Natsu Dragneel Quotes

Gray has just lost to Lyon, who trained beside him under Ur and is now trying to revive the demon her sacrifice sealed, and nine chapters later Natsu will have to stop him from killing himself. This speech comes first, shouted while Natsu carries Gray away. What makes it more than a pep talk is who is speaking: Natsu and Gray are rivals, and here one treats the other as a member of something rather than as a rival, which is why the speech keeps saying we. The doctrine it states, that the guild is defined by not quitting, will be repeated hundreds of chapters later in far grander settings, but this is the version that costs the least and means the most, because Natsu is not addressing a crowd. He is telling one man not to die of embarrassment. Mashima wrote the guild's whole ethic into a fight over a frozen demon on a cursed island, and the later versions of the speech never quite recover this scale.

Jiemma had humiliated Yukino and expelled her for losing a match, and Natsu's response was to walk into Sabertooth's lodgings during the Grand Magic Games and confront the master of the strongest guild in Fiore. The line is what he says on his way out, after Minerva offers to settle the dispute in the tournament. What is worth noticing is the register. Natsu shouts almost everything he says in this arc, and this is phrased as a rule rather than a challenge. Sabertooth's whole ideology is that weakness is expulsion, and Natsu does not argue with it. He states the alternative definition and leaves, which is more effective than a speech because it treats the matter as settled. Sting spends the rest of the tournament trying to beat him, loses, and comes out of it with a new respect for Fairy Tail, and the guild he takes over as master afterward is his answer to this sentence.

Hades is Precht, the guild's second master, and the argument Natsu is having with him is the one Fairy Tail keeps having with itself: whether a guild is a family or an instrument. The speech is the arc's climax and it is the weakest part of the fight. The rescue that follows is not his: Laxus, expelled from the guild, returns to help. Even that does not settle it. Hades gets back up, and he falls only after Happy, Carla and Panther Lily destroy the heart that powers him. The words are the drum roll, and the reinforcement and the lucky break are doing the work. Mashima knows how to write this beat, and the Galuna Island version of it, delivered to one friend, is stronger for being small. Here the speech has grown to the size of the island and lost the person it was addressed to.

Erza tried to die. She went into the Tower of Heaven's magic expecting to be destroyed ("my body should have been broken down into its component molecules," she says early in the next volume), and a few panels before this line she is still wondering how Natsu could have found her inside "that huge tornado of magic power." This is his answer, and the grammar matters: before the order about her comes a claim about everyone in the guild. Erza has spent the arc, and her whole life since the tower, as the one who protects, the childhood slave who got out and turned herself into armor, and Natsu's objection is that she has quietly exempted herself from being protected. The line refuses the exemption. It starts quietly for Natsu, who usually shouts these; the shout comes only a few panels later, through tears. The next volume mourns Simon as the man who "wanted to be the man to protect you, Erza, for so long," and Natsu's line makes the same point from the other side: a debt paid by dying is a debt the rest of them then owe.

Zero is Brain with the restraint removed, the second personality that surfaces once the six seals on the man's body are broken, and his pitch to Natsu is that destroying things is its own justification. Natsu is in no position to disagree on the facts. He has flattened towns, and the guild's reputation for property damage is a running joke; taking on the same sins is a plain admission of that. The sentence turns on redefining the sin instead of denying it. Fairy Tail's ethic, stated here as clearly as anywhere, is that breaking things is forgivable and looking away is not, which is a doctrine you can only hold if you are prepared to be blamed for a great deal of rubble. The fight ends with Natsu eating Jellal's golden flame and entering Dragon Force, so the power system gets the win as usual, but the line is the more honest half of the scene. A guild that defines its true sin as not believing in anyone has to keep believing in Jellal, who is standing right there, the man behind the Tower of Heaven. The arc does exactly that, and it is a genuine risk.