Overly Long Tirade on Fairy Tail 7 Transcript

Original Video: https://youtu.be/Cgb8HE2GHbM

If you've been been poking around discussions of Fairy Tail in various corners of the internet, even simply my own videos, there's a sentiment widely shared on Hiro Mashima's previous manga, Rave Master, and its superiority to the longer and recently concluded Fairy Tail. But this sentiment really doesn't get at the heart of the matter Is Rave Master better? How? Why? Does it represent the golden age of a manga author beaten down by years of churning out chapter after chapter? Or is it just more of the same?

Well, having read most of his mangagraphy, I can say with confidence that...it's beyond words. It's grand, it's stellar, it's everything I thought Fairy Tail could be and more! It's...

No.

No. Fuck no. Are you fucking kidding me? Who do you think this is? Who do you think we're talking about here?

For the uninformed, Rave Master was written almost 20 years ago. Being Mashima's first successful foray into the weekly action series, it certainly has the attitude of something trying to stand out on its own. It's about a chosen one hero with a legendary sword trying to collect a bunch of magical stones to stop an evil King. It's cool, and hip, referencing all kind of musical things! Hip Hop Town, Punk Street, the Song Continent, Musica, Rave, the bad guys use evil jewelry called Dark Blings. And referencing a bunch of musical things in your action fight thing is something that has literally never happened before. But hey, there's nothing wrong with generic, it's all in the execution.

And now, I'm going to ignore the story, action, characters, and themes for no particular reason as we delve into:

THE GOOD

With his first weekly serialization underway, the author of the past seemed to be willing to go a bit further than the man of today in some areas. Rave just seems to have a few less boundaries, such as in comparison to Mashima's current depictions of graphic violence. After punching the shit out of Zeref, Natsu's arm is torn to shreds, but beyond that odd exception there's a conscious effort to keep things as toned down as possible. Blood is kept to a minimum even when swords are out and punching doesn't do a lot of outward damage in the first place. Perhaps the strongest example of Mashima's modern stance on violence is not in Fairy Tail, but a one-shot done as it was running called Starbiter Satsuki. Returning to the gimmicks of Rave Master in being about swords, about half of the one-shot is dry exposition talking about a bunch of katanas with abilities way cooler than the ones we actually see in the action parts, yet despite all the sword slashing there's not a single drop of blood. You'd think the freedom of a one-shot would allow Mashima to cut loose and go wild, but instead he's playing it a safe-edged as possible. Because if you're going to have a series about swords there better be some edge to it. Reading Rave for the first time after being so familiar with Fairy Tail was actually somewhat shocking, as one of the earlier arcs had the main protagonist, Haru, going through an illusion that assaulted him with visions of his loved ones mutilating their bodies: self-immolation, arm slashing, fishing around their own body for organs. It's not the most graphic manga in the demographic by a longshot, even for the time period, but for Mashima, even a little violence can go a long way.

Much later in the manga, the characters are on a rescue mission when Musica busts into a cell to find their friend Nagisa, a victim of torture. In sharp contrast to the overtly sexual and bloodless torture of Erza, aside from a silhouette of her body, most of Nagisa is covered in shadow, leading the eyes away from her body and towards the slight hint of scarred skin in the light, and even further to her hands and missing fingernails. It's a rare example of Mashima at his best: the relative brutality of the torture lending more weight to the emotions of Gray...of Musica's rage and following beatdown, allowing me to care about what's happening to these characters to a degree, if only for a moment.

And even when the moments don't linger, more often than in Fairy Tail, at least, they stick. The first major arc ends with the death of a rivalry, Gales Raregroove and Glory, laying the foundation for the echoed conflict between their sons. And...they stay dead! We get flashbacks, sure, but at no point do they magically come back and return to relevance. Musica loses Reina, her spirit living on in his new weapon, Silver Ray. The things like this, to a degree, help avoid the worst of Mashima's biggest problem. As generic as the story is, there are clear end goals and progression as Haru unlocks more of his sword's ten forms and collects the rest of the five Rave stones. There's no real thematic cohesion or throughline to draw, no noteworthy character arcs, and tons of bullshit poured throughout, but it does have a clear end. And hooo boy is there bullshit, Mashima's habit of faking tension sure as hell didn't spring from the ether.

