User blog comment:Miskos3/Fairy Tail 527: Emotion, Review/@comment-130.105.140.184-20170317075322/@comment-7418318-20170317081344

I never agreed fully with Checkhov and all the people who continuously quote him. I agree with the underlying idea, but I dislike the exact wording.

Because if you take this too literally, it means that everything must be used in it's most obvious and most basic way.

Does the rifle absolutely have to go off to have a reason for being there? Can a rifle not have other meaningful reasons to be there? Maybe as a memento from a war long ago. Or it turns out to be the murder weapon that'll be used to convict the murderer. It can be used as a blunt weapon. Someone might aim it at someone else, causing this someone else to shoot first.

Since in all those cases the rifle never goes off, it's technically going against what Checkhov said and thus "shouldn't be there" if you take it literally... and yet in all those case the rifle served a purpose.

Thus it'd be a whole lot better in my opinion to replace the "must go off" with "must serve a meaningful purpose".

Larcade sort of did that. His prior existence didn't mean much, but through his demise we see just how far gone Zeref is right now. Sure it could have bene handled better, but at least it wasn't entirely meaningles.