All spoilers up to the Tartaros arc are unmarked. Examples pertaining to the Alvarez Empire arc can be spoiler tagged if deemed necessary.
Fairy Tail
Fairy Tail is the most famous wizards' guild in the Kingdom of Fiore, most widely known for producing some of the most powerful wizards in the history of magic—so powerful, in fact, they cause unintended destruction no matter what they do. Founded over one hundred years ago by Mavis Vermillion, the guild was named in honor of the age old question, "Do fairies have tails? Do they even exist?", which represents an mystery, and thus an eternal adventure. As the titular guild of the series, its members and the adventures they embark on serve as the central focus of the series.
Fairy Tail is stationed in the town of Magnolia, its original guildhall standing for nearly a century until its destruction and subsequent renovation following a war with the rival guild Phantom Lord. The guild suffered a seven-year dark period after its strongest members went missing along with its sacred ground of Sirius Island, although it returned to its former glory after said members returned and broke the guild's losing streak in the annual Grand Magic Games. Following a costly victory against the dark guild Tartaros, Fairy Tail officially disbanded to avoid being targeted by the Alvarez Empire, which wished to exploit its darkest secret. One year of physical and emotional recovery later, however, and the guild has since regrouped for good.
- All There in the Manual: Most information on the characters' personalities and interests—particularly the minor members—are detailed in profiles on certain chapter covers, some of which makes its way into the anime.
- Badass Crew: Fairy Tail easily outnumbers the other guilds in terms of badass members by a dozenfold. They're also a colorful, tightly knit bunch of goofballs who consider each other closer than any family.
- Berserk Button: The one surefire way to send a Fairy Tail wizard into an Unstoppable Rage is to hurt another Fairy Tail wizard, or one of your own. No villain in this series is spared their wrath for doing this.
- Beware the Silly Ones: They baffle all ordinary folks (and sometimes each other) with their eccentricities, but they all have one thing in common: mess with their guild, and they will end you.
- Breaking the Fellowship: Fairy Tail disbands after the Tartaros arc, leaving their guildhall in a pile of rubble and the members with more invisible scars. After a year of training, Natsu, Lucy, and Happy decide to get the guild back together, with the majority of its strongest members ganging up on the Avatar cult.
- Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Don't let their assortment of personality quirks fool you; a good number of their deadliest opponents have acknowledged them as cunning warriors. It's quite telling that their founder was a genius military strategist with the appearance and behavior of a 13-year-old girl.
- Dark Secret: Lumen Histoire, the guild's biggest secret sealed away deep beneath the guildhall, is so low-profile that only the guild's masters are permitted awareness of its existence. Wide knowledge of it is said to potentially upend the laws of magic as the world knows it, and word of it leaking out is enough for a neighboring continent to launch a full-scale invasion in order to claim it. It is a wellspring of perpetual magic power known as Fairy Heart, akin to a stream of Etherion that can never be stopped once it is unleashed. At the core of this power is the body of Mavis Vermillion herself, held in stasis within a lacrima crystal in a state between life and death that was brought about when she was afflicted and "killed" by the Curse of Ankhselam, the same life-stealing curse that Zeref suffers from.
- Destructive Savior: They're notorious in Fiore for causing more collateral damage than any of the monsters or villains they face. As such, they're not particularly well liked by the Magic Council, and the reward money they receive is usually reduced to pay for repairs.
- Determinator: No matter what, they never give up, and if they can help it, they never let themselves lose to the same opponent twice.
- Does Not Know His Own Strength: Fairy Tail wizards tend to "overdo" their magic without thinking, which guarantees that they'll end up demolishing a single building at best.
- Elemental Powers: The guild features the greatest number of wizards who possess such differing powers:
- Natsu is a Fire Dragon Slayer who can breathe, attack with, defend against, and eat fire, and later gains the power to combine it with Laxus's lightning; while Macao and Romeo can use different-colored flames to produce different effects besides simply burning their enemies.
- Gray's magic, Ice Make, can produce ice in the shape of weapons or other useful objects.
- Makarov and Mavis are masters of light magic, including the evil-purging Fairy Law and Fairy Glitter spells, and the defensive Fairy Sphere.
- Laxus is and his great-grandfather Yuri are both lightning wizards. Laxus in particular is also a Thunder Dragon Slayer who deals in lightning the same way Natsu does in fire.
- Juvia uses water magic, and can turn her own body into water.
- Gajeel is an Iron Dragon Slayer who can turn parts of his body into iron weapons and such. He later gains the power to use it with Rogue's shadow magic.
- Wendy, a Sky Dragon Slayer, can create gusts of wind as well as heal.
- A few of the minor members have plant-based magic. Droy instantly grows magic seeds into plant weapons, and Laki's Wood Make works much like Gray's Ice Make. Then there's founding member and Wizard Saint Warrod, who can grow trees that stretch on for miles in a near instant.
- Famed In-Story: From the very first chapter/episode, Fairy Tail is already one of the most popular (if infamously reckless) magic guilds in the kingdom, and Lucy is already set on joining it from her debut.
