Natsu Dragneel Quotes

Gray has just lost to Lyon, who trained beside him under Ur and has spent the years since deciding he is the better pupil, and nine chapters later he will try Iced Shell, the spell that killed their teacher, out of the same shame. Natsu's speech interrupts that. What makes it more than a pep talk is who is speaking: Natsu and Gray have been brawling since chapter two, and this is the first time either treats the other as a member of something rather than as a rival, which is why the sentence keeps saying we. The doctrine it states, that the guild is defined by not stopping, 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 expelled Yukino for losing a match, made her strip in front of the guild and remove her mark, and Natsu's response was to walk into Sabertooth's lodgings during the Grand Magic Games and fight the master of the strongest guild in Fiore in his own hall. The line is what he says on his way out, after Minerva stops the fight by holding Happy hostage. What is worth noticing is the register. Natsu shouts almost everything he says in this arc, and this is delivered flat, as a rule rather than a challenge, and the manga frames it as the moment Sting and Rogue begin to be persuaded. 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 prove him wrong and ends it agreeing with him, and the guild he later runs is built on 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. Natsu wins because Laxus, who has been expelled from the guild, arrives and lets Natsu eat his lightning, giving him a mode the story invented that chapter; the words are the drum roll for the power-up, and the power-up is doing the work. Mashima knows how to write this beat, and the Galuna Island version of it, delivered to one friend on a beach, is stronger for being small. Here the speech has grown to the size of the island and lost the person it was addressed to. Hades has spent decades believing that magic is the only thing that matters, and the answer to that is not that Fairy Tail lives dangerously; it is that Makarov, the pupil he abandoned, built something Precht could not, and that answer arrives a few pages later without shouting.

Erza tried to die. With the Tower of Heaven's Etherion about to go off she merged herself into the lacrima to absorb it, and the manga gave her a full vision of her own funeral, the guild in black, before Natsu pulled her out. This is what he says when she wakes up, and the grammar matters: not don't sacrifice yourself, but we are the same. 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 is a small speech for Natsu, who usually shouts these, and it is the first time in the series he sounds older than she does. Simon died in that tower for her, which is what she was trying to answer with her own death, and Natsu's answer to that is that a debt paid by dying is a debt the rest of them then owe. The series takes the principle seriously; it is why nobody in the guild is allowed a noble death for the next four hundred chapters.

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 what he says before he has the power, and it 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 having just tried to kill it. The arc does exactly that, and it is a genuine risk.