Fairy Tail

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Fairy Tail, a Japanese manga written and illustrated by Hiro Mashima, had 72 million copies in print by February 2020. That figure places it among the best-selling manga series of all time. Its hero is Natsu Dragneel, a wizard who roams a fictional world searching for a missing dragon named Igneel. The search sounds like a lonely quest, but Natsu belongs to a guild, a band of wizards who work side by side. What began as an attempt to write something simply fun grew into a saga of demons, dragons and an immortal dark wizard. Why did its author want fun so badly? What does Natsu not yet know about himself? And how did a story built on familiar genre ingredients collect both prizes and mixed reviews?

  5634

• 2. Wizards for Hire

  ›

  In the Kingdom of Fiore, wizards sell their magic to clients who post paid job requests, and guilds are the organizations that match them. Fiore lies in Earth-land, the fictional world where the series unfolds. Natsu is a Dragon Slayer, a particular kind of wizard, and he belongs to the popular guild named Fairy Tail. His missing adoptive father is the dragon Igneel, and Natsu travels the kingdom hoping to find him.

  On the road, Natsu befriends a young celestial wizard named Lucy Heartfilia and invites her to join Fairy Tail. With Happy, a cat-like creature called an Exceed, the three form a team. Other guild members gradually join them. Gray Fullbuster is an ice wizard, and Erza Scarlet is a magical knight. Wendy Marvell is a second Dragon Slayer, and her companion Carla is another Exceed.

  The team's missions range widely. They subdue criminals, take on illegal dark guilds and face ancient demons called Etherious, who were created by Zeref the Black Wizard. Their path eventually leads to the guild's sacred ground, where the demons' maker waits.

  1285

• 3. Zeref's Long Shadow

  ›

  Sirius Island is Fairy Tail's sacred ground, and it is where Natsu and his companions finally meet Zeref. For 400 years he has lived under a curse of immortality and deadly power. He wants to die, hoping to atone for his atrocities. A fight over Zeref breaks out between Fairy Tail and a dark guild called Grimoire Heart. The battle attracts the evil black dragon Acnologia. Fairy Tail's wizards survive his assault only because of Mavis Vermillion, the guild's founder and Zeref's estranged lover. Her spirit casts a defensive spell named Fairy Sphere, which holds the wizards in suspended animation for seven years.

  After that long sleep, Fairy Tail wins the Grand Magic Games tournament. A war follows against Tartaros, a dark guild made up of Etherious. Its members aim to unseal a book believed to hold E.N.D., Zeref's ultimate demon. Then Acnologia returns and annihilates both guilds. At that moment Igneel emerges from Natsu's body, where the dragon had sealed himself in order to fight Acnologia. Igneel dies anyway. Acnologia kills him while Natsu watches helplessly, and Natsu leaves on a training journey to avenge him.

  One year later, the Alvarez Empire, a military nation ruled by Zeref, invades Fiore. Zeref has grown disillusioned with the conflicts waged in his name. He plans to rewrite history so that his own rise to power never happens. To do that, he needs Fairy Heart, a wellspring of infinite magic power. It lies inside the equally cursed body of Mavis, which is preserved beneath the Fairy Tail guild hall.

  While fighting Zeref, Natsu learns who he really is. He is Zeref's younger brother and the true E.N.D., a name that stands for Etherious Natsu Dragneel. Zeref resurrected him as a demon and sent him 400 years forward through a time travel gate called Eclipse. Igneel was a partner in the plan. The goal was for Natsu to kill Zeref. Natsu fails at that, but he incapacitates Zeref and stops the drastic changes Zeref's plan would have caused. Mavis then lifts her curse and Zeref's by returning his love, and the act kills them both.

  Acnologia, the black dragon, remains the last threat. Fairy Tail and its allies trap him in a space-time rift created by Eclipse. He absorbs the rift's magic, escapes and gains godlike power. He keeps that power by pulling the present-day Dragon Slayers into the rift alongside his disembodied spirit. Lucy and many other wizards across the continent immobilize his body inside Fairy Sphere. Natsu gathers the other Dragon Slayers' magic and destroys the spirit, which kills Acnologia and frees the Dragon Slayers. A year later, Natsu and his team set out on a guild mission that is a century old.

