I spent an entirely unproductive weekend binge watching Fairy Tail till there were no more episodes to watch and then moved on to the manga, proving, to the consternation of my parents, that history is doomed to repeat itself. (See my experiences with Bleach eight years ago.) The sharp-minded reader will have noticed that this was a most irresponsible thing to do during finals week, even if I have no finals; and yet, observe that I didn't regret my actions. Not one bit. So little did I regret doing such a thing that I proceeded to binge read the manga till I was all caught up. What a fun and surreal all-nighter that was. I did regret binging in some small measure the second time around, because I hadn't mentally prepared myself to fall into the routine of waiting a week for each new chapter with Fairy Tail. That part usually comes later - after the headiness of being up to your ears in a new (or in this case old) series has died down a little. This feels like being snatched out of the air abruptly during the dive into infinity.
That said, Fairy Tail is exciting. Supremely so. Almost as exciting as I remember Bleach being at its peak, but without some of Bleach's more serious faults. For one thing, Mashima does not display Kubo's tendency to drag battles and arcs on to the point that you forget there was more to the series. Every battle that begins can be guaranteed to end before it gets tiresome. That said, Mashima seems even more reluctant to kill off characters than Kubo was. Makarov was a notable exception in the Alvarez arc, when he decided to use Fairy Law even when Mavis assured him that they could win another way. It was almost as if he needed an excuse to depart this world.
I would compare the Alvarez arc to the Quincy arc in Bleach. Regrettably, Mashima has fallen into the trap of making the enemy ridiculously OP. At some point you need to decide that a character simply can't be more powerful and leave it at that. Otherwise you run the risk of making all the characters you've seen so far appear pathetically weak. Ever since the Spriggan Twelve made their rather unwelcome entry, characters like Jellal look like they barely know any magic at all. Even Acnologia - perhaps my favorite evil character in the series - was handily put away for the time being by goddamned Irene. Mashima's tendency to draw familial ties between any pair of characters he can get his hands on has to stop as well. I get that Erza has got to have a mother, and I've reluctantly accepted that Irene exists, but that has got to be it.
Unlike Bleach, where Kubo decided to become a born-again Christian in the Quincy arc and make everything in sight a Biblical allusion (and from a children's illustrated version at that), Mashima seems to have put a lot of thought into his bad guys. For one thing, Zeref and Acnologia are pretty much on equal footing strength-wise. It's not like Zeref's the ultimate villain and Acnologia is just a petty nuisance. They are both final bosses, as it were, in their own right. Fairy Tail also blurs the line between good and evil a lot more than any other series I've seen. There's more gray (and Gray) in Fairy Tail than black or white by a large margin.
Zeref in particular is truly an interesting villain. For one thing, he's not one of those cartoonish villains who sit around all day thinking of evil things to do. He's a perfectly normal person. There aren't very many scenes where you can say with absolute certainty that Zeref is a villain. For one thing, he is cursed. The more he loves people, the more people die. He willingly separated himself from civilization because he didn't want people to die. He hates being immortal, and his life's goal is to die. Unusual for a villain, no? He's spent his life creating evil demons (Tartaros) in the hope that they would kill him. The interesting thing is that Fairy Tail would not ally with the demons even when they knew that the demons' principal aim was to kill Zeref - their enemy. Admittedly, Tarataros's desire to use Face was something that could not have been forborne; but what about Natsu? Even when Natsu revealed himself to be END and rushed to destroy Zeref, Gray, that pompous hero of nothing and savior of no one, did everything in his power to stop him. I've always been ambivalent about Gray, but I've rarely been as annoyed with a fictional character as I was with Gray during his fight with Etherios Natsu. Only Wes from HTGAWM is more annoying, but he died in the most recent episode, and now I am having doubts about my atheism.
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