OK, so this blog is supposed to be mainly about books, with a bit about movies and such here and there, so really I probably shouldn’t be subjecting my handful of readers to a rant about an anime, but I’m doing it anyway. Because I can. Not sorry.

I finished Fairy Tail yesterday. And I’m feeling some kinda way.

So, some backstory: Fairy Tail is anime that started in 2009 (it was a manga first, like so many anime, but that’s a separate discussion). The original run was 7 seasons that wrapped up in 2014. I didn’t start watching it when it first started – I started it just as season 7 was ending, on the recommendation of my brother (who keeps up with more anime than I can name!), and had watched all 7 seasons by the end of 2015.

Then, a new season – a kind of prequel/in-between arc – came out in 2016. SO, I made a crazy decision to re-watch the whole series again, from the beginning and then go through the new season. This time I skipped a bunch of filler arcs and some dumb throwaway episodes, and I was watching it with my mother (we are whole anime-loving family!) and we BLASTED through it (we sometimes would sit and watch 15-20 episodes in a single weekend!). The season ended on a somewhat sour note and then the show went into a long hiatus. The manga author was writing an ending in the manga, so the anime producers said they would do a final season when they had an ending.

That final season didn’t come out until the beginning of 2019, and by then it had been three years since I’d watched the show (except for re-watching an episode here or there just for the fun of it, of course). So I made the insane decision to ONCE AGAIN watch the whole thing from beginning to end. This time, I would watch every single episode, not skipping a single one, and this time it would TRULY be from beginning to END. I started the re-watch in early 2019 – I THINK around February, though I can’t quite remember. I watched usually just a couple episodes per night, and sometimes would not watch for a week or several weeks at a time if I was busy, or too tired at night. So it has taken me about a year and a half. But I finished it, all 328 episodes, from beginning to surprisingly satisfying ending, last night.

I’m not going to try to explain or recap the whole show for all you non-anime folks, but I’ll just say: Fairy Tail is in a lot of ways your standard shonen adventure anime. It’s a fantasy, set in a fantasy land, and it focuses on the adventures (on might say MIS-adventures) of a guild of wizards (in a world of many guilds of wizards) called Fairy Tail. The MAIN main characters are the central five (later seven characters) Lucy, Natsu, Gray, Ezra, Happy, Wendy, and Carla. There adventures, of course, get bigger and bigger as the series go, until by the end of the series, they are dealing with literally world-ending villains and events. It’s full of (melo)drama, and humor, and kickass fight scenes, and its cheesy as hell! In many instances, the day is saved (and in the last couple episodes, literally all of reality) by the POWER OF FRIENDSHIP. Literally. And I loved every single fucking second of it!

I found the ending surprisingly satisfying. So many shows (Western or otherwise) end the series in some depressing way in which all the characters go their separate ways, or everyone dies, or in some other way that feels way too FINAL. I much prefer endings in which we get a sense of “and their adventures continued! (You’re just not going to see them).” Fairy Tail had that ending. The bad guy was defeated, the world was saved, a few people died but a few more survived than I thought would, a couple of my preferred ships went canon, a few others were left ambiguous as ever (anime loves to do that!), and the main characters were all preparing to go on their next adventure!

But I am feeling some kind of way, folks! Endings always mess me up, especially after a very long series. And I have been devoting SO MUCH time and energy to it. I watched the whole series three times through, and this was probably the last time I’ll do that (at least for a very long time…). As Zaphod says in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: “I need to go find something else for my entire life to be about…” (I’m currently considering re-watching My Hero Academia and catching up. I was watching it pretty consistently for awhile, but completely lost track at the beginning of season four).

If you like anime in a general sense, but haven’t watched Fairy Tail specifically, I HIGHLY recommend it. Especially if you enjoy a good, exciting, endearing shonen-style anime.

For now, I think I just need to sit with my feelings for awhile.

Ok, anime rant done now. Back to your regularly scheduled program.