In one moment you have ditz Lucy I mean Elie pretending to drink a bottle of poison, partly so we can see a frame of the empty glass and wonder if she might be done for, but mostly so she could pretend to be dead and try to escape which doesn't matter because she gets rescued anyway. In another you have Nagisa's asshole dad being shot, then waking up to share information that would have stopped the conflict before it began, but only AFTER the battle. And he only survived the bullet because he was wearing a CERAMIC BANDANNA. WHAT. Oh man, and Musica. He puts his life into making Haru's final sword and nearly dies, before Haru comes to find him collapsed on the ground, believing him to be dead. Musica's apparent sacrifice created the only way to defeat the main antagonist and save reality from destruction, yet Haru would choose not to make use of it, because he's sad that Musica is dead and died for his sake. This whiney little shit would let reality crumble because he was sad that his friend died for him! "People dying is bad. Stap fighting." Choke on a dick, Haru.

...We've gone beyond the good things about Rave Master already, haven't we? This early into the video? Sad.

THE SAME OLD SHIT

The oh so standard contrivances are far from the only thing Mashima can't seem to let go of. Reading Rave after Fairy Tail was strangely enlightening, to the point that some elements of Fairy Tail make even more sense in retrospect.

And some elements make less sense then ever. Is Rave in the same universe as Fairy Tail? Or it is just a fictional story? There's like, cars and phones in Rave but Fairy Tail is like generic fantasy so...h-how? How? I don't...I don't want to think about it. Instead let's look at the final battle against Acnologia, because on Natsu's side of things it's practically nonsensical.

 He and the rest of the Dragon Slayers are whisked away to the Ravines of Time so that Acnologia might take their power to better control his new time and space abilities. Never mind that being able to take these characters out of thin air already implies some level of competence in space manipulation if nothing else. Also ignore that he just gained these abilities five minutes ago yet already knows exactly how they work and what he needs to do to control them further, and that he saves his strongest opposition for last. All this nonsense comes out of nowhere to push Acnologia into begin the final boss despite Zeref having a much, much greater relevance in the story, having been name-dropped since chapter 12 and been in some way connected to almost every arc in the series, whereas Acnologia was first mentioned much later and only had passing relevance until the final arc. But Rave Master's finale also takes place in a crystal laden dimension, and its main antagonist is so similar to Acnologia it's uncanny. Both are men who want to destroy slash enslave the rest of the world, exclusively because they are sad that their family died when they were young. Both have power sets mirroring the main protagonist. Acnologia's ability to eat anything matches Natsu's ability to eat anything, while Lucia has a shapeshifting sword with ten forms that clashes with Haru's ten forms. They even have a similar approach to their respective designs. But to compare these two aspects directly, while there's nothing imaginative about Rave's implementation of the tropes, they are built up better throughout the story. Lucia is the son of the first main antagonist, King, his rivalry with Haru's father mirroring the battle of their sons. The final clash in Star Memory is built up through their journey to find the means to go there by gathering the five pieces of Rave and the five pieces of the special Dark Bling Sinclaire respectively. Comparatively, Acnologia has no connection to the running plot against Zeref, isn't connected to Igneel and the dragons who are more interested in destroyed END and Zeref's demons than Acnologia himself. While Lucia's backstory is sprinkled through the series, Acnologia only starts whining about it pages before his defeat. But all of Acnologia's forced, awkward relevancy and characterization truly does come into focus when you realize it's just Mashima going through his motions.

