User blog comment:Miskos3/Fairy Tail 526: My Name Is..., Review/@comment-203.215.120.175-20170312224510

Where do I begin…

Let me salvage what ‘positive’ things I can get from the latest development. Other than how Mashima in the course of a single chapter blatantly subverted the usual image of old wise wizards and in so doing ruined our impressions of the ‘magic king’ (being a copycat isn’t that big of an issue for me though, since even Madara over at Naruto can be accused of using powers that others have demonstrated), the revelations somehow heighten the symbolic contrast between Irene the (Scarlet) Despair and August the (Vermilion) Disaster.

Whereas Irene is a mother who turned into a monster and abandoned her daughter, August is cast in the role of the abandoned child, the monstrous spawn of a forbidden union. While Irene looks young but turns out to be really old (and perhaps even older than Zeref himself, depending on whether he was cursed before the invention of Dragon Slayer Magic), August looks old but turns out to be younger in comparison to Precht and Mavis and even Makarov (imagine if he was raised as part of Fairy Tail instead, the guild would be even more overpowered than it already is, and he’d rise to the ranks as guild master, or even take the top spot among the Gods of Ishgar). With respect to ability, Irene on the one hand can ‘nourish’ or ‘smother’ the world with her enchantment (as if to accentuate her motherhood), and August on the other hand can absorb and imitate direct caster magic thrown at him (as if to convey that he’s a precocious enfant terrible).