This will not surprise anyone who’s seen my earlier posts.

My favorite anime I’ve watched so far is, hands down, Fairy Tail!

Fairy Tail intrigued me from the beginning. I’d never had a single “favorite anime,” and this did not instantaneously snatch my top spot, flash-in-the-pan style. No, the first episode simply told me a story I enjoyed listening to. I was hooked, though, at that moment, that first moment when we see Natsu eating fire! It was something new and unique, obviously part of Natsu’s story, and the reaction of those wizards, “N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-N-NA (bunch of stuff I can’t transcribe)?!” (meaning “W-W-W-W-W-W-WHATTHEHECKISHE?!”) was hilarious! And the music they were playing as Natsu fire-breathed that idiot’s butt into oblivion! Oh, I was definitely following this one!

(A.D.D. Moment about the music: you actually don’t find that much Celtic music in anime. There’s all sorts of music in the soundtracks for all these anime, across cultures, instruments, styles, but not much Celtic, and I love Celtic. So finding it in Fairy Tail was definitely a plus for me.)

So I joined our heroine Lucy, a Celestial Spirit Wizard (can summon spirits based on the constellations if she has the appropriate key) as she joins her favorite wizard’s guild, the titular Fairy Tail.

Fairy Tail, as it turns out, is filled with crazy people! Crazy in a hilarious sort of fashion, but still crazy! They can’t go five minutes together without getting into a fight, yet they treasure each other deeply, like family. In truth, they are family… albeit one of the wackiest, zaniest families ever! With magic!

“Breaking stuff is a Fairy Tail specialty!”
– Natsu Dragneel

Their craziness and violence is not limited at all to each other. Not only do their enemies receive several times the hostility that Fairy Tail members playfully give each other, but they have a well-deserved reputation for tremendous collateral damage. Destroy half a city? Normal. Create a giant crater? Normal. Demolish a building? Eh, on the low end, but not bad. Even their pillow fights can damage the building (and anyone hapless enough to be on the receiving end).

As months passed and I watched each succeeding story arc, as this family of crazy people goes off on a new adventure involving deadly danger, dark wizards, monsters galore, ancient magics, vast and far-reaching plots and machinations, and more, I became more and more engrossed. The anime grew on me, until the day I simply decided, just because, that this was my favorite anime. It has become the standard I compare every other anime to in how much I like it. To this day, I can’t describe exactly how it happened, how this one managed to push all the right buttons, in exactly the right way, but it did.

Here are a few things I think of when I think Fairy Tail:

Hilarious. Dramatic. Deep. Emotional. Positive theme. Well-crafted world, story, and magic system. Engaging characters. Strong women. Great music. Family-level bonds of friendship and loyalty. Wacky, zany fun. Intriguing abilities. Free spirits. Memorable villains. Love. Redemption. Forgiveness. Hope.

Yeah, I could go on for a long time.

Fairy Tail.

My favorite.

And it has nothing to do with… oh, who am I kidding? It totally does!

The women kick ass!