’re not people, doesn’t mean that things don’t happen.

I don’t want Q and Eliot raising 3 kids in a house with white fence and like, a rose garden. That shit means the story is over. And I’m not ready for that. What I want is complex storytelling, aware of their grandure, and a really epic season finale where their love (and, to be clear, love does not mean making out, it means a deep soul connection) plays a significant role in how everything unfolds. And I’m sure that’s happening. So, like, I’m pretty happy.

[boyjadzia]

I got fired today, basically bc depression is sabotaging my life, so any suggestions for cheering up people have are appreciated

[buttonsizedbabyarchive]

ive been feeling uncomfortable on this blog lately and its no fun :-(

theres so many k!nk and n/s/f/w blogs that follow me and with the amount of followers i (somehow) have its not really possible for me to block all the ppl i dont want :/

im thinking about remaking and joining a community that’s closeknit and safe,, aaaaa i just want to feel ok on my own blog !

[wellyfullofale]

I know you're really positive on your blog but can i ask for Top 5 least fave characters too? Curious to know who yours are <3

Ahh don’t let the positivity fool you, I’m up for throwing some shade as much as the next person ;) I think the worst thing a character can do is be boring tbh but I’ve missed out a few characters who are so inconsequential I’ve forgotten they exist (ahem Rodney)

Anyway my 5 least favourite characters that have actually done something recently:

1. Pierce Harris. For quite obvious reasons. I know it’s a story needing to be told but he makes me feel physically sick.

2. Lawrence White. Yawn. He just riles me up. He’s an obnoxious oaf and he definitely votes Tory and that pretty much sums up why I hate him. #RonnieDeservesBetter

3. Doug. I don’t even know his last name. I know he’s probably really inoffensive to most people but he just really gets on my nerves. He just reminds me of all the men who drink in the pub I used to work at who read the Daily Mail and believe everything in there and don’t use any of their brain cells to try and be reasonable, but just always assume the worst of people. No time for that, sorry.

4. Emma Barton. Yeah I get it she’s a soap villain and I know some people love her but across all the shows I’ve ever watched I just hate the characters who manipulate and then take the high road and that’s exactly what she does. I can’t wait for her comeuppance.

5. Lachlan White. Little shit makes my skin crawl.

[calm-green-tea]

Where's that "I imagined something too hard and now I'm upset" post. Really feeling that rn. Any ways how's your guys day's going?

[leeran]

About Natsu's (lack of) character arc

So, there are a lot of posts criticizing Fairy Tail thanks to this recent arc. I'm sure there's someone out there talking about this exact same issue, but I admit I haven't found that person yet… And in any case, I want to say my own piece about this subject. It's been awhile since I wrote some sort of analysis here, but this is probably going to be long anyway.

I want to clarify something: I'm trying to be objective here. While my opinions and tastes will show up, what I'm going to focus here is on writing and structure. I want to talk about why Mashima's writing is so ineffective lately, and why so many people call Natsu a Mary Sue or plainly dislike him. I'm not here to defend Natsu; I love him, sure, but he's been a victim of terrible, awful writing. I 100% understand why people dislike him or even hate him. They have VERY good reasons to do so. What I want to do is explain why this happens.

Alright, now let's start.

→ Inability to change.

At the start of the latest time skip I saw the first sign that I should drop any tiny bit of hope that I had for Natsu's character. I was stupid and I kept that hope alive, sadly, but I really should've seen it coming.

Remember when he came back of the one-year-trip he took after Igneel's death? How he had his long hair, and many people wanted him to keep it that way, but in the next chapter he came back to his usual look? 

It may seem silly, but to me this was a sign of a bigger problem. Usually, when there's a time skip it's expected that character designs change. Not only because it keeps things interesting, but also because people change with time. A change in design tends to reflect this. And I know it sounds stupid to worry about something so “insignificant”, but remember: manga is a visual medium just as much as it is a written one. Visual elements are as important here to tell the story as any other. For example: Lucy, the character who's allowed to change the most throughout the story, gets a slight change in her design after this time skip. By contrast, Natsu doesn't.

Following that small sign, we discover that Natsu's personality hasn't changed. Like, at all. A year has passed, and he hasn't changed. Worse than that: He lost Igneel. And. He. Hasn’t. Changed. At. All.