- Family of Choice: Best exemplified by Laxus's character arc when he turned on his grandfather for kicking his own son and Laxus's dad, Ivan, out of the guild, even though Ivan showed a blatant disregard for his comrades' lives; only later does Laxus learn to accept the entire guild as his family over his scumbag father. Erza similarly disregards Irene as her mother when she learns she abandoned her as a baby, thanking her only for letting her eventually meet her real family.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: The Sirius Teamnote spend seven years frozen in time inside Mavis's Fairy Sphere to survive Acnologia's attack on Sirius Island. As a result, they're all seven years younger than they actually should be.
- Hired Guns: A lot of the adventures they go on are paid jobs at the request of Muggles, and range from serving as escorts to catching bandits to slaying monsters. More often than not, they end up breaking something no matter how simple the job may be, and the repairs come right out of their paycheck.
- How the Mighty Have Fallen: The seven-year Time Skip sees Fairy Tail go from the top guild in Fiore to the absolute weakest: after the Sirius Island arc leaves them without their main fighting force, most of the remaining members leave out of frustration or shame; the decline in jobs forces them to foreclose their guildhall and move to a tiny bar for a base of operations; they are constantly hit up for money borrowed from a neighboring Jerkass guild; and their six consecutive losses in the Grand Magic Games make them a complete laughingstock. Of course, things improve once the missing members return and win the games, restoring their old glory.
- It's Personal: The guild never takes kindly to anyone who harms one of their own, as shown on numerous occasions:
- In the Phantom Lord arc, everyone in the guild is out for Phantom's blood when their rivals demolish their guildhall, but Makarov refuses to take action since it's reparable. But when Gajeel brutalizes Levy and her friends and leaves them hospitalized, Makarov personally leads the assault on Phantom to make them pay for hurting his kids.
- In the Grand Magic Games arc, Lucy gets arrested by one of the kingdom's officials, who offers Fairy Tail her reprieve if they win the tournament. The guild agrees to his terms, but sends a team to break Lucy out of jail anyway.
- In the Tartaros arc, Fairy Tail once again goes to war with an enemy guild, this time for nearly killing Laxus, the Raijin Tribe, and former Council member Yajima, who is an old friend of Makarov's.
- The whole crux of the Alvarez Empire arc is that Zeref wants to use Lumen Histoire to destroy the timeline just so he can have a do-over with his own life. That's bad enough. But that also means doing harm to the girl who brought Fairy Tail together in the first place. To a Fairy Tail wizard, that's simply inexcusable.
- Kung-Fu Wizard: A good number of their finest members can hold their own in a good old-fashioned fist-fight without their magic.
- No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Even though they have a bad rap with the Council that maintains order in the magic world, not to mention a horrible track record of keeping things unbroken whenever they perform even the simplest of tasks, they still keep getting work, are beloved by much of the general populace, and grow to become one of the largest and most popular guilds in the entire Kingdom of Fiore.
- Parental Abandonment: Most of the guild's core members are either missing or dead. All the more reason for them to consider each other one big family.
- Phrase Catcher: Whenever a member or group of wizards destroys something, expect onlookers to cry, "He/She/They overdid it!"
- The Power of Friendship: Fairy Tail not only embodies the concept of True Companions, it downright weaponizes it. Magic in the Fairy Tail world is fueled by the power of one's emotions, so seeing their friends get hurt pushes a button that multiplies their power a hundredfold.
- Secret Art: The three Great Fairy Magics are legendary spells developed by their founder Mavis Vermillion, and can only be performed by those who bear the Fairy Tail emblem. They are Fairy Law, a radiant light that purges those the caster determines to be their enemy; Fairy Glitter, a similar spell that obliterates any target; and Fairy Sphere, a defensive bubble that wards off any manner of evil.
- Thou Shalt Not Kill: Downplayed They have stated a few times that they never take another life whenever they can help it, with the majority of villains who have died either killing themselves or someone else finishing them off. However, that doesn't mean they haven't taken lives; it's just that those who have actually died directly by Fairy Tail's hand are not even human, the majority of which are remorseless, artificially created demons bred to kill, and one being an intelligent but no less ruthless machine, so they're never broken up about it.
- Underdogs Never Lose: Played with; Fairy Tail gains its underdog status after being crippled by Acnologia and placing dead last in six consecutive Grand Magic Games off-screen. When Fairy Tail's core members return and decide to take part, virtually everyone in the kingdom except their closest allies expects them to fail miserably once again. Even with their three months of training and awakening of their Second Origins, they get off to a rocky start in the preliminaries and the first day. Of course, this doesn't last into the second day, where they start to turn things around and take the rest of the games by storm until they finally beat the reigning champion on the final day.
- We ARE Struggling Together: The Battle of Fairy Tail arc sees Laxus start an inter-guild battle royal by holding a number of the guild's female members, and later all of Magnolia, hostage and forcing all the other members to fight each other in order to save them. When the time comes for them to band together and save the town, they're still sore about the battle and do nothing but bicker until Erza (Lucy in the anime) convinces them to put their differences aside.