  12

• 4. Built for Fun

  ›

  After finishing Rave Master, Hiro Mashima looked back on that story and found it both sentimental and sad. For his next manga he wanted a "lot of fun." His inspiration came from sitting in bars and partying with friends. He also described the new series as being about young people finding their calling, such as a job.

  On the 3rd of September 2002, Magazine Fresh published a one-shot by Mashima titled Fairy Tale, which served as a pilot. His later concept for a serialized version cast Natsu as a fire-using member of a courier guild who carried things on assignments. Then Mashima imagined different types of wizards hanging out in one place. He coerced his editor into letting him change the concept to a wizard guild. The title also shifted from "Tale" to "Tail," a nod to the tail of a fairy, which Mashima said may or may not prove to be a "pivotal point." When he weighed his own interests against the fans' wishes about what should happen next, the fans took precedence.

  Between Rave Master and Fairy Tail, all but one of Mashima's assistants left. Making sure the three new ones knew what to do was the hardest part of the first year of serialization. In 2008 he described his weekly routine for each chapter. Monday brought the script and storyboards, and Tuesday the rough sketches. Drawing and inking filled Wednesday through Friday. The weekends went to Monster Hunter Orage, a monthly series he was writing at the same time.

  That year Mashima had six assistants working in an 8000 square foot space with seven desks, plus a sofa and a TV for video games. By 2011 he said he worked six days a week, for 17 hours a day.

  34897

• 5. Friends in Ink

  ›

  Mashima's father died when he was a child, and he cited that loss as an influence on the bond between Natsu and the dragon Igneel. Much of the cast came from real life in this way. He drew on people he had known when creating the characters.

  Natsu's motion sickness came from one of Mashima's friends, who gets sick whenever they ride in taxis together. For the hero's name, Mashima felt western fantasy names would sound unfamiliar to Japanese readers. He chose Natsu, the Japanese word for summer.

  At the 2008 San Diego Comic-Con, the American manga critic Jason Thompson interviewed Mashima. Mashima later based the reporter character Jason on him. Another character was modeled on an employee of Del Rey Manga, the original North American publisher of the series. The humor, Mashima said, came from his daily life and from jokes his assistants would make. Del Rey Manga was the company that first carried the series to English-speaking readers.

  3489

• 6. Print and Spin-offs

  ›

  Weekly Shōnen Magazine began serializing Fairy Tail on the 2nd of August 2006 and ran it until the 26th of July 2017. Kodansha collected the 545 chapters into 63 tankōbon volumes, published between the 15th of December 2006 and the 17th of November 2017. An extra one-shot chapter appeared in the magazine on the 3rd of July 2024.

  Del Rey Manga released the first English volume in North America on the 25th of March 2008. It stopped after the 12th volume in September 2010. Kodansha USA took over and began publishing volumes in May 2011, finishing with the 63rd on the 23rd of January 2018. In November 2015 it started a larger omnibus edition called Fairy Tail: Master's Edition, with each installment covering five regular volumes. In the United Kingdom, Turnaround Publisher Services distributed the books. In Australia and New Zealand, Penguin Books Australia did.

  The series also crossed paths with other manga. In 2008 a one-shot paired it with Miki Yoshikawa's Flunk Punk Rumble. A 2011 crossover linked it to Mashima's first series, Rave. On the 19th of October 2013, a special magazine issue let Mashima and Nakaba Suzuki each draw a four-panel comic of the other's series, The Seven Deadly Sins. A full crossover chapter followed on the 25th of December 2013. A two-volume collection of Mashima's short stories, Fairy Tail S, came out on the 16th of September 2016.

  Eight spin-off manga followed. Fairy Tail Zero by Mashima and Fairy Tail: Ice Trail by Yūsuke Shirato began with the launch of Monthly Fairy Tail Magazine on the 17th of July 2014. Both ended with its thirteenth and final issue on the 17th of July 2015. Other titles included Fairy Tail Blue Mistral, Fairy Girls and the three-part Fairy Tail Gaiden by Kyōta Shibano. The sequel Fairy Tail: 100 Years Quest began on Magazine Pocket on the 25th of July 2018. Mashima storyboards it and Atsuo Ueda illustrates it. On the 27th of June 2018, Mashima announced one more spin-off for that app, Fairy Tail City Hero by Ushio Andō.

