The 5 Best And 5 Worst Characters In Fairy Tail

Fairy Tail is an exciting, expansive anime based on the manga of Hiro Mashima. The beauty of the series is that its stakes are low in the early episodes, giving the viewer a chance to get to know and love the characters. Gradually, the show becomes more complex as the convoluted backstories of its characters are explored in depth. Fairy Tail begins with a young woman named Lucy Hartfilia, who arrives in the city of Magnolia hoping to join a famous wizard guild called Fairy Tail. Over the course of the first few episodes, she meets hothead Natsu Dragneel and his talking cat friend Happy, Natsu's lifelong frenemy Gray, and the imposing, imperious Erza Scarlet. Before long, Lucy becomes a member and gets swept up in wizard-related jobs to make money, huge wars with rival guilds, attacks from other dimensions, time-traveling dragons, and apocalyptic demons & sorcerers. Fairy Tail's tone ranges from light-hearted and cheeky to intensely melodramatic, with lots of over-the-top characterizations pushing the relentless action scenes. While all of Fairy Tail's characters are larger than life, let's find out which characters are irresistible and which are annoying. 

The Guild Master of Fairy Tail certainly has his charms. He loves his guild members as though they were his own children, often referring to them as his "brats." He took in many of them when they were children, leading with the quote "Do fairies have tails? Do they even exist? Like them, this is place is an eternal mystery... a never-ending adventure!"  If he was always that benevolent, paternal figure with a slightly roguish sense of humor, he'd be great. However, Makarov is annoying because he tends to treat everyone around him like they're idiots. He has a hair-trigger temper that punishes guild members based on his often arbitrary rules. He veers from stern taskmaster to permissive uncle at the drop of a hat. On top of all that, this father figure is one of the biggest perverts in the show, spanking Lucy and drooling over many of the guild's women. He's also not a great family man, as he had to kick both his son and grandson out of Fairy Tail. The fact that he often neglected both of them in favor of his guild as they were growing up certainly didn't help matters any. 

The strongest wizards in Fairy Tail are the S-Class wizards, and Laxus Dreyar, the Lightning Dragon Slayer, just might be the toughest guild member of them all. The grandson of Guild Master Makarov Dreyar, Laxus' contempt for everyone else in the guild can be linked to his jealousy of his grandfather favoring the guild over his family. While Fairy Tail is important to Laxus too, he wants a tougher, meaner version of the guild without all of the mindless, destructive antics and goofing around. His resentment boils over in the "Battle Of Fairy Tail" story arc, when he and his Thunder God Tribe cronies try to take over the guild by force. Acting as a relentless bully, it's hard to understand why he was tolerated in the guild in the first place. Even more annoying is his inexplicable change of attitude after the battle. When he goes from homicidal to feeling warm about the guild, it feels out of the blue. Trying to change him from a one-note psycho to someone who learned a lesson without showing any actual growth simply didn't work. 

Initially entering the series as an enemy in the epic showdown between the Phantom Lord and Fairy Tail guilds, Juvia Lockser switches sides after that fight. As Makarov points out, everyone needs a job, right? In Phantom Lord, she's part of a squad called the Element Four, and her domain is over water. Creepily chanting "Drip, drip, drop" as she tries to drown Gray in their battle, she starts off as a terrifying, fascinating villain. In the middle of their fight, she decides that she's in love with Gray and spends the rest of the series throwing herself at him. While her powers are fun and she proves herself to be loyal and handy in a fight, she quickly becomes tedious since she has no other motivation or characterization besides her relentless crush on someone who is just not interested. Even worse, she sometimes picks fights with the other women who work with Gray, accusing them of stealing them from her. Unfortunately, Juvia never really evolves beyond this. 

This head-banging, long-tongued, heavy metal assassin pops up as a hireling of Jellal during the Tower of Heaven story arc. As part of the hit squad Trinity Raven, he's assigned to kill Juvia and Lucy. Fairy Tail is a show that sometimes leans on titillation in a way that feels entirely unnecessary, but this battle really took the cake. His sonic guitar and deadly hair are silly enough, but he turns Juvia into a succubus just so she can get into a catfight with Lucy. While they eventually defeat him, this battle is an embarrassing low point for the series, especially since it feels so jarring in the middle of the otherwise excellent story arc. Fairy Tail has always had plenty of comic relief, but its winking T&A scenes are tedious and lazy. That's especially true because the show's female characters are otherwise well-written, with a great deal of variety and depth. 

There are some interesting behind-the-scenes conspiracy figures in Fairy Tail. Ultear Milkovich is more of a plot device than an actual character. On one hand, she's behind seemingly every twisted scheme in the early arcs of Fairy Tail. She's a plant on the Magic Council, conspiring with Jellal to build a doomsday device. She's in disguise when Team Natsu takes a job on Galuna Island. She sneaks around trying to find Zeref. Her entire personality is little more than a knowing sneer. Later, when it's revealed that she plans to rewrite all of her evil deeds using powerful time magic, she at least starts to get a semblance of a personality. It doesn't help that her special ability, Arc of Time magic, is confusing and poorly explained. The attempts to redeem the character don't feel quite as arbitrary as they did for Laxus, but it feels like it was too little, too late.