But we can't talk about identical characters without everyone's favorite fuccboi, Jellal. Or as he's called in this incarnation: Sieghart. And what a character Sieg is. I thought it wasn't going to happen. Mashima has a ton of bland, uninteresting characters across his mangagraphy. I couldn't imagine picking one of them to hate above all the others. But Sieghart takes the cake and eats it in front of my eyes. Mashima refuses to let me forget, but how everyone else think's he's just the coolest motherfucker. He's not just a magic user, he's an Elemental Mage, who's able to use magic that doesn't fall into any element at all, like poison, illusion fuckery, or weird time shit. So he's just a mage, but Element Mage sounds cooler, doesn't it? I mean, what else would he be? In a scene where Elemental attributes are discussed, each of the characters being placed into a category that is never brought up after the only fight in which it's relevant, Ruby goes out of his way to mention that Sieg probably has the 'Infinity' Elemental Attribute. It never comes up in the story, no other absent character is clumsily brought up, and it has no bearing on the current battle in any way. It's exclusively mentioned to make Sieg sound even cooler, and all it accomplishes is making me want to smack him upside the fucking head.

Don't you mind that he's only introduced as a mysterious high ranking member of the evil group Demon Card, but still weaker than their elite lieutenants, the Oracion Seis, by his own word, yet later he's remembered as not only being a member of Oracion Seis, but the strongest among them. Not even Haja, a mage with infinite magical power is able to stop Sieg, despite the latter being weakened from having taken down 1000 mages with a sword and the master of the village, a man Sieg was trying to team up with for the express purpose of defeating Haja in the first place. Sieg thought he needed to team up with the village elder to beat Haja, but ended up beating both of them singlehandedly! Perhaps that's his only character flaw: he undersells his grotesque amounts of power. He's the only one though, because the other characters will not shut the fuck up about how great and awesome he is, even when he does absolutely fucking nothing good. Haru sees a picture of him, and his first thought is 'that guy who's supposed to be evil and gave Elie a trauma of thunder...man he sure looks cool!'

And that makes Elie's inability to stop mentioning how handsome and cool he is all the more strange, as Sieg and Elie's relationship is a long one. First, he aimed to kill her, thinking she was part of an experiment to recreate Resha, the wielder of a powerful magic called Etherion, a power that could easily end the world in the wrong hands. After his failure to kill her nearly causes exactly what he feared, he realizes he was wrong and comes around to join the good guys. Skip ahead a couple hundred chapters. Sieg takes Haru and Elie decades into the past to discover the truth behind Elie's amnesia, eventually discovering that Elie and Resha are one in the same. But when all that retardation is wrapped up, when it comes to the matter of getting back to their present, a convenient time hole opens up once again, except this time it's inexplicably operating under different rules. The last one was opened through a specific circumstance: Elie, Etherion, and the 5 Rave Stones hearing her desire to learn about her past in front of Resha's gravestone, and the current one...just felt like opening as they finished their adventure in the past. But suddenly, Sieg notes that there's no way such a portal would be so convenient as to put them back when they came from, so he must stay back in the past, using his time magic to ensure the portal sends them where they need to go, but at the cost of having to stay behind. It's an emotional moment, as Sieg is forced to remain there, refusing to even do so much as eat or drink to avoid changing the time stream, only using his magic to protect Resha's grave and close the time loop. Haru and Elie realized the identity of the skeleton and break down, sobbing about what a great man Sieg was.

