According to a confirmed report via ANN, the ongoing series Fairy Tail looks like it’s about to come to a close at the end of March just as the new spring season gears up. Information was revealed via Kodansha’s TV Magazine that the series will air its final episode on March 30th, 2013. The show has typically gotten its renewal news in the fall of each year, with the series originally premiering back in October of 2009, but no such notice came last year which has left fans wondering what the fate of the show would be.
After the news was revealed, the mangaka tweeted about it by asking fans to stay patient and that more news was coming.
ツイッターでもづっと言いたかった事は時がくるまでは言えないんです。よい発表ができる日まで我慢。
— 真島ヒロ (@hiro_mashima) March 2, 2013
The more creative fans looked at the structure of the tweet and speculation runs that it’s worded in a “coded” way that says that more anime will be coming, just not in what form. With the TV series doing fairly low in the ratings in Japan and recent home video releases selling in the hundreds of copies at best at times, it’s not a surprise that a new approach would be taken to the aging show which is now at 171 episodes as of this writing.
The series has been simulcast in limited form via Crunchyroll for a couple of years now, with only a certain recent selection of episodes kept available there, and FUNimation has licensed and released the first forty-eight episodes on DVD/BD combo releases, with more coming later this year as they licensed another block of the series. Kodansha continues to releases the manga, which is at thirty-six volumes now in Japan and the first twenty-three release in North America, though solicitations are up through volume twenty-nine as the series is on a fast track through the spring and summer.
Series Concept: In the Kingdom of Fiore, powerful wizards make their living by joining magical guilds and contracting out their services to become “wizards for hire.” Harnessing the forces of Dragon Fire, Ice, Weaponry, and the Zodiac, four young wizards of the infamous guild Fairy Tail team up to seek their fortunes.
Growing stronger with every mission, they travel the countryside helping people and battling rival guilds, but with personalities as different as their magic skills, this team may end up doing more damage than good.
I hope it comes back. It’s one of my favorite shows.
If the TV networks actually screened it like DBZ there would be plenty of buyers…
I think the series is going to be taking a hiatus, probably for the entire spring season so as to allow the manga ample time to get back ahead of the anime as their getting a tad too close to one another.
I feel like the series would be more popular in the US and North America if a channel(I’m looking at you Cartoon Network/Toonami) would just air it on TV and not have people hope word of mouth would help it grow in popularity.