▲ + Jellal ( lmao not too harsh VHGDFAKS ), ▲ + Chelia, ▲ + Mermaid Heel, ▲ + Alvarez aaaaaand 3 x ▲ of ur choice!!!
a guided tour through the salt mines! / meme.
jellal. truly unpopular opinion, probably, but he was most interesting to me when he was a villain because at the time, the writing for him was probably best. since, he has been involved in a lot of things that made me actively groan ( the deux ex jellal moment during tenrou, his involvement with ft in the gmg arc, the way his eyes healed perfectly after he severely injured them ). he cannot be blamed for bad writing, obviously, but it kind of made me dislike him as a character despite me having liked him previously.
chelia. there is no way for me not to be harsh here. i do not like this character. i do not like how she essentially replaced sherry in the story. i consider her to too similar to sherry, especially when she was first introduced and there were far too many traits that were extremely similar to her cousin. in a way, chelia is sherry 2.0 with a stronger type of magic and ‘cute’ clumsiness. aside from this, there is very little she does / very few traits she possesses that sherry does not have as well, making her a rather uninteresting character for me. it also does not help that she is involved in one of the most idiotic fights in the entire gmg arc — and given how much pointlessness happens in that arc, this is definitely telling. i obviously talk about her fight alongside lyon against juvia and gray; chelia is canonly weak against water so why the actual hell didn’t juvia, an s-class mage in phantom lord, take advantage of this weakness????? in short, a lot of chelia’s involvement in the story feels nonsensical to me. ( also, people who post chelia content into sherry’s tag. why do you do that. )
mermaid heel. alongside lamia and saber, this guild is actually one i’d actually love to learn more about? we know very little about them as it is, i believe, the only guild that participated in the final round of the gmg that did not have their guild master shown? in fact, i kinda think that compared to other guilds, they were treated especially unfair by the narrative — considering that millianna was essentially demoted to a comic relief character / plot device to further underline that minerva is a bad guy who’d stop at nothing when she could have had a much more meaningful impact on the story? i also do not like the way kagura’s very justified resentment towards jellal and erza both was handled; it should have been fleshed out much more before the degree of forgiveness that was later shown in the manga would have felt realistic.
alvarez. i did not read the arc. i do not care about the arc so all that i know, i know because it was on the dash. it probably could have been a good arc, the same way a lot of arcs could have been good, but given that the last decent arc was tenrou, my expectations were low from the beginning. however, then the typical problems with the later ft arcs came into play: powerful characters once more became suddenly weak / performed considerably below their abilities, and it never seemed like the stakes were actually appropriately high as the ‘good side’ was protected from death to the point where it has become ridiculous. i think no one wants their favourites to die, but writing a war arc and having absolutely no fan favourite die seems cheap me. yes, there was the moment when juvia seemingly died, but i remember the dash that day: no one really thought she would actually stay dead. if anything, people hoped she might because it would finally make it feel like the risks were real.
fanon. i think most people can agree that fanon is a horrible, horrible thing. especially when it exaggerates a character’s traits to the point where all other aspects of their character seemingly cease to exist. i also do not like it when some headcanons suddenly gain the kind of popularity where people who do not agree with them are accused of not understanding the character. after all, a lot of things are really open to interpretation and unless the creator says something, all headcanons that are in line with the source material are … equally valid?
minor character blogs. so, this is something i’ve witnessed a lot during my five year stay in this fandom. once in a while, there are people asking “ why are there no blogs for [insert minor character here]??? :( ” and as someone who has written pretty much exclusively minor characters, i can tell you what my experience with writing minor characters is: it can be very difficult to keep the blog going once the initial excitement that someone is writing the minor character dies down. and it is also my experience that a blog that struggles to generate interactions is a blog people start to consider draining. their joy to write the character is the next thing to die and before long, the blog ends up abandoned or deactivated. this is in no way meant to make anyone feel bad and i can understand that not all characters mesh well, but i think that a lot of people cannot really understand how much dedication it takes to write a minor character.
m.ashima. so, i am not sure if anyone but me remembers it, but there a time when people who dared to post their disagreements with the way the manga was going were met with accusations that they were ungrateful, that we had been given the manga and that we should not complain because without the author, the manga would not exist. and sure, that is true. however, it is important to read critically and there is absolutely nothing wrong with pointing out narrative choices made no sense or were problematic ( stone age omake, all instances of natsu groping lucy / violating her boundaries, juvia doing the same to gray, etc. ). and in my opinion, as long as this rightful critcism is tagged properly, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. the manga is, in many ways, a decent outline ( or was, up to the tenrou arc ), but it was never all that it could have been if all storylines had been developed properly instead of being twisted by the way the narrative eventually catered to the fans.
