5 Point Discussions – Fairy Tail 38: “Dragon Or Demon”

Irene’s battle with her daughter comes to its epic conclusion! Remember, if you like this article and 5 Point Discussions, please share it on Facebook or Twitter! It means a lot. And if you’ve got any comments or questions, please hit me up @SageShinigami.

1. Despite my blustering about Erza last episode, I really thought someone or something would help her take this meteor down, but nope. She literally just tanks it and cracks the thing into pieces, without even being any worse for the wear.  It doesn’t really make sense, but at least now we’re away of Erza’s parentage: literally the daughter of a woman who was both responsible for creating Dragon Slayer magic and who was a dragon herself. An absurd amount of magic dwelling inside her combined with the plot armor of being one of the author’s favorite characters plus Mashima’s overall unwillingness to actually kill off anyone means this was probably one of the only outcomes available.

2. Plot twist! Irene’s loved Erza the whole time.  Despite Erza’s existence causing some of her problems in her 400 year life, when it finally comes down to it she’s unable to kill her daughter. Erza puts up some token resistance thanks to a last minute spell from Wendy, but it’s nowhere near enough to stop her, and only ends with Irene having Erza’s sword in hand for the final blow.  But at the last second she takes her own life rather than choosing to kill her daughter, who in the end she loved too much to even try to enchant herself on when she was a baby.

The unfortunate thing both about this being a series aimed at kids is that they aren’t able to tell the sad truth: sometimes your parent is crap.  Even though Erza never wavered from the belief that her family was Fairy Tail and her dad was Makarov, they still can’t help trying to rehab an awful parent into someone who had love for their child.  This is all too often a problem in anime, possibly because cultures that push collectivism over individualism aren’t great at articulating how sometimes familial relations can be irreparable.

3. In the end, Natsu is forced to make a choice.  What’s putting an end to his life as a human is the combination of the Dragon and demon seeds within him.  The Igneel within his consciousness asks him to choose between being a dragon or a demon to crush one seed or the other.  It’s a trick question though, and now that Natsu comprehends his full history–not just his time with Fairy Tail but his life before he was revived and his time with Igneel, he’s able to make the only right answer: he is Natsu Dragneel.  He doesn’t have to be what other people have tried to make him be, but instead he makes the choice to choose his own humanity, dissolving both seeds in the process.  It’s a decent moment, though it raises the question of how he’s going to fight his older brother, which is the first thing he tries to do after waking up.

4. With Irene down, the magic of her Universe One spell finally comes undone.  The Universe One spell had condensed the entire continent into the equivalent of a tiny island.  But it did something just as important too: it got Acnologia away from the other Dragon Slayers, Zeref, and Mavis. This was always meant to be a way to buy time for Zeref to complete his plan. But now that’s out of the picture, and from the looks of things everyone’s back to where they were before the spell activated, meaning Acnologia can’t be too far away from everyone else, right?

5. The promo teased August vs. Gildarts and I couldn’t be more excited.  The two most powerful members in either group going at it with one another?   Expect nothing less than an absurd battle involving the destruction of half the town, since Gildarts isn’t the best at controlling his magic.

Fairy Tail is available for streaming on Funimation and Crunchyroll.