Natsu's motivation was established in the beginning of the manga: He wanted to find his adoptive father, Igneel, after he disappeared 7 years prior to the start of the story. That motivation was fulfilled in the Tartaros' arc, followed by Igneel’s death. In one day, Natsu fulfilled a dream he spent seven years (or fourteen, I guess) pursuing… and then he had to see one of his worst fears come true. This is a pretty big thing for any person, but it's also the culmination for a character arc. The character is at his lowest point, so he's forced to grow in some way (whether it's positive or negative).

But… we don't see Natsu grow. Sure, we see him grieve for… a couple of panels, but that's all. The chapter before the time skip, we see Natsu smiling and barely reacting to what happened, besides deciding that he has to become stronger. 

We don't get much insight into him. And after that? A year passes and we don't get to see Natsu's struggles or his process of growth. What's worse: when he comes back, he's acting like he always acted. And there's no insight that shows us that no, he changed, he's just ACTING. We have nothing like that, he just… got better. And we don't get to see it.

Look, this isn't about his coping mechanisms or anything. It's not about whether a person, in real life, can go through a situation like that and appear unchanged by all that happened. No, this is about the writing choices made for a character being utterly ineffective and incompetent. It's not like we need much, honestly. We don't need to have Natsu ranting in his thoughts about all the suffering he went through and how he changed. Small changes would've been enough. Maybe having Natsu smiling less, or showing sad smiles. Or maybe have him lose some of his will for fighting, at least when it comes to the reckless fights he does for fun. Those things are small, but they are effective.

But, what is Natsu's character arc anyway? What did Mashima intend for him at the beginning of the story (or what he seemed to intend)? In my opinion, there are two major themes to what should've been Natsu's character arc: Choosing between Igneel and Fairy Tail, and learning to deal with loss. Both of these themes should've culminated at the end of the Tartaros arc, but Mashima accidentally destroyed all the moments that lead to this.

→ Igneel vs Fairy Tail.

So, the most basic character arc you see in stories usually is about what a character wants vs what a character needs. As I said, Natsu's motivation was established in the first chapter of the manga: He's looking for his adoptive father. However, as the story advances we start to understand how important Fairy Tail is for Natsu. It is his new family, and he can't abandon them. But what happens when Natsu finds Igneel? Will he leave with him and quit the guild? Or will he stay in Fairy Tail and say goodbye to his father? These questions are never properly addressed in the manga at any point, which I think was the first problem when it comes to establishing Natsu's character arc.

However, we do get at least one moment when we see a glimpse of what should've been his arc. This happens at the beginning of Edolas: Natsu and Wendy need to go to another world to save their friends, but there's a very strong chance of them being unable to return to Earthland once this is all over. Natsu says that he doesn't have anything tying him to Earthland if his friends aren't there… besides Igneel. However, he still makes the choice to go to Edolas. He basically chose the guild over Igneel, knowing fully well that he might have to give up his search for him.

While he makes this choice with a smile, his attitude during this arc seems a bit off comparing to previous arcs, at least until they reunite with Lucy. He smiles all the time, but not in a defying or devilish manner, like he usually does. It might be just my interpretation, but it did seem like he was swallowing up his feelings on the matter (not only when it came to giving up his search for Igneel, but also about what happened to his entire guild). Showing a bit more about him, about his feelings and thoughts at this time could've helped to build a real arc for him. Especially when we had a brilliant set up only a couple of chapters before, with him speaking to Gildarts about Igneel and Lisanna, which showed us that Natsu couldn’t just give up his search for Igneel. Except he did! Only a couple of chapters after that! And he barely shows any conflicting feelings about it! See why I say the writing is really incompetent?

The ideal progression would've been to see Natsu grow to understand that he already chose Fairy Tail over his search for Igneel. The manga deals a lot with themes of family and friendship. Having Natsu grow closer to the guild (more than ever before) thanks to Lucy joining in was the perfect set up for a character arc about about something REALLY difficult: choosing between your past and your present. That is, choosing to move on.

This leads us to the second theme of Natsu's (hypothetical) character arc:

→ Learning to deal with loss and moving on.

