YMMV / EDENS ZERO

• And You Thought It Would Fail: In Japan, where Mashima's works are received more favorably than in the West, doubts were still raised over the anime adaptation's success due to its after-midnight broadcast time. Against all expectations, its first three episodes managed to pull in an unusually high rating of 2.2%, while its seventh episode managed to climb into the top 10 highest rated episodes that week with a rating of 2.5%, making it the second highest viewed anime to debut in the Spring 2021 season. A second season has been announced.
• Anvilicious: The story isn't very subtle with the message that Androids Are People, Too, digital AI beings and non-humanoid aliens included.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Inevitable when it's the spiritual successor to Fairy Tail. The similar character designs to Fairy Tail primed people to expect the fan service before ever reading or watching it. To be fair, Mashima definitely delivers.
• Broken Base: The time loop to Universe Zero. This essentially reboots the entire story, though the main cast regain their memories as they reunite.
  • For some, it's interesting to see how differently several characters' lives play out, especially with some former antagonists getting a more positive portrayal. For others, it's disappointing to see the post-Time Skip designs revoked, as well as the undoing of Valkyrie and Witch's deaths that had previously been handled quite maturely.
  • Fans have also debated the presence of previous Universe antagonists, such as Draken Joe and Shura, as cautious allies in Universe Zero; one half thinks it allows the story to explore more of their human sides after hints in their respective arcs, while others think it takes away what made them memorable villains in the first place by simply going to a timeline where they never reached their moral low points.
• Catharsis Factor: Mashima stated in interviews that he dialed up the vileness of some of the major villains, as he was sick of making them sympathetic in Fairy Tail, so fans would be more than happy to see them get throttled. To wit:
  • Illega collects beautiful women from different planets to be turned to stone and treated like furniture, offering no interest in their lives. Seeing Shiki and later Rebecca knock him out is utterly gratifying.
  • After being shown to be nothing but a heartless mercenary who uses Sister's healing powers to justify her acts of brutality on her own soldiers, the fake Sister gets a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown by the rightfully pissed off real Sister for ten years of captivity—while she's trying to deliver a sob story explaining why she went to such lengths in the first place. And as the cherry on the cake, Jinn slowly and painfully smashes her head in as revenge for her lying to and manipulating him.
  • Seeing Spider beaten at his own hacking game by Hermit after boasting about his unfair advantages, then later killed for stupidly thinking Drakken would avenge his loss when he goes whining to him.
  • Garrot getting his butt kicked by Valkyrie's sword after disrespecting her memory in front of Homura, whom he abuses for much of the Sun Jewel arc until forced to fight her head on.
  • Madame Kurenai's haughtiness breaking after Shiki beats her mech and leaves her at Homura's mercy. Homura, who has every right to hate her mother for everything from abandoning her to causing Valkyrie's death, forgoes revenge and forgiveness in favor of telling her to never come close again if she wants to keep it that way. Kurenai takes her mercy for granted and starts planning her revenge...only to run straight into a group of men she abused, led by a model whom she disfigured and enslaved for cruelty's sake, which he repays via cracking her in the face with a bat as a start.
  • Pretty much all of the Belial Gore Arc's second half after the crew's loss to Drakken Joe's forces in the first timeline. They intercept Maria, Seth and Diego's sneak attack (especially nice after Maria mocked Sister for falling for it the first time) and take the fight directly to Drakken. The Shining Stars handily dispatch each member in one-on-one battles, and Drakken's source of power is destroyed, allowing Shiki a more even playing field in their fight where he manages to come out on top.
  • After seeing Hermit's backstory back in the Digitalis Arc, as well as Jinn and Kleene's in the Foresta Arc, Müller finally gets taken down by Weisz after readers were left waiting for the sick doctor to get a worse punishment than simply being arrested. Topping it off is Hermit giving him the final insult by tricking him into turning off the signal for Ziggy's virus, then punching his disembodied head into a wall.
• Complete Monster:
  • 'Guilst' (aka 'Planet Guilst Assault') arc: Illega is a bloated frog alien who pays criminals to kidnap and bring him women, who he turns into stone statues to be used as furniture. Once Rebecca uncovers his room containing hundreds of stone women, Illega arrives holding Copa at gunpoint, promising to release her should Rebecca kneel before him and become his toy forever. When news of the planet destroying Chronophage arrives, Illega plans to start his collection again on another planet.