How fucking ironic then, that out of a desire to avoid the idea of contrivance, what results is an event contrived in and of itself for the sake, of, you guessed it, jacking of Sieg as the most selfless pure thoughtful competent master of time and space SHITHEAD in Mashima's entire fucking body of work. Look at how smart he is, reading the Bible and Genesis! Look at the insufferable amount of magic he can wield. Much like it is the purpose of the ladies of Fairy Tail to look sexy above all else, Sieghart is not allowed to be anything less than the greatest hero of the manga, sung loudly by everyone but Sieg himself. Suddenly Jellal makes sense! In Fairy Tail, he's a guy who has more sway on plot and characters than Erza, while still getting less screentime. In Fairy Tail alone, it might seem like it's because he's Erza's man, but with Sieghart in mind, it's obvious that Erza's only special because she's the only one cool and perfect enough to be Sieghart I mean Jellal's woman. And Erza being attached to someone so utterly devoid of personality seems to have stripped her of it in the same way, like he's a black hole, siphoning personality away from everyone around him. It happened to Ultear and Meredy, and hooo boy did it happen to Erza. It's actually kind of sad, because if you look reeeaaally hard, Erza at one point could actually be called the best character Mashima ever wrote. When she was introduced she had personality: she wielded authority, impressing on the importance of rules and regulations in stark contrast with Fairy Tail's love for freedom, and her unwillingness to tolerate bullshit created something largely absent in so much else of Mashima's writing: interparty conflict. Yet despite her hardass nature, her goofier and even genuinely cute moments, combined with an overall desire to do the right thing kept her from being the stick in the mud she very well could have been. Then, Jellal happened, in the Tower of Paradise arc, where her characterization for the rest of the manga would come into focus. It begins in the setup, with some blatant symbolism being plopped in with Erza's primary form of magic: her armor. As she developed her magic during her in past at the Tower itself, said backstory also gave her the trauama around friendship that keeps her from being able to open up, the exceptions being awkward but not by her own intention. The armor is directly mentioned as being a cold barrier keeping her from the warmth of Fairy Tail's friendship. This comes to a head in the penultimate battle, when Erza clashes with Ikaruga, whose magic pushes Erza out of her comfort zone, shattering her armor with every swing and rendering her without its benefits, forcing Erza to shed that armor to win, fighting for her friends and all that jazz. It's trite but it's more than can be said of any other character in the manga. Until the end of the arc when she's right back in that cold, unfeeling armor as she bids farewell to old friends, then she continues to wear armor throughout the series as any symbolism around it is dropped without fanfare, undercutting everything. But even if this had been a well executed character arc, this is a prime example of character development not always being a good thing. Through softening her hardness, while this does qualify as a charcter arc, she loses the only thing that made her a decent character. Her insistence on rules is gone, her awkward cute attempts to connect with guildmates is gone, and beyond this point she's only the 'red-haired fighting boob girl'. Even her character design becomes cuter and more appealing than her initial incarnation to follow suit. It also serves to make that earlier characterization feel like a mistake. Erza has apparently been a part of the Guild since she was a child, yet her introduction scenes are met with a deep seated terror from Natsu and Gray. It's a reaction that implies years of whipping them in line, yet they also bathed together? And the initial explanations for their fear sound more like one time incidents of Erza beating Natsu in a fight, or punishing Gray for his nudity. Wouldn't Gray have calmed down on the nudity if he got the shit beaten out of him for it, dozens of times, over the course of years? Natsu gets smacked around by all kinds of characters, so why is Erza the only one who scares him? Since this characterization is made to have never been sensible, it had to vanish. And it's allYOUR fault. And YOURS. But most importantly YOU.

