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pencilofawesomeness · 1 month ago

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How Fairy Tail could have had a really cool thematic parallel if they Committed to the Bit:

I often joke about my constant urge to spew essays on characters and topics I have thought too much about, but I refrain because translating all the thoughts in my head to words takes time and effort, and sometimes I am speaking to the void. However. I am spinning in my chair, gnawing at the bars of my enclosure, and frankly thinking way too much right now so I must scream.

It would have been so impactful if Fairy Tail emphasized Jellal being brainwashed.

Jellal is my boy, of course, but I’m not even just talking about the impact to his character: I mean the impact of the entire plot. This, of course, if we went the whole mile with the theming. The machination of being controlled, emotionally or magically influenced, or even unable to fulfill a desire due to an insurmountable obstacle, comes up numerous times throughout the plot, to both primary characters, supporting characters, and antagonists. While Fairy Tail is absolutely a series about friendship, it is also about choosing your path, with a large recurring theme of, regardless of connotation, about being selfish, and what that means on both ends of the spectrum. It’s a matter of free will, and the antithesis to this is all manner of external control. So really, it makes sense that this should be a thoroughly explored theme.

I could talk all day about all the different examples and aspects of this but I came here to talk about Jellal. First, the slavery aspect really hits the nail on the head, so we’re off to a great start—this, of course, applicable to multiple characters, which I really enjoy. Things go wild, however, when Jellal effectively chooses to trade himself for Erza in the punishment game and gets the ever-living shit beat out of him at the ripe age of eleven or twelve years old. He is, understandably, not in a good place, and he comes to the stunning conclusion that… he hates the slavers. Yeah. Checks out. Then, he hears the voice of ‘Zeref’ spewing rhetoric about hate, and it overwhelms; this, we know in hindsight especially, to be Ultear casting a mind-fuck spell in order to manipulate him, under the guise of pretending to be a figure young Jellal believed to be a god.

When I first saw this flashback, watching the anime, I was unbelievably hyped. For all of Fairy Tail’s odd relationship with foreshadowing, I got the gist of it as soon as the magic went into his right eye and overwhelmed him. In Japanese media especially (largely due to the prevailing symbolism of the daruma doll), the right eye is a huge indicator of free will and the future—namely one’s goals. Creepy magic ghost entering the right eye with magic-bind looking things and immediately warping Jellal’s goal? A+ delivery. Of course, at the time Zeref—an unrevealed ‘evil’ entity—seemed a likely culprit, but Ultear being the puppeteer changes little of the result. In fact, it actually creates a super interesting parallel, but more on that later.

First, there are the consequences of Jellal being an antagonist who is not in control of his actions. I see people lament that it “cheapens” the severity of the arc and provides a cop-out redemption for Jellal, and while the execution of the latter certainly could have been different, I don’t think the premise of mind alteration cheapens the overall plot and theme of Fairy Tail at all; on the contrary, it could have been used to further emphasize intra- and inter- character conflict as well as provide a super engaging parallel for the end of the series. The theme of nakama, family, and friendship is huge, so what better way to emphasize that than to show a twisted example of it?

Jellal goes from ride-or-die loyal and ‘good’ to circumstantially loyal to an ideal (and the people attached to it) and ‘evil’ with the flip of a magic switch. Erza gets the immediate short of the stick when she is the first victim (aside from Jellal himself) to this meddling, and the caring friend she had seen days or weeks before is now cruel, insane, and full of threats—threats she takes heed to as she is cast from the island. Now, Erza is also a child, and one full of trauma, so I am not trying to invalidate her fear or blame her for any outcome. This also does not dive into the intricacies of saving friends at cost to oneself, and all of the conflict thereof; if anything, the complication of the matter bolsters the drama and impact. And then, we have the rest of the squad. Sho, Wally, and Milliana buy into the idea without any trouble, and they continue to buy into it as they get older. Beyond morality, it’s a power fantasy, and those are easy for formerly powerless people to latch onto. However, Simon is the only one who realizes that something is fundamentally wrong and twisted with Jellal… and his ultimate goal, developed over the course of roughly seven to eight years, is to wait it out until he finds the opportunity to kill him, or get somebody else to do it. Ultear, even after integrating herself into the group out of nowhere, gets away with her plan, because ultimately nobody questions that Jellal’s sudden change was anything but a result of trauma and his own will—even in a world with magic, where the very first arc revolves around the use and mistreatment of charm magic.

