User blog comment:Retro7/Fairy Flush Reviews: Naval Battle/@comment-4866818-20120713011424/@comment-904888-20120713040530

Well, as someone did point out, Minerva is acting much the same as Gajeel way back in the Phantom Arc, and the motive behind the two were very similar. The reason why we have come to hate Minerva more than we did with Gajeel was that Phantom arc is relatively early in the series, where we are not AS attached to the FT characters as we are now.

Other differences include: Gajeel was a private session, while Minerva is public humiliation. None of FT and very few Phantoms boasted about their strength to FT while Gajeel session was occuring, while Minerva was just in plain sight of EVERYONE, not JUST FT and ST, which would make FT and possibly the reader doubly angry at ST than they were with Phantom.

But it also shows how Lucy haven't learned a fundamental flaw in her magic: she is totally hopeless without her keys, and she has done nothing to remedy it. So partly this beating is her fault for not learning the lessons of the past (in fact that weakness was so obvious that she LOST her keys before she ever summoned any spirits in FT...). Talk about putting all eggs into the same basket... Instead of summoning two spirits at once, it would probably be better if she learned how to summon spirits without needing their respective keys in her hands. Now, whether if Aquarius abandoning her mid fight has anything to do with her defeat is another story (I suspect she rubbed it from Scorpio, who used that exact exit line when Lucy was fighting against Kain on Tenrou Island).