Fairy Gone 2nd Season Series Review: Could Have Been Worse, Could Have Been the First

Series Positives

If you want my thoughts concerning the first season of Fairy Gone (Season One), here’s a brief synopsis:

It was terrible.

I went into the second season of Fairy Gone (Season Two) with a sense of obligation rather than interest. I won’t explicitly say the failure of Season One doomed its successor from the start. Still, for Season Two to be worth anything, it would have needed to clean up a convoluted mess, reintroduce forgotten characters, and tell a story that was both interesting as well as enjoyable. Frankly, that was asking a lot.

To Season Two’s credit, although it didn’t deliver that unlikely reversal, it was much, MUCH better than its predecessor.

Season One was a dull, complex web of lore building. On top of figuring out what the story was, this series expected you to remember the names of all its characters, locations, titles, former countries, weapons, fairies, etc. Fairy Gone even had its own calendar and dating system. Season Two was a comparative masterpiece seeing how it was much more straightforward. Boring and lackluster, granted, but straightforward, nonetheless.

Admittedly, it isn’t much of a compliment to say a story made sense. But you have to understand the relief it was to be five episodes into this season and know exactly what was going on and what the goal was.

And again, the soundtrack was also pretty good.

It might seem like I am running dry on this section already. It’s because I am.

We need to remember, Season Two may have been an upgrade, but it was starting from the bottom. Had this been the first season, I very much doubt I would have given it a recommendation. At no point in Season Two was I interested in the characters or their goals. There was no sense of attachment to this world, and at no time did anything ever feel like much of a threat.

It was great that the lecture-style narrative of the first season didn’t make a return, but let me tell you something. I didn’t remember anything about Season One when starting Season Two, and I think I remember even less having now finished Season Two. You could probably watch this installment just fine without needing to sit through the last.

But that remains a problem because Season Two itself gave no reason to be worth watching either.

Series Negatives

This series thought it was hotter s@#$ than it had any right to assume.

There was a moment in Season Two that was setting up the playing field for the big climax. The main villains realized they didn’t have enough manpower to face the Dorothea adequately. To fill their ranks, they decided to recruit “someone they knew.” Let me set the scene.

The character in question was off to the side of the screen. You couldn’t see their face, but as the music started playing, the series was building up a sense of foreboding. Whoever this “mystery” character was, they must have been important because why else would they be cast in an ominous shadow? Then the big reveal came, and the soundtrack blared and grew intense, using the same sort of music for every other bad guy who is reentering a story.

The character appeared, the episode ended on a cliffhanger, and indeed, the heroes were in trouble.

Or, at least, I have to imagine that was the intention. I can’t really say since the first thing out of my mouth when I saw the person the series was hyping up was, “Who the hell is that?”

Season Two did this all the goddamn time. Whenever this story thought it was doing something super cool and epic, it failed to realize there was practically zero context for what was happening. Yeah, a lot of this had to do with the flop that was Season One, but Season Two didn’t add anything of its own either. Nothing new was brought to this story.

I’m curious; if you are someone who enjoyed Season One for its story, was Season Two at all satisfying?

I need to ask because I wasn’t expecting Season Two to lead anywhere. It took me a few episodes of watching this installment for me to realize there was an overarching plot between the seasons.

On top of that, almost everything about this series, not just Season Two, was bland and generic. From just this installment, there were cookie-cutter bad guys, uninspired heroes, zero-impact fights, atrociously awful CGI animation, a paint-by-numbers plot, and keep in mind; this was the BETTER of the two seasons.

When I finished Season Two, I wondered if Fairy Gone could have worked better had I watched it as a whole. On the one hand, there wouldn’t be a six-month gap that would cause me to forget everything that happened in the first half. On the other hand, to get to anything resembling a competent narrative, I would have to sit through twelve episodes of heavy-handed world-building that would ultimately not come to matter much in the second half.

In the past, when I have reviewed shows that were split-cour (a long-form anime split into two standard length series with a break season in between), the first installment has always needed to establish interest for its follow up. Later, the second installment must give justification for the wait. Fairy Gone did neither.

Season One was an overly complicated slog, and Season Two was as stale as can be. The pick-your-poison scenario this series presented isn’t one you need to indulge.