  2223242643

• 7. From Page to Screen

  ›

  On the 12th of October 2009, TV Tokyo aired the first episode of the Fairy Tail anime, produced by A-1 Pictures, Dentsu Entertainment and Satelight. That series ran until the 30th of March 2013. A sequel animated by A-1 Pictures and Bridge ran from the 5th of April 2014 to the 26th of March 2016. A third and final series, animated by A-1 Pictures, CloverWorks and Bridge, aired from the 7th of October 2018 to the 29th of September 2019.

  Two anime films reached theaters in Japan. Fairy Tail the Movie: Phoenix Priestess premiered on the 18th of August 2012. Fairy Tail: Dragon Cry followed on the 6th of May 2017.

  Konami developed an action game for the PlayStation Portable, unveiled at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show and released on the 3rd of June 2010. Two sequels followed on that console. Two fighting games reached the Nintendo DS on the 22nd of July 2010 and the 21st of April 2011. In 2016, a browser game from GameSamba called Fairy Tail: Hero's Journey was announced for closed beta testing.

  A role-playing game titled Fairy Tail, developed by Gust and published by Koei Tecmo, was announced on the 5th of September 2019. It was set for the 19th of March 2020 on PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch and Steam. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed the date to the 30th of July 2020 in Japan and Europe and the 31st of July in North America. A sequel, Fairy Tail 2, was announced for winter 2024.

  At the end of 2021, Mashima asked Kodansha Game Creator's Lab to run a contest for Fairy Tail game proposals. The winner would receive $132,300, of which $88,200 came from Mashima himself. In March 2023, three winners were chosen. The roguelike deck-building game Fairy Tail: Dungeons reached Steam on the 26th of August 2024, and a sports action game followed on the 16th of September 2024. The third winner, Fairy Tail: Birth of Magic, still awaits its details.

  4748545862

• 8. Praise and Complaints

  ›

  In France, Fairy Tail had sold over 7.7 million copies by 2018. According to Oricon, it was the eighth best-selling manga series in Japan for 2009 and fourth best in both 2010 and 2011. It ranked fifth in 2012, ninth in 2013, seventeenth in 2014 and fifteenth in 2015.

  Awards arrived early. Deb Aoki of About.com named it the Best New Shōnen Manga of 2008. French magazine AnimeLand gave it Best Manga Series of 2008 at the 2009 Anime & Manga Grand Prix. It won the 2009 Kodansha Manga Award for shōnen manga, Best Comedy Manga at the Society for the Promotion of Japanese Animation's 2009 Industry Awards, and Best Shōnen Manga at the 2009 Japan Expo Awards. Volume 9 earned a nomination in the Youth Selection category at the 2010 Angoulême International Comics Festival.

  Critics were less unanimous. Reviewing the first volume for Anime News Network, Carl Kimlinger wrote that "the mix of goofy humor, face-crushing action, and teary-eyed sap is so calculated as to be mechanical." Carlo Santos, also of Anime News Network, praised the art and action scenes but found little story and character development. By volume 12 he suggested Mashima's real talent lies in "taking the most standard, predictable aspects of the genre and somehow still weaving it into a fun, fist-pumping adventure." Rebecca Silverman, reviewing the first 11 volumes, argued the stories were arguably better than the early art and praised Lucy and Erza as strong female characters. Her colleague Faye Hopper called it a "somewhat mediocre shounen series that pushes enough buttons" to keep her reading.

  Kimlinger, Silverman and A.E. Sparrow of IGN all saw strong similarities between Mashima's art and Eiichiro Oda's in One Piece. Sparrow meant it as a compliment, saying the art had enough unique qualities of its own. Kimlinger went further and said the resemblance makes it hard to appreciate Mashima's "undeniable technical skill." Years later, on TV Asahi's Manga Sōsenkyo 2021 poll, 150,000 voters picked their top 100 manga, and Fairy Tail placed 65th.

  7071728586