(Now, as an aside, I unfortunately have some experience in friends suddenly changing. In real life, it is rarely so sudden and obvious, of course, and the culprit is usually those horrible little signals and hormones within the mind, and nothing so fanciful or external as magic. I had a friend take a nosedive into some truly batshit ideas—cult-starting worthy—and exhibit wild mood swings and displays of unprecedented behavior. It admittedly took me a moment to ascertain it among the known issues, but once the pieces clicked, it clicked. I wished I had noticed sooner, and even though she was more culpable of her choices than a person supernaturally influenced by an outside force, I still can’t hate her for all the harm done. This is all just to say that I have, especially in recent years, a personal perspective on this trope and an appreciation for the painful nuance.)

Refusing to reveal this mindfuckery in the arc diminishes the severity of it a great deal, I fear. We, along with the characters, spend time believing he died an insane villain… and then when he comes back amnesiac, it softens his character but does nothing to contradict how awful he had been. It’s not until years later, arcs later, that we get this random instance of the long overdue reveal to tell us that the manipulation has been discovered off screen. Not only is this utterly underwhelming, but Jellal is now actively working with Ultear and is fine with it! He’s still (understandably, after all this damn time thinking otherwise) blaming himself and lighting his own pyre to atone for things started by a factor completely outside of his control, and every character lets him. The discussion of autonomy is wasted. So, too, is all the juicy emotional fallout. We don’t see Jellal grapple with the horrifying reality that he has not been himself, that years of his life were wasted as a mental slave instead of a physical one; we don’t see Erza beat herself up (likely unnecessarily) because she could have potentially protected him but she hadn’t out of fear, and then she condemned him unknowingly; we don’t see the others truly come to terms with the fact that Jellal had been stolen from under their noses and they never noticed; we don’t even get more than a glimpse in Ultear’s head, who committed the deed because she thought her means wouldn’t matter and then they did.

It’s horrifying. It’s tragic. It was, perhaps, preventable—in that the problem was a punchable one, to a degree—except the people involved were just children, just human, and it wasn’t enough. Friendship and flashy magic power could not trump trauma and entrapment, not this time. No matter how I think the series could have and should have handled it (and I have several ideas, of course), Jellal’s story provides a haunting case of failure regarding the themes of friendship/community and freedom that our protagonists embody.

Which brings me to the perfect opportunity to follow up this occurrence of stripped autonomy and loss of freedom with a culmination of the affected themes, plot points, and more: the books of Zeref.

Namely, the idea that the etherious—sapient, cognizant, and fully capable of autonomy via every depiction given of them, from Tartaros to even Lullaby to especially Natsu—can be and have been resolutely manipulated and controlled via the books by Zeref. Now Zeref, infamously hands-off up until the finale, barely utilized this. The most we ever see is instilling a directive and supernatural need to kill Zeref in the texts, which serves as an externally imposed goal. (Sound familiar, yet?) Provided Larcade clearly doesn’t have these instincts, it is not a guaranteed addition either, which further adds to the sense of deliberation. Natsu experiences this only in the last arc, in what I assume is supposed to be a very tense and jarring plot of a friend and protagonist suddenly losing himself, but it does not get expounded on for long enough to hammer the point home. The plot point of reclaiming the book becomes about saving his life only, and not his autonomy. Not only could this have been emphasized to be properly horrifying and devastating, but the effect—and the suspense—would be doubled with the prior establishment of Jellal’s arc and the tragedy therein.

To back up for a moment, this parallel is further accentuated by the fact that Ultear and Zeref are clear mirrors of each other. Ultear was afflicted by a magic condition outside of her control and she was enslaved as a lab rat for it. When she broke free, she perceived her mother to have abandoned her, so Ultear, in her unresolved anger and grief, aims her entire goal to rectifying it, which culminated in planning to undo the entire timeline in order to make the one she wanted all along. Any casualties, any cruelties—including the mental enslavement of a slave child—are means to an end, and will ultimately be forgotten. Zeref lost his entire family to tragedy, and in his grief, he refused to forfeit the idea of regaining what was lost, namely his brother. He became afflicted with a curse—a magic condition outside of his control—and experienced cognitive dissonance for it. Ultimately, this miserable existence culminated in the idea of erasing the timeline entirely and forging his own. Any casualties, any cruelties—including subjecting his creations to the same lack of complete cognitive control—are means to an end, and will not matter.