THE REALLY FUCKING BAD HOLY SHIT

When it comes to the question of whether or not Rave or Fairy Tail is worse...it's not really that clear cut. They share a lot of the same problems, and while Rave has a few things above Fairy Tail, that goes both ways. I'm tempted to say Rave is the worse if only because of the fact that it's questionable in the first place. That really says something! Fairy Tail's been stuck in my craw for years! And yet my dislike of Rave is almost as strong even though my exposure to it has been much more fleeting. And in one particular case, Rave is completely and utterly outclassed, and that is in its structure and power scaling. I...didn't think I was ever going to say that. Fairy Tail has better power scaling than something. I mean, Fairy Tail at least had the decency to not introduce the setting's strongest and most influential figures from the outset, placing the setting power cap high and early on, yet still within reach by the main characters with more than two dozen volumes left to go. The Alverez arc is a drag but you could do worse as far as 60+ volume series go with pacing. As far as Rave, though, by volume 9, Haru has already found 3 of the five Rave Stones, gotten six of his Ten Commandments, and has met his father before being thrust into battle against the leader of Demon Card, the primary antagonistic organization up to this point. The climax is massive. A bomb in Gale threatens to decimate the planet, a character widely considered to be one of the strongest in the setting fights directly with Haru and comes out on the bottom, and eventually it ends. King is defeated, Demon Card is largely destroyed., but the adventure continues. If there is ever an example of blowing your load early, it's this one. In the remaining 26 volumes, characters are regularly brought up in comparison to King. Lucia is just as strong as his father but was imprisoned! Drew was merely biding his time, and was actually King's equal! Deep Snow was sent away from Demon Card because his power was feared by King. It all feels desperate in its attempts to explain why Haru and his friends are somehow at a point where they can be challenged by these characters as they continues to sail past King's power level. And right after King's defeat, is the slap in the face that is volume 10. After some flashback chapters, we're introduced to a new arc, where the characters need access to a gate that will take them to the country of Symphonia, surrounded by a deadly storm. Trying to get there any other way is tantamount to suicide. To do so, they attempt to get money until they realize they can just find a rich sponsor who will allow them to pass, meeting Ruby, who just so happens to own the passage in the first place. After several chapters of helping him out of his jam, they pilot their ship over to the gate...where it's immediately destroyed. But before they can lament, Haru insists that they'll charge right through the storm anyway, gate or not! End volume.

...The entire arc was nothing but a tremendous waste of time. Ruby spends the entire series struggling to be relevant, a villain recurs later and is blown out, but other than that and the flashback chapters, more than half of the volume is nothing but a slog after the massive, emotionally taxing climax of the previous arc finale, all the the reader has a reward for getting through it is a slap in the face as the whole struggle was rendered meaningless the moment it finally came to a head, as if as a punishment for, you know, actually reading Rave Master. And the kicker? This isn't even the lowest point in the manga. I'm just fucking around and wasting your goddamn time, like my favorite manga author ever.

After Mashima finally pulls his pants back up and starts building into another big arc with a big climax, once again we're in an awkward interim period, but this time, the main characters are in possession of one of the 5 pieces of Sinclaire, the dark counterpart to Rave that the antagonists desire. The main characters being in the possession of something desired is nothing new: they've had Elie in their party since the beginning, who's the wielder of Etherion. Yet suddenly, having both her and Sinclare makes all the fucking difference, as they are completely unable to avoid confrontation from some of their largest and most dangerous foes. The arc plays out like the most boring parts of a JRPG with all the weight of the setpiece moments. Imagine, you're on the overworld, walking around when you get into a random encounter. It's Jegan, Dragon Master of Oracion Seis, eternal rival to the protagonist Let, a dragon who's mastered his humanity, but had his lifelong love, Julia, trapped as a mindless dragon under Jegan's control and forced to serve in his army of beasts. Let tells the others to go on ahead, their true goal still ways away, as he enters mortal combat with Jegan. After a grueling battle, Let is reunited with a humanized Julia. This matters a whole lot and is given a lot of emotion as the two are written out of the story for the time being.

You're back on the overworld map. You take another step. It's a troop of the strongest soldiers in the Imperial army, led by the traitor Deep Snow, a man who had a strength King feared, now working for Lucia. Enter Dalton the Chrysalis, the Emperor's Right-Hand and the strongest warrior in the Empire! Watch as he is defeated by Haru using his bare hands, after which he quickly insists that he's actually the weakest of the Emperor's elite guard. Watch as Shuda returns, suddenly possessing a deep connection with Gale to explain why he allies with Haru as he protects their retreat, the fight ending with an emotional payoff as Shuda relays a conversation he happened to overhear that gives some forced and awkward closure to Deep Snow, but closure none the less.

You're back on the over world map. You take another step, you're finally at the dungeon. It's one small room with a bunch of crystals in it. And there's Lucia, the final antagonist who gets utterly blown the fuck out by Haru's friendship screaming, completely undercutting all the tension by making the biggest bad look like an utter joke, right before we're thrown into some world ending bullshit that comes from nowhere and jesus fucking christ.