  • 'Digitalis' (aka 'Hermit') arc: Spider goes by the name Jamilov in the Digitalis RPG Rogue Fantasia. Cheating to give himself an advantage, Jamilov wanders through the fantasy computer world, slaughtering the living NPCs for fun, while taking a special joy in murdering player characters so he can also kill them in the real world, exterminating entire towns. When he arrives at the town Shiki and Rebecca are at, Jamilov tortures and impales several PCs upon a spike to let them die slow and gleefully brings an army to massacre every living thing there, even trying to murder a child for an advantage. When thwarted, he tries to erase the Eden's Zero and kill everyone aboard the ship for sheer spite.
  • "Digitalis" & "Foresta" arcs: Dr. Müller is a figure from Hermit's past who manipulated her into activating the "Accelerator" under the pretense on saving Hook, a neighboring planet populated with androids. With the Accelerator being used to instead destroy Hook out of a sense of human superiority, Müller reveals his true colors to Hermit as he tortures and dismantles her for research and amusement. Making an escape from prison that resulted in the loss of his body, Müller crafted an O-Tech body for himself, using several humans as guinea pigs for his robotic experiments. Developing a grudge against the Rutherford family for withdrawing their funding from him, Müller kidnapped the young Kleene and Jinn after murdering their parents, and sadistically forced Kleene to watch as he dismantled her brother to be given O-Tech implants. Later partnering with Ziggy in his plan to take down Foresta with a robot virus, Müller is given an unlimited supply of humans to experiment on as he guards the server containing the virus. Once Hermit and Weisz arrive to stop him, Müller tries to have all the humans on Foresta wiped out by the planet's robots, and later activates the Doomsday System in an attempt to destroy the entire planet.
  • 'Sun Jewel' arc: Kurenai Kogetsu, aka Madam Kurenai, was a slave freed by the heroine Valkyrie. Rather than return to her lost daughter Homura, Kurenai married the slaver Baron Mordo and murdered him to take over the planet Sun Jewel. Running the world as a horrific tyrant, Kurenai uses an orbital cannon to vaporize anyone who defies her and amuses herself via sadistic games such as burning a model's face off and using him as a broken pet. Upon the rebellion of the mining districts, Kurenai decides to exterminate them all, including her own daughter, simply to show she is not to be defied and to punish them for still honoring Valkyrie's memory.
  • 'Lendard' arc: Cure is a member of the Oración Seis Interstellar who is secretly responsible for three of the Oracion Seis Galactica's rise to power. Cure is also the one behind most conflicts of the Sakura Cosmos and Aoi Cosmos arcs, as he gave Drakken and Nero their powers, thus being behind 200 years of a planet's population being drained, the lives lost during the Aoi war, and the creation of Deadend Crow, an enormous Titan Android who has killed millions of people. When confronted by his ally Holy, a survivor of "Bloody Atmos Day Incident" by the hands of Crow, he blasts her in the stomach and admits he gave Drakken, Nero, and Crow their power so he could create villains in order to justify the existence of the Oración Seis Interstellar. Cure is willing to sacrifice anyone so he can maintain a disturbed balance of good and evil. uncaring for all the lives taken in the process.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • After facing some resistance from readers who saw her as little more than an Erza Scarlet knockoff, Elsie Crimson has garnered a more stable following after showing herself to be quite lovable, morally ambiguous, and unashamedly Troll-ish.
  • Captain Connor, due to being a Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass and getting a hilarious scene where he teaches Pino how to swear, has become a Memetic Badass among fans.
  • Laguna of Drakken Joe's Element Four is quite popular for the Jojo-ish air to his appearance and abilities, as well as being among the more Affably Evil members of Joe's group, getting a Heel–Face Turn later on.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Fans have taken the similar/identical character designs of Fairy Tail characters and the futuristic setting to mean that this series actually takes place in the future of that series, with the characters being their descendants or reincarnations.