I mentioned that selfishness is also a recurring theme and this is a prime example of the dark side of it. For Lucy, claiming her independence and following her own path against the wishes of her estate, it is a wondrous thing. Freedom cannot be achieved without some selfishness, and this is a wonderfully handled theme in Fairy Tail, where our protagonists unabashedly put their friends above concrete morals and follow a creed to live their life to the fullest—the eternal adventure. For characters like Ultear and Zeref, their personal desires—born of horrible tragedy and frankly understandable things to want—come at the cost of the autonomy of everyone else, especially the pawns they use to further their goal. This, in true fictional hyperbole, begs the question of where the line in the sand is to be drawn, of what is acceptable on a moral standard and what is not. It is, of course, colored by the protagonist’s point of view as clear antagonism, but as a viewer of the media it provides to us to question when protecting one’s ideal becomes irrevocably an attack on the sanctity of others.

Which brings us back to the matter of the books. The intended horror of Natsu losing control of himself, I think, could have been really emphasized in order to highlight these aforementioned themes. Imagine if, instead of a complete menagerie of new characters as the final invading force, Zeref’s key piece of his invasion was Natsu. With the intended goal of undoing time, having Natsu kill him is no longer necessary, so it would be more pragmatic to use Natsu instead as a weapon of mass destruction for his goal. Not only is he inside of Fairy Tail, but Zeref is, theoretically, doing this for Natsu too, and he won’t remember this upon success—nevermind that the Natsu we know, that presently exists, that we have watched develop over the entirety of the series, would be forever erased regardless.

Armed with the knowledge of what happened to Jellal, and how he ultimately had no one to intervene for him, this increases the urgency within the characters and will likely expedite their discovery of why Natsu turned against them out of nowhere. This time, a resistance is launched, and characters have the chance to intervene on the behalf of a friend. Gray couldn’t save Ur, Lucy spent years ensnared by the will of a family member, Erza didn’t recognize Jellal’s plight until it was too late, but they can save Natsu, and save him quickly. Fairy Tail, Team Natsu especially, can rewrite the book of E.N.D. solely for the great cause of freeing their friend and handing him back his free will, and in the process, Fairy Tail saves their own future as well. This doesn’t preclude the ability to free Zeref from his curse, but with or without that we have a beautiful culmination of fighting for the sake of a friend, for the individual and for the whole group. This time, friendship wins.

I just think it could have been really cool.

#fairy tail #pencil essay #pencil rambles #jellal fernandes #jellal fernandez #yall this why i usually only threaten to write essays #this is 2k worth of essay I banged out in less than 24 hours like a madwoman #couldn't even sleep well last night I was just Thinking about it #ruminating if you will #there are sooooo many finer points I left out of this for the sake of streamlining #like my separate analysis essay on ultear in particular #and how hades plays into it etc etc #she was such a cool antagonist #and of course I think about how I would have resolved jellal's thing #ranging from most tragic (death or incarceration) to most friendly (we adopt him)#but that's also a different can of worms #i can't even apply all of this to htryds because the specific ship has sailed for the natsu plot #even though i am absolutely harping on the jellal bit #and those sweet sweet themes of freedom and autonomy #some of my favorite themes which is why i love characters who get it taken from them #nobody will be surprised i love the winter soldier for example #juicy stuff #anyways i already subjected yall to my rambles i will stop in the tags #as i quell the AP Lit-caliber essayist ignited within me

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metanarrates · 6 months ago

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i am soooo curious about your takes on otome isekai villainess stories and their morality + gender constructs 👀 if you'd be willing to elaborate....

so villainessekai is a BIG genre. like. big big absolutely massive genre. because of that it's kind of hard to make sweeping generalizations genre-wise just because there are so many different authors with different takes on the general premise... that being said, I have enough time to ramble about some gender stuff I've noticed. maybe ill elaborate on the protag centered morality another time - my tldr on that at this moment is just "for a genre allegedly focused on humanizing women who were considered 'evil,' there sure are a lot of common double standards when it comes to how its protagonists behave."