It's too fucking much, through and through. If the torture of Nagisa is some of Mashima's emotional manipulation at his best, then this is him at his absolute worst. Big setpiece encounters with monumental character moments, tying up plot threads set up half a dozen volumes ago, all under the context of the characters being stopped from proceeding to their goal, that's just a tiny fucking cave with some magical rocks in it. There's nothing grand or epic about this! Going up a tower to stop a magic ritual that will result in the creation of a superweapon by defeating the leader of an evil crime group and the eternal rival to the main character's father? Yeah, that sounds like a grand end to some kind of a fucking adventure. Having a dick waving contest with the traitor to a massive empire in the middle of some random fucking forest is not grand in scale. Beating the shit out of the main antagonist 14 volumes before the end of the story in some tiny fuckall cave is not a cool set piece. Fighting on a bunch of dragons on the sky actually does work, but it doesn't create any sort of arc. There's no gradual buildup, just a tsunami of overblown emotions, and when you thing the destruction is over and the tide is receding it's actually another fucking tsunami coming! Rather then tension and release, it gets cut off, so it's more like: tension, re-, tension, re-, tension. By the end of it you're just struggling for respite, but there isn't even any resolution. The Sinclair gets taken, but right after this Sieg has another big climactic battle to take one of the other ones so the bad guys can't win, and their original goal of gathering the five Rave stones is just reaffirmed. It's the biggest, most important waste of time Mashima has ever made me slog through, since, well Fairy Tail. But at least Fairy Tail had the decency to let me up to the surface so I can breathe!

THE END OF THINGS

For all the bitching about Rave Master, I could do more. But I won't. The important take away here is that Mashima has not gotten worse. Fairy Tail did not start great and go to shit at some point in its life cycle, it was always just mediocre at best. Rave Master is not packed with any amount of imaginative moments or creative sparks that the manga workload drilled out of him before he shat out Fairy Tail. Mashima has always been mediocre. His first published one-shot, Magicians, has a guy with an eye tattoo in a clusterfuck of a story that is clearly things being thrown at a wall until something sticks, like it's trying to one-up itself on a page to page basis. A kid who likes magic finds a dog that looks like a snowman, and within 30 pages it's about a government conspiracy to create stupid looking superhumans being stopped by transforming magic users with enough exposition to make you wonder why it's not taking place in a fucking cafe. In the afterword, Mashima looks back and thinks it's stupid, but I can't help but see the exact same shit I've always been seeing. Sudden contrived twists to force tension out of characters with nothing but a one-line goofy personality to go off of, an eye-tattoo mage being the coolest guy and why DOES the dog look like a snowman? It's no dumber than a Gold Claimer being immune to Musica's Silver Claiming because uh, evolution! Humans used better metals over time, and Gold is better than Silver, so that's why you can't hurt me with Silver, because I can manipulate Gold! The moon is out, therefore I can change into a massive monster, even though magic in the series has never worked that way!

That last moment with Midnight transforming to beat Erza and Jellal really encapsulates my issue with Mashima's writing. Midnight being able to pull out abilities that don't fit his prior powers to keep up tensions and fill out page counts is exactly the kind of bullshit I generally expect. But it's a trick. Mashima was just pretending to be retarded: since it was an illusion! What a relief! Midnight wasn't pulling a shape-shifting power out of his ass, he just pulled an illusion power out of his ass! One that never had a chance against Erza in the first place because of her pre-established methods of countering that exact type of magic! But that's the thing. As crazy and over the top the transformation is, it still fucking gets me. My knee jerks at the explanation and I say, "That's stupid! Why would this be happening!" But it's not happening. It's not real. Yet the emotions seem just as strong as ever. It's a fake over the top asspull to cover up a real and less over the top asspull, yet I'm so readily able to accept this as something happening in the story until Erza and Jellal start getting defeated, because otherwise it's not really that out of place. At the end of the day, I can never take Mashima seriously as a writer. If he kills a character I'm counting the chapters until they come back, because it could be one, ten or a hundred. They'll be back. If a character is losing I'm waiting to see what bullshit they pull to win. Moments that just scrape by on being average are a genuine surprise, and things that I actually want to call good to any degree come off as bizarrely mind shattering. Like it's an anomaly, like it's something that shouldn't exist, like nature has somehow made a mistake. Ultimately, I can't trust Mashima to tell his own stories.

