Gray Fullbuster Quotes

Juvia has just told him she will let him go if he hands over Lucy, and she is halfway to falling in love with him while saying it. Gray's refusal is the sentence that decides her, and the manga is explicit about the mechanism: nobody has ever fought Juvia seriously, because the rain follows her and people leave, and a man who treats her as a real opponent is the first person to treat her as real. That is the whole of her attachment to him, and it is set up in one line before the fight even starts. Read in that light the sentence is less a code of honor than a courtesy, and Gray will spend the next five hundred chapters not noticing what it did. The line commits him to something as well. Juvia joins Fairy Tail after Phantom Lord falls, which means the person he promised not to go easy on becomes one of the comrades the promise was about, and the series gets a decade of comedy and one genuinely painful arc out of that inversion.

Gray's teacher died by turning herself into ice to seal a demon, and she did it in front of him, because he had gone to fight the demon against her orders. The scar he carries from Galuna Island, the one he gets from Lyon and keeps, is the first injury the series lets him be proud of, and the line to Lucy says why. A wound you can see is one you have earned and can point to; the one he has been carrying since childhood is the kind nobody can see and nobody can treat, and he has been stripping in public for years without anybody asking what the exposure was for. Mashima plays the stripping as a gag and this chapter briefly stops laughing at it. The habit comes from Ur's training, half-naked in the snow to learn the cold, so his body is a record of her whether he likes it or not. Wanting the damage to show is a way of wanting the record to be legible. The series never says this out loud, which is to its credit; it puts the sentence in Gray's mouth and moves on.