  • Some believe with the introduction of the story's planet-hopping theme that the settings of Fairy Tail and Mashima's other works will also crop up in the form of alternate worlds and planets, setting the foundation for a potential "Mashimaverse". While Mashima denied this himself in an interview, he stated in the same interview that he considered actually doing it ever since the fans' idea got him thinking about it. About a year later, he started working on Mashima HERO'S, a short Crossover manga series between EDENS ZERO, Fairy Tail, and Rave Master.
  • Due to the cameos of Fairy Tail characters, and a particularly large role for Happy, there are those who believe this series is actually a novel written by Lucy. This idea got flipped on its head when Rebecca alludes to an old manga where guilds are more like families than places to work.
  • Following the reveal of how Rebecca's Ether Gear "Cat Leaper" works, some fans have started a theory that Rebecca isn't jumping back to a certain point in time, but rather traversing into an Alternate Timeline. Prior to Rebecca using it to return to the past when Drakken attacks the Edens Zero, Captain Connor was found and saved by Shiki and company, accompanied the crew and even navigated a treacherous part of space to help them reach Sun Jewel, but after she makes it to the past, Connor was never found by the crew and they made it to their destination without any complications. The theory was later confirmed in Chapter 173 when Rebecca learns more about her ability from Noah.
• Fandom Rivalry: With fellow Science Fantasy Shōnen manga Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru by Masashi Kishimoto, the creator of Naruto. Not helping is how Kishimoto voiced his desire to work with Science Fiction years before Mashima formally announced his plans for a new series, or how Mashima's main reason for setting this series in space was because no one else was doing it at the time.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Before Shiki's name was revealed, Fairy Tail readers took to calling him "Gratsu" due to having Gray's hair and Natsu's face.
  • Some fans like to call Rebecca "Becca" for short. Others have given her the full name "Rebecca Bluegarden" after her home planet, much like how Shiki derives his surname from his own planet, Granbell, the latter of which turned out to be true.
  • Before her name was revealed, Witch was commonly identified by readers as "E4", the code that is found on her helmet.
  • Those unfamiliar with this series (but familiar with Fairy Tail) sometimes use Recycled In Space terminology when referring to characters that are clear Expies of Mashima's previous work. For example, "Space Natsu" for Shiki, "Space Lucy" for Rebecca, "Space Erza" for Elsie, and so on.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Calling the series "Fairy Tail 2.0" or "Fairy Tail in Space" is sure to at least ruffle the feathers of its most diehard fans, because while its earliest chapters certainly gave many the impression that it would largely be rehash, the series quickly set itself apart from its predecessor by having a much darker, harsher tone, a less haphazardly written story, and a more cynical yet cautiously optimistic approach to The Power of Friendship.
• Fetish Retardant: A disproportionate amount of the manga's fanservicey scenes consist of an attractive female character (usually Rebecca, but nobody is truly safe) getting violently sexually humiliated, often during a life-or-death battle. Needless to say, it gets old fast.
• Franchise Original Sin: More in terms of a Creator-Driven Successor, this series has received complaints for using designs that are similar and, in some cases, virtually identical to those from Fairy Tail (e.g., Happy and Erza). However, these aspects can be found in Fairy Tail itself, whose characters not only bear similar designs from preceding works such as Rave Master and Monster Soul, but also recycled characters and names from those series under different contexts, either as part of Fake Crossover (such as Plue, who debuted in Rave), or as an Expy (such as Jellal/Siegrain, a loving Shout-Out to Rave character Sieg Hart).
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • There tends to be a lot of overlap with the One Piece fandom, which makes sense considering that both series follow the adventures of a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits lead by a lovable Idiot Hero as travel the ocean/universe in their awesome ships. This is pretty amazing, considering the fierce rivalry One Piece's fanbase had with EDENS ZERO's predecessor's
  • With Black Clover, which has many former fans of Fairy Tail with both series taking place in a world of magic and having a colorful cast. By overlap, many of them are now fans of this series.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The manga has gained an increasingly devoted fanbase in the United States and France, and has televised marketing in the latter. Reasons for this include its uncommon Space Fantasy setting in the modern market, its considerably Darker and Edgier tone than Fairy Tail, and a cast of characters that plays well off of each other.
