User blog comment:FairyRaven/Fairy Tail Chapter 428: When We Take Different Paths, Review and Commentary/@comment-7418318-20150413185218

Wow... that went quite different than what I expected.

I'm certainly glad that Avatar aren't pushovers after all, though Lucy becomeing somewhat of a burden to Natsu irks me... Sure her slapping Gray was great, but it's immediately overshadowed by her being taken down without even being able to put up a fight and becomeing the reason for Natsu being captured as well (because he concentrated on her to the exclusion of everything else, he was taken by surprise). I haven't yet read all the comments (though I will once I finished tying this), but I expect I'll find several anons cursing Lucy for being a "weak damsel in distress" -_- Mashima, why?!

Oh well... moving from the controversial stuff on to the clearly good stuff:

I found it nice that Natsu's first thought was to bring Gray and Juvia back together, even before he mentioned bringing Fairy Tail back. And it's also nice that during their little sparring none of the two was clearly superior to the other yet.

Having Gajeel openly say things about saving innocent lives is something I'll need to get used to. He acted like that for a long time, but always put out the brash facade before the timeskip. While I have to get used to this change I do appreciate this. It feels like he grew up and finally gained enough self-confidence to just openly show his true self instead of trying to put up a mask for others.

I too am a bit surprised Briar didn't turn up yet, but since I put Mary down as the second-most-likely to fight Lucy I suppose I wasn't too far off. I certainly expected Mary to have a psychopathic and/or sadistic streak in that cuteish creepy fashion of hers and I wasn't disappointed... in her personality anyway. I AM disappointed that Lucy wasn't allowed to fight back and just got taken out right away though, as I mentioned before.

I guess Mashima is really hammering the ships home now. First we had Juvia and Gray living together, now Natsu is actively trying to get the two together, we got several NaLu moments and now we learned (or rather got confirmation) that Gajeel and Levy have been close together this entire time too.