Natsu is established very early in the story as someone who can't deal with loss at all. He can't accept the possible death of his friends. We see his reactions to Gray's attempt to sacrifice himself. We see how he would've reacted to Erza's death, and how he even tells her that he can't deal with the thought of losing her.

And, more importantly, we see it when Lisanna's death is mentioned:

When it comes to death and loss, Natsu can't move on. He can't accept Igneel disappearance, and he can't accept Lisanna's death. And here's the thing: Lisanna's death was a perfect parallel to his loss of Igneel. It was a minor arc that could’ve help him learn to move on after losing someone.

But then Mashima decided to revive Lisanna and he screw it up.

Am I saying that Lisanna should've stayed dead? YES. Look, I don't like the idea of more female characters getting fridged. She was dead just to give her brothers (and Natsu) Pain and Suffering (™), honestly. However, after she was brought back, Mashima never did anything for her. She has literally no character arc. She barely appears, and is usually there to make either Elfman or Mirajane suffer. And her relationship with Natsu is completely dropped after Edolas. She serves no purpose in the story at all. And I want to like her! I think the concept for her is really interesting! But Mashima did nothing for her as character. (And this is a failing of him as writer, NOT a question of whether Lisanna is an interesting character or not. I don’t hate her, I want to make that clear).

In a better written story, Lisanna's death would've served to start a character arc about accepting loss and moving on. We had three different characters dealing with this death, and all of them were unable to move on. But instead of forcing the characters to confront this loss and finally accept it, we have the author rewarding their lack of growth by bringing back the character from the death. That right there is bad writing.

And this ties to a bigger arc, which comes back to the whole Igneel vs Fairy Tail thing. Natsu choosing Fairy Tail over Igneel would've been him finally moving on. Yes, Igneel disappeared, I can tell you how much different is having someone disappear instead of simply just die: It eats you up your whole life, even if you assume they're dead. But even so, accepting the loss of Igneel and moving on with the new family he found would've been the growth Natsu needed. It would've meant that he learned how to deal with death. It would've meant that he became an adult, in some senses. Again: Want vs Need. What Natsu wanted was to find Igneel, but what he needed was to move on.

As you see, Natsu's character arc was established in the beginning of the story. We had several arcs prior to Edolas showing us his inability to deal with grief and loss, as well as the importance Fairy Tail had gained in his life. We even had a chapter just at the beginning of Edolas reminding us of both Igneel and Lisanna, and how Natsu was unable to move on after both of these losses.

We had all the elements set-up in the story… But then it went nowhere.

Had these element been well established, Igneel's death in Tartaros would've been so much more powerful than it ended up being. And more importantly: Natsu would've been forced to change. As it is, we leave Tartaros, the culmination point for Natsu's character arc, without being able to see him truly grow.

What's worse is that Mashima tries to establish another character arc (related to E.N.D. and Zeref) at the end of Tartaros, after failing to finish the first character arc. So when we arrive to the recent chapters and we have Natsu face the choice between becoming a demon and becoming a dragon, that scene falls so tremendously flat that most of the fandom was pissed off.

That arc, the arc about Natsu questioning his own identity after finding out the truth about his past, was so poorly established that I can barely say it was established at all. I mean, sure, some of the scenes are there. Natsu finds out about all of this, but he barely seems to react to it. He barely seems to struggle with all this. HAPPY is struggling more than Natsu is. And the thing is: when you failed to execute the bigger and most important arc for the character, how can you hope to follow it up with something else? Natsu never learned the things he should've learned. He never grew, he only became physically stronger. That's all.

When you have a character with a sad backstory, who has flaws but neither the story nor the characters around him force him to recognize and confront them, and who only grows stronger and stronger physically speaking, how can you not expect people to call him a Mary Sue? I've said time and time again that I HATE that term, but people have every right to use it in this particular case, although I prefer to talk about bad writing, since it places the responsibility where it belongs: in the author.

Natsu keeps fighting the battles of other characters, and it serves no purpose to the story or his character arc. He just does it because he's the main character, but the story gains nothing from it. OF COURSE people are going to be pissed off. What else could you expect? That’s poor writing.

So there it is. This is one of the many, many flaws Fairy Tail has, but I think it’s an important one. When you can't get invested in one of the main characters it's very difficult to keep reading a story. And when the plot also shows the same sort of poor writing in the latest arcs, what else do you have to care for in the manga?