• Gotta Ship 'Em All: As the spiritual successor to Fairy Tail and with a huge cast, this is to be expected. Of course there are fans of the more obvious pairings like Shiki x Rebecca and Justice x Elsie, but don't discount fans of Ho Yay and Les Yay pairings like Shiki x Weisz and Rebecca x Homura to name a few.
• Growing the Beard: Some fans of the series tend to think that EDENS ZERO doesn't truly pick up steam until around the end of the Digitalis arc through the Sun Jewel arc, which mark the start of less rushed pacing, more emotionally intelligent writing, other main characters besides Shiki getting their own fight scenes and taking a level in badass (with Rebecca becoming an Empowered Badass Normal after several arcs of buildup), some genuinely challenging villains, and an improved use of Foreshadowing, including The Reveal that Valkyrie—set up as a major supporting character—was Dead All Along, and the ensuing fallout with Homura and the other Shining Stars.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In chapter 83, during the Belial Gore arc, when Drakken Joe makes an example out of Weisz by cutting off his arm, Jinn leaves stating that he doesn't "have fond memories of mutilation." This line is cryptic at the time, but takes on a harsher meaning when his backstory is revealed and we find out that he had his limbs sawed off while he was wide awake and his little sister was forced to watch.
  • The accident that crippled Happy and resulted in him being reconstructed as a bot was already a sad backstory, but it gets worse once we learn how Cat Leaper really works. In a previous timeline, Rebecca would have been the one to die in that accident but her powers activated to save her life. In other words, she unconsciously leapt to a world where Happy was hit instead of her.
  • During the climax of the Sakura Cosmos Saga, the Big Bad tells Shiki that they are giving him the "blessing" of dying alongside his friends. On the surface, this just seems like a typical villain line. However, given the fact that Ziggy is an alternate Shiki whose decision to attempt to avert Nero 66's destruction ultimately led to Rebecca's death and him being sent 20,000 years in the future and ultimately becoming Ziggy, one can't help but wonder if this had been a Freudian Slip on their part.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: According to Word of God, the reason Mashima decided to make this work a "Space Fantasy" series was because there were no other ongoing Shōnen manga set in space. Eleven months later, Masashi Kishimoto launched his own Science Fiction manga, Samurai 8: The Tale of Hachimaru, which also happened to be set in space.
• I Knew It!:
  • "Rebecca Bluegarden" was an early Fan Nickname for her before it was finally confirmed in Chapter 79.
  • Fans correctly suspected that Homura was a Red Herring Mole who was being impersonated by an actual Mole on Digitalis since it was established early in the arc that players' Digital Avatars aren't restricted to their appearances in real life, despite evidence that Homura realistically could have been The Mole (though to Mashima's credit, he intended the Red Herring Mole plot from the start).
  • Xiaomei, a Fourth-Wall Observer who serves as the series' Greek Chorus, was many readers' first guess for the identity of the mysterious Fortune Teller who knows everything across all of time.
  • Due to the build-up surrounding the Sun Jewel arc, many correctly predicted that Valkyrie would be Too Cool to Live and get killed off by the end—though few actually expected her to be Dead All Along.
  • On account of their resemblance and style of dress, few were surprised at the familial relationship between Homura and Madame Kurenai, her mother.
  • The revelation that Sylph was Jinn's sister, Kleene, was anticipated due to their shared wind powers.
  • In the English dub trailer, most people have correctly predicted that Sean Chiplock, Tia Ballard, Ray Chase, Sarah Anne Williams and Colleen Clinkenbeard would voice Shiki, Happy, Weisz, Pino and Mother, respectively.
• Iron Woobie: Rebecca is such a Plucky Girl that you'd never know how rough she has it by looking at her. She got left on the streets of Blue Garden as a little girl, assuming her parents ditched her; she watched Happy nearly die horribly in front of her shortly after; her friend Labilia turned into a vicious and petty bully who'd invite complete strangers to get in on laughing at her; she gets thrust into life-threatening situations on a regular basis after making her new friends; and she finds out she's jumped from multiple timelines where she or her new friends were endangered or killed during said situations, with the first incident she remembers in full being the week she was imprisoned by Drakken Joe after he killed Shiki and completely broke her other friends for her sake.
