Fairy Tail Final?:

This week marks the final episode of Fairy Tail, an anime that has reliably released new content every year since 2009.  It will be sorely missed, but it isn't the end.

On the manga front, there's still 100 Years Quest, Happy's Great Adventure, City Hero, and the crossover manga Heroes.  Edens Zero also features a lot of Fairy Tail callbacks.  I don't know how long these spinoff and sequel manga intend to continue, but for now there's more Fairy Tail than ever.  It's a shame the anime won't be covering these, but I do admit the original ending was a pretty nice stopping point in and of itself.

I'm just so happy Fairy Tail was animated to the end.  Look what happened to Bleach.  Or alternatively, look at the horror story that is Bolt, which is looking to be as long as the original series but this time entirely composed of filler.  Fairy Tail's legacy is in much better hands than any other franchise.  One Piece is so slow and dragged out that only a fan edit makes watching it humanly possible.  And even this fan edit is lucky to release a single new episode per month.

I'll choose Fairy Tail's anime adaption every time over the alternatives.

Even Pretty Cure is hit and miss these days.  Star Twinkle is great, but the previous two seasons were barely watchable.  I assume there are many more seasons of Precure to come, but there's no telling whether any of them will be worth watching either.  That was never true of Fairy Tail.  Fairy Tail, so long as it wasn't filler, was always great from start to finish.

With the ending of Fairy Tail comes the ending of all the stalwarts that used to populate anime.  One Piece is over, replaced by sporadic episodes of One Pace.  Naruto ended ages ago.  Bleach was cut short.  Pretty Cure has become unreliable.  Dragon Ball Super ended last year.  Now Fairy Tail is also gone.  It used to not matter what season it was, the same great anime would always be on.  Now each seasonal change is a clean sweep, every single watchable anime ends and is replaced by something new, which may or may not be as good as its predecessor.  It's the end of an era.

The only two series carrying on from summer into fall are Star Twinkle Precure and Vinland Saga.  The fall season has SAO so no big deal, we'll be just fine with the new slate, but not every new season has SAO promised. . .It's a high risk situation from here on out that there could end up being nothing good on tv at all.

I miss the good old days of 2009 where everything was reliable.  Naruto, Bleach, Fairy Tail, One Piece, Pretty Cure, Inuyasha, Major, Index/Railgun, whichever Kyoto Animation adaption of a key visual novel was currently going, Hayate no Gotoku, Dragon Ball Kai, Bakemonogatari, To Love ru, Shakugan no Shana, Maria-sama ga Miteru, Saki, all this stuff used to air like clockwork.

There was always another episode of this coming.  It was as assured as the sun rising.  Now we're in a position where we don't know what, if anything, is going to happen with anime in the spring of 2020.  It's totally uncharted territory.  There may be nothing decent at all.

For the most part, this golden age of anime could be restored tomorrow.  There's still plenty of un-animated content for Bleach, Fairy Tail, One Piece, Major, Index/Railgun, Key works, Hayate no Gotoku, Bakemonogatari, To Love ru, Maria-sama ga Miteru and Saki.  Imagine that being announced for the spring 2020 season.  Boom!  12 great franchises right there.  Instead we're getting a bunch of unproven amateur series from god knows where, all likely to end in 12 eps, so even if they were good it wouldn't even matter.  Make me world dictator and I'd make anime great again. . .