(part of the protag centered morality, to be clear, is just kind of a common effect of self-inserty escapist fiction, but it's... just sort of weird and noticeable whenever it crops up in this genre. like i said i might yap about it another time. penelope eckhart you live rent free in my head what the hell is happening in vadd)

but yeah! gender!

quick rundown for those not familiar with the genre. villainess isekai is a genre of manwha + manga + webnovels + light novels that shares a common base premise. the protagonist has been isekai'd into the body of a fictional character from a story (often an otome game or a novel) she knows. the fictional character plays the role of a villainess in the original novel, and is doomed to an unsavory fate. the protagonist must try to change the story she knows to prevent her untimely end.

or, at least, that's the more original premise. the villainess genre is huge, and over the years, there's been takes that ditch the isekai component completely. time travel villainess stories are highly popular right now. some deal with reincarnation from a different fantasy life, like, 200 years in the past or something. some ditch the "main character has some kind of knowledge about a doomed future" aspect of the premise entirely and just lock in on the protagonist being considered an "evil woman" without messing about with any kind of supernatural foreknowledge.

but regardless. the common thread is that the woman in question is considered a villainess, and that she is almost certainly aware that she will meet her doom if she doesn't play her cards right.

I'll say here straight up that this genre is almost completely a power fantasy genre. we're about to get into whether or not the main character is "rightfully" considered a villainess or not, but no matter what the answer to that is, the main character almost always 1. is a member of a fantasy european-ish nobility 2. commands some form of social or monetary power and 3. will eventually obtain a lover of incredibly high social status. being able to be "evil" is often a huge component of this power fantasy, but there's a baseline of power that can be obtained even for protagonists who seem completely powerless at the start. you will always end with a protagonist in a position of unbelievable wealth, comfort, social respect, and power.

this plays heavily into the genre's treatment of gender. because what are the acceptable ways for a woman to wield power, even in the alleged safe space of a fantasy?

I tend to categorize villainessekai protagonists into two broad categories, for that reason. the "actually evil," and the "unjustified victim." while there's of course a huge amount of nuance that can exist between these two categorizations, in practice they tend to be extremely rigid. what we are actually talking about here are fantasies of "unacceptable" and "acceptable" power wielding, and the protagonists tend to be constructed quite differently depending on which fantasy they cater to.

category one: the "actually evil." while these protagonists can be quite complicated and often are unjustly treated by the societies they are in, they are still women who wield a huge amount of power and take quite a lot of joy in beating people over the head with it. they're sexy, confident, and will achieve their goals no matter what it takes, even if it does mean being viewed as evil in the eyes of the world. these protagonists are actually usually not isekai'd - there is no body snatching involved. they are simply women who have had Enough with the world beating down on them, and have decided that they're going to fight back no matter what. time travel foreknowledge is common but not always necessary.

the power fantasy here is pretty clear cut to me. inhabiting the psyche of the evil, undesirable femme fatale is a fun power trip and lets the reader think about how nice it would be to just... not care about social opinion, and to effortlessly outwit and trap everyone who has ever been cruel to them. no more being niceys you can just start beating people to death with your epic magic or whatever.

villainess isekai is a romance genre. because of this, there is a layer of romantic fantasy involved as well. the fantasy that you'd be wanted because of your cruel or evil or ruthless traits, and not in spite of them. also maybe sometimes you want a man who will bark like a dog for you ok i won't linger on it but there does seem to be a fair amount of femdom undertones in a number of these

category two: the "unjustified victim." there's subcategories to this in my head, but the basic idea here is that our protagonist is Nice and does not deserve to be treated as a villainess. either she's been isekai'd into the body of someone who sucks and now has to deal with the fallout of actions she did not commit, or she (or her body host!) are being unfairly villainized and treated as a scapegoat by others. this category is populated hugely by doe-eyed ingenues. while there's a fair amount in this category who still possess some capacity for unkindness or spite against the ones who have wronged them, most of them are kind, loveable sweethearts who don't want to hurt a fly.