• Like You Would Really Do It: While the sequence has been generally well received for its grim tone and establishing the villains as a credible threat, it was generally accepted that Drakken Joe's on-screen execution of Shiki wouldn't stick, and was correctly predicted to be undone by Rebecca's time travel ability, something that Mashima had already been building up since the preceding arc.
• Love to Hate:
  • While Young Weisz is repeatedly depicted as a selfish, greedy, lecherous scumbag despite being one of the main protagonists, readers find enjoyment in having such a seedy Anti-Hero as a main character, seeing it as a nice change of pace from the more fundamentally heroic protagonists of Mashima's past works.
  • By Chapter 83, Drakken Joe has been heralded as one of Mashima's most credible villains, not because of any particularly interesting motivations, but because of his genuinely intimidating presence, no-nonsense villainy, and his act of definitively breaking—and in Shiki's case, killing—the heroes in a relentlessly brutal fashion, to the point that Rebecca going back in time gives them their one and only chance they have at fighting back.
• Memetic Badass: Captain Connor has garnered a reputation among a small yet vocal number of fans as a master of everything he does following his debut chapter where he steers the titular ship through a cluttered debris field without any of the crew noticing, despite not appearing for several months worth of chapters after that.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "Fairy Tail 2.0"^contextAn alternative title for the series itself due to its characters' blatant similarities in design to the author's previous work, Fairy Tail.
    • "Fairy Tail IN SPACE!"^contextSame as above, but accounting for The Reveal of the series' Space Fantasy setting.
  • "Natsu and Gray had a child"^contextA Ho Yay joke over Shiki's resemblance to main male Fairy Tail characters Natsu and Gray, sporting the former's face and the latter's hair.
  • "More ryona. More mindbreak. More PTSD."^contextThe series has become notorious on certain imageboards for its steadily increasing moments of shocking violence and mental disturbance, especially compared to its Lighter and Softer predecessor Fairy Tail, enough that some readers began anticipating how far Mashima would go based on the belief that True Art Is Angsty.
  • "insert a bomb into the rectum"^contextIjuna's morbid backstory with Shura involved her suffering an Ass Shove with a bomb at one point, and became quite memorable once mentioned.
  • "MILF hunter"^contextThe Big Bad is revealed in the Lendard arc to have collected thousands of human mothers and kept them inside People Jars as part of his plan to find Mother.
• Mis-blamed: One of the criticisms levied against the series is the overuse of the word "friend", something that alienated a number of readers. A sizeable amount of the word choice is a result of unofficial Scanlations exclusively translating the word nakama as "friend", when the original word typically has a different meaning depending on its context.^note The more typical word for "friend", tomodachi, is also common in the series, while nakama more accurately means a group bound by common interests that don't necessarily include friendship. By contrast, the official translation takes the opposite approach by switching up the translation as the scene demands, using words such as "crew", "team", "on your side", and pretty much any kind of applicable term besides "friend" wherever appropriate.
• Moe: Pino is a textbook example of an adorable little android with a meek yet innocently intellectual personality, a noseless face with big puppy dog eyes, and antennae that characters state make her vaguely resemble a tiny bunny rabbit. Her cuteness is only further enhanced by her Art Evolution, making her head bigger, her arms and legs stubbier, and her face squishier.
• Older Than They Think: Mashima's inclination towards Reused Character Designs and Shout-Outs relating to Fairy Tail in this series isn't especially new for him, as Fairy Tail itself is filled with just as many references to Mashima's earlier works, most prominently his first major series, Rave Master.
• Robo Ship: Inevitable with a cast full of sexy robot women. In particular, Weisz x Hermit became popular after their fight against Dr. Müller and the Volume 15 manga cover depicting them together.