I don't...I don't want it to be this way. I get it. I get the appeal. There's cool swords and neat powers and wacky fun characters. It all feels like it's a story by someone who cares deeply about what they're doing, the fans of which allowing themselves to get caught up in the raw emotion, so how can someone who seems to care so much about every little thing not actually seem to care about any of it at all?

When I was 14, I spent my down periods jotting plans and fill notebooks long since gone, detailing a massive, epic story I would write 5 chapters of, before going back to planning and throwing away the clusterfuck of trash characters and gross plot contrivances and convenience. When I was twelve, I had no idea what to write for a free topic English essay, so I wrote an awful meta essay in which I narrated my struggle to find something to write about, filling it with meaningless words, only to find out I hadn't actually hit the proper length yet as a third act twist before continuing on until the end of the assignment. While you might have caught the more obvious connection with the 'massive story full of trash characters and contrivances', you might not know about this little gem from Rave Master, in which Mashima and his editor appear in the story, the insert of the author desperately struggling to fill pages in the most unimaginatively meta self-insertion I've seen. Because I did the exact same thing when I was 12!

In his collection of one-shots, Bad Boy's Song is a generic story about some high schoolers who play music on the roof of the school during their graduation. The borderline delinquent protagonists give spirit back to the rest of the student body who remain engrossed in their studies, the MAN wants them to cut the crap, yadda yadda. But in the afterword, Mashima talks about his history with music, recounting times he played with his friends, saying:

"No matter how bad our skills were, as long as you know how to get an excited atmosphere, the audience will also be happy. Maybe manga is like that as well! The manga I draw must not only be good looking, but the atmosphere...the characters, story, and content...[if that] can make the reader happy, then it's good enough for me!"

He doesn't care. He's not interested in making anything matter beyond that base, emotional level. "How can I get the audience to care this week?" Every week. For almost 20 years. Atmosphere, story, characters, content: maybe he meant for it all to come together for the emotions he so desperately wants, but how it comes off is that those are merely secondary to the vague notion of emotional payoff, no matter how unearned. Take a look at this moment at the end of the Tartaros arc. We recognize Natsu as the main character, we know of his motives to find his surrogate father Igneel, and with Igneel gone, Natsu is sad. Never mind his lack of solid motivation, the bare minimum characterization of their relationship, and forget all the plotholes and inconsistencies around the mechanics that summoned the dead dragons here in the first place. All that matters is the emotion. Natsu is sad.

I can only imagine Mashima got lucky. His art wasn't shit, hell it got better if nothing else about his work did, and he was somehow able to keep chapters coming. He's productive. Rave Master and Fairy Tail are nothing more than the story telling ability of a high schooler (at best) pushed through the grindstone of weekly manga production. The dude probably has a family now. Where is he going to find the time to improve? He's already successful, why would he need to? And he's not going to stop. Mashima's probably going to start something new one of these days. And I'm going to take a big steaming dump all over it if it's deserved. Not because I want him to fail, but because I want him to improve. His juvenile story telling abilities are something I see within some aspects of myself, and yet, in his clear lack of meaningful improvement across two series, and his mission statement (in which he leans on hollow emotion), he represents what I pray I never become. I want myself to improve, to put in the hard work no character of his seems to be able to. He can sell an emotion, he can conceive a good character, maybe he just needs a talented writer to fill his art with something that matters, or an editor who won't take his bullshit, or a few years of study and self-reflection. And maybe a failure would give him that. Who can say? I might be putting a pause on the Tirade, but perhaps it will never truly end after all...