the power fantasy here, I would argue, is actually mostly a persecution fantasy. while there is of course nuance & a lot of authors have a ton of different takes on this, the fantasy here is one about being treated unjustly and proving the haters wrong, either by having someone step in and rescue you or by wielding power justly to defend yourself. the fantasy is about being acceptable all along, good all along, and just needing a chance to prove yourself.

the romantic fantasy element here is usually about having someone recognize your true worth. instead of believing all the shit about you being evil or cruel or whatever, someone is able to look past that and recognize that you are a beautiful and kind-hearted woman underneath. also, again, he will save you from the Haters. (the truly evil woman rarely needs a savior because the fantasy is about saving herself.)

because of this, we get two pretty clear constructions of femininity. we have a dark feminine and a light feminine. sexuality & evil, sweetness and kindness. weirdly i don't think the genre super often has much to say about this. it just simply Is. here's your power fantasy - what flavor do you like? sometimes there's some feminist reflection on this in-text but i rarely consider that like... valid... unless the entire story treats women besides the protagonist well. kinda hypocritical to reflect on the role of Evil Women and still have women who are treated as Evil Bitches by the narrative.

hey speaking of. those also are some secret other categories of woman.

i might have mentioned in another post that the villainess genre Loves to reinvent villainess tropes by recasting someone else as the "evil woman" to our "good or at least sufficiently projectable woman" protag? yeah so here they are.

there's the classic evil dark feminine, which I won't linger on because we've all seen it. she's a nasty possibly sexy conniving skank who wants to steal your man. we've all seen it. Next.

but what's interesting to me is that there's also a category of evil light feminine. these are called either "green tea bitches" or "white lotuses" by fans, and they are often (not always) the Original Protagonists of the story the actual protagonist has been isekai'd into. usually it's some kind of reveal that the entire original story was a foul unreliable narrator's trick, and the white lotus has been using her apparent innocence to torment and vex our poor protagonist.

but regardless of her role in the Original Story, the white lotus is always the same. she seems very sweet, very innocent, very pure, very acceptably feminine, but on the inside she's a living nightmare who weaponizes her femininity to hurt people.

if I'm being generous to the genre, this can be considered a valid reflection of the fact that there are some women who weaponize femininity in order to put down other women. many of us have met people like that. it happens. it might be considered a power fantasy to "defeat" that kind of woman.

if I'm being critical of the genre - which I almost always am - I would say that having defeated one boogeyman of Evil Woman by turning it acceptable, the villainess isekai genre must invent a new boogeyman to pit its protagonists against. we're just redefining the borders of which sort of woman is allowed to be relatable and good, rather than challenging the base notions of misogyny and patriarchy that lock women into eternal acceptability combat. oh no we have a fake acceptable woman who must be proven as a fraud! the real Good Woman is right here! etc.

sort of my endcap on Gender Thoughts here - i would note that almost none of these characters are anything other than extremely feminine. we have a few tomboyish or crossdressing protagonists here and there, but they almost always shed that in favor of ballgowns at some point or another. I've noticed this as an aspect of heterosexual romance, but it does feel very strange to me how much femininity is on display. as a nonbinary lesbian, the world of rofan always feels alien to me. whether antagonist or protagonist, whether the character is "acceptable" or "unacceptable" in her femininity, this is a world where being genuinely uninterested in femininity as a woman is nigh unthinkable. there is always an emphasis placed on the fact that she is in fact a woman, and one who will eventually be desirable to men, no matter what the circumstances are! you could draw a lot of conclusions from that. my personal conclusion is that het romance is kind of scary and highly based in affirming gender binaries. :(

#narrates #as always im Super looking in on this genre from the outside #mostly because i primarily read manwha in this genre and i am not korean.#also im a nb dyke so im absolutely not interacting with the genre in the ways it's usually meant to be read - as selfinsert power fantasy #buuuut its worth pointing out that huh. does anyone ever notice that this het romance genre creates Types Of Women?#because i sure do. i do notice it.#anyway long ass post.#escapist fiction tag #<- my tag for discussing genres of fiction that are primarily escapist

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