• The Scrappy: Couchpo was generally overlooked by fans when she was a minor supporting character, but many raised their eyebrows when she was made a full-time crew member, since she basically serves as The Load who's just there for the food, and has no fighting experience or apparent role beyond giving Rebecca's content some much-needed constructive criticism. Mashima's attempts to rectify this by making her a calming voice of reason during the Nero 66 arc have done little to persuade readers, who continued to wonder why she was still around after the three-year Time Skip.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: The manga has a rather directionless start for its first two chapters, spending most of its time on building the dynamic between Shiki and Rebecca while essentially leaving them to wander about until the central plot—a search for Mother to attract friends and subscribers, respectively—is established in the third chapter. The anime fixes this by tying Mother into the plot of these chapters from the very beginning and giving the characters the incentive of having their wishes granted by her^note The knowledge that Mother is a wish-granter isn't shared in the manga until Chapter 48, well into the anime's second cour, but even then, character and worldbuilding continue to take center stage for the first proper arc. It's not until the end of Chapter 15 (Episode 7 by comparison) where the titular ship is revealed that the gears of the plot truly begin to turn, leading to a notable improvement in quality overall.
• Spiritual Successor: EDENS ZERO draws heavily from its predecessor, Fairy Tail, following a boy with powers from a bygone age who was raised by a currently absent, non-human caretaker, quickly partnering with a girl who runs into him by circumstance and becomes his most cherished friend.
• Squick:
  • While mostly depicted in a Gory Discretion Shot, enough of Happy's body and blood is shown right after getting struck by a drunk driver to give an impression of just how horribly maimed he was, with a shot of torn flesh at the bottom of the panel indicating that his lower body was completely torn off or flattened.
  • Somehow, Mashima managed to make an image of a dead planet look nauseating by showing it to have been ripped apart into two chunks, both held together by organic, sinewy-looking ether strands, like some kind of exposed muscle or entrails.
  • The image of an NPC woman turning her face to reveal half of her head missing isn't quite as bad as it sounds, since it's just a mess of broken code without any actual gore. The immediate follow-up image of real life players Impaled with Extreme Prejudice on top of a tower spire, just barely alive long enough for the crew to witness their final moments...not so much.
  • Chapter 65 has a handful of some truly grotesque imagery:
    • Garrot's referral to Valkyrie as a "fine woman" makes him look like a creep on its own, but it takes on a much more sickening light upon The Reveal that she was Dead All Along, and he continues to demonstrate his "attraction" by licking her face, which distinctly looks like a rotting corpse. Suddenly he goes from an average creep to a veiled necrophile.
    • The way Homura defeats Garrot: using Valkyrie's sword to invoke Death from Above, causing it to impale him straight through his chest and out his back. Although it's silhouetted, it's otherwise on full display, complete with a realistic splash of blood, and we see the direct aftermath as he's still alive, twitching and moaning in agony afterwards.
  • Shura:
    • To start he's introduced by "dropping" two women into a high ceiling with his gravity power. He claims that women are "a dime a dozen" and that everything in the Aoi Cosmos belongs to him as the blood from their splattered corpses drips around him.
    • Once again he uses his gravity to crush a subordinate to death for calling Ijuna a comfort woman.
    • Chapter 147 pairs sexual assault on a captured and bound Witch as Shura gropes her, followed by him stabbing her with a knife. No Gory Discretion Shot either.
• Tainted by the Preview: The series attracted backlash from readers of Fairy Tail when the first sketches of the main characters were released, showing that they simply looked like precursors Natsu and Lucy with slightly different hair styles. The first key visual added to the backlash when it revealed not just other characters with similar designs, but identical-looking Fairy Tail characters such as Happy and Erza.
• They Copied It, So It Sucks!: The manga's derivative elements to Mashima's earlier works are taken as a point of contention against the series, despite this being a staple of Mashima's work, including the manga he derives from:
  • Regarding the character designs, fans weren't happy to see the main characters Shiki and Rebecca simply looking like Natsu and Lucy in wigs, and feared they wouldn't be able to distinguish much from the two pairs. It's also compounded by the presence of Fairy Tail Expies such as Happy and Elsie (Erza)^note a tradition of Mashima's is to reinvent specific characters from older works in his new series. This has lessened with the release of the first chapter, which shows off the characters' more distinct traits to help set them apart, such as Shiki struggling and putting more of an effort into making friends than Natsu, and Happy's role reversal as the straight guy to Rebecca's silly girl, as opposed to the silly guy to Lucy's straight girl.
  • There are readers familiar with Mashima's Monster Hunter manga, Monster Hunter Orage, who would've preferred it if EDENS ZERO's protagonist had a more distinct name than "Shiki", the same name as Orage's protagonist.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Digitalis arc barely explores the concept of a virtual world with sentient NPCs and enemies beyond visiting two practically indistinguishable cities, instead focusing on Hermit's dilemma and an Arc Villain who murders players IRL and uses cheats to make himself invincible. Mashima didn't help matters when he revealed his original ideas for the plot that put more focus on the citizens and other players, including Labilia^note who would return for a small but prominent role just two arcs later, which he felt would have caused Arc Fatigue. As for the Plot Twist of Homura being a Red Herring Mole, while handled well enough, some have felt the idea of one of Shiki's friends actually betraying him would have helped make the overall story more interesting.
• Too Cool to Live: As one of the most powerful heroic characters established next to the Demon King, and far more so than the main cast, a number of readers have found it come to little surprise that Valkyrie would be Killed Off for Real somehow (though few expected her to be Dead All Along).
• Unnecessary Makeover: Fans like Weisz regardless, but quite a few were sore that his slicked back hair was done away with for his allegedly more natural spiky 'do. Some fans commented that it helped differentiate him from Mashima's other coolheaded male sidekick archetypes (such as Gray or Musica, the latter of whom also underwent a midseries makeover), but now that it's gone he looks like a lighter haired Shiki.
• War Ship: Elsie and Justice.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: When the Animated Adaptation rolled out, a number of people got the impression from the very first episode that the series was going to be geared more towards younger children with its assortment of technicolor robots and a protagonist whose goal amounts to making a buttload of friends. Besides having his typical brand of Ecchi humor, the story stands as one of Mashima's darkest and grittiest works, with more graphic violence, sickening imagery, and grounded depictions of human cruelty. The anime also cuts back far less on the Bloodless Carnage that the adaptation of Fairy Tail was notorious for.
• The Woobie: Pino is such a sweet and innocent little bot that it's heartbreaking when the crew discovers she was physically and emotionally abused by Sibir, who tore off her leg, replaced it with a screw, and erased her memories so she'd have no choice but to register him as her master, something she's painfully aware of. This has left her not just with a crippling fear of Sibir's reformed present day self and an extreme dislike of bullies in general, but a serious case of confusion and uncertainty in the purpose of her existence.
• Woolseyism: Kodansha has proven to be quite liberal when it comes to translating the series into English, particularly the Japanese names and phrases:
  • Rebecca's Verbal Tic in Japanese is the comically masculine particle zeyo whenever she feels angry or insulted, while others pick up on how bizarre that sounds. To retain this gag, Kodansha replaces "zeyo" with the equally strange pet name "ducky", turning it into a Term Of Endangerment.
  • The name of the Chronophage is a pre-existing approximation of its Japanese name, "Tokihami", both of which consist of words meaning "time" ("chrono-" and "toki") and "eating" ("-phage" and "hami"). It also helps that the word "chronophage" typically refers to something that's time-consuming, which applies in a more literal sense here.
  • The massive tree on Guilst is known as the "Kikaiju", a pun on "machine" (kikai) and the Japanese name for Yggdrasil (Sekaiju), the World Tree of Norse mythology. Kodansha retains the pun by calling the tree "Mechdrasil".
  • The Oración Seis Galáctica (Spanish for "Galactic Prayer Six") are known as "Ginga Rokumashō" (Galaxy's Six Demon Generals) in Japanese, unlike the Oración Seis from Rave Master and Fairy Tail, which are written with furigana^note which tell the reader how to pronounce/read a particular word or phrase in kanji while maintaining the meaning of the kanji used for Oración Seis. However, as its Japanese name is very similar to the kanji used for Fairy Tail's Seis, "Rokuma Shōgun" (Six Demon Generals), the name fits.
    • When the manga subsequently introduced a faction of the Interstellar Union Army directly called the Oración Seis in Japanese, the translators adopted the kanji of this name, "Seikei Rokukishō" (Star System's Six Prayer Generals) into the English name, thus turning it into "Oración Seis Interestelar" ("Interstellar Prayer Six") and keeping the parallels between the two Japanese names from being Lost in Translation.

---