Aye, Reader!
A Fairy Tail spinoff starring series mascot, Happy.
While adventuring with Natsu one day, the pair came across a strange sun face shaped being which suddenly proceeds to suck the two into it's mouth. Natsu was spat back out but Happy remained and was transported to a world where all the inhabitants are anthropomorphic people. He's informed by the elder of the village he lands in that he's the foretold chosen one, due to matching the description of having blue fur and able to sprout wings, that would save their world from evil. What evil, they don't know however.
Thus begins Happy's quest to find what exactly this prophecy means about him and trying to find a way back to his home while helping the residents of the village.
Went from 2018 to 2020 at eight volumes.
Fairy Tail Happy's Heroic Adventure provides examples of:
- Adaptational Badass: This manga marks the only time in the franchise where Happy must fight and fend for himself, and he proves to be incredibly adept at it.
- Big Bad: General Star, the ruler of ScienCity, whose lust for power lead him to use Marice's magic to try and conquer the world, which would create the animal world Happy is transported to. General Star would become a cyborg and use the tech of ScienCity to break into the animal world and try and take back Marice and all the magic of the world.
- Bittersweet Ending: Marice is freed from her seal and can control her powers, General Star is defeated and Marice and the animal world residents are finally freed from his threat. Though the Three Treasures are destroyed in the final battle meaning Heart, Moon and Crystal's spirits pass on completely. With his objective finished, Happy is allowed to return to Earthland. However, the only way Magicia can do so is to transport him back to the same day he was abducted, a process that will wipe out Happy's memory of his time in the animal world. While sadden to hear this, his animal world friends assure him they won't forget him and Happy is convinced that, while he'll lose is memory of them, deep down in his soul a part of him will always remember and cherish his time there.
- But Now I Must Go: A Foregone Conclusion, Happy knows once his quest is finished, he'll have to leave his newfound friends to get back to his world. Often times being a little too eager to get back that he has to catch himself and remember that the people of the animal world will miss him. When it eventually does happen, it's from every living animal he's met along with Marice who all give him a tearful goodbye.
- Cerebus Rollercoaster: Despite making a gradual shift to a dark and sometimes depressing tone, the series never abandons its sense of wacky humor.
- Cerebus Syndrome: It gets parodied a few times at first, such as Happy comforting a rabbit girl who thinks she's dying, only to discover she just has a cavity, and later saving her from a threatening wolf, only to learn he just wanted to cuddle her and came on too strong. But then it takes a more genuinely, almost jarringly dark tone once Happy uncovers more of the world's past and begins to face more genuinely serious and tragic villains, such as Chee, and later on the entire Holy Kingdom, where it's leader Leon is a Well-Intentioned Extremist who wants to stop Happy by any means because he sees the cat as "the Messenger of the Devil", and has brainwashed everyone there to protect the world.
- Cooldown Hug: Happy ultimately defeats Chee like this after hearing his backstory, noting that, despite his words and actions, Chee's hurting on the inside and really just wants to be loved.
- Cool Gate: In the form of a giant head that eats Happy and transports him to another world.
- Distant Finale: The epilogue zooms ahead ten years in the future of the animal world where many of the characters have grown up or older.
- Gotta Catch 'Em All: The Three Sacred Treasues: The Smile Heart, Ether Moon and Healthy Crystal, that Happy much collect over the course of the series which are said to help him get back home.
- Kangaroo Court: In the Holy Kingdom arc, Happy is cited to be a messenger of the devil due to some old teachings claiming him as such. He's put on trial and his friends are used as witnesses. They keep stating he's harmless, but the court twists their words to make Happy look like a villain.
- Series Mascot: Happy, the mascot of Fairy Tail, finally gets his time to shine as the main character of his own manga.
- The Greatest Story Never Told: Zig-zagged. In the end, Happy eventually is able to get back to his world after defeating the Star Dragon. However Magicia tells him in order to get him back to Earth-Land, it has to be to a time before Magicia abducted him, which means Happy will lose his memory of the animal world. While Happy won't be able to tell a soul there about his adventures due to the memory loss, the residents of the animal world will never forget his heroics. Marice especially who chronicles a book about his adventures.
- The Power of Friendship: Wouldn't be a Fairy Tail series without this theme, though it is played more subtly as Happy's positive action influence others.
- The Reveal: Through the series we learn there was a human name Marice who has some relevance in the tower though no other humans are mentioned, yet Happy and his friends encounter a few machines (One in the tower and another in Cool Land). After the Holy Kingdom arc, we finally get answers when Tortoise has Happy transported a thousand years into the past. The animal world Happy finds himself in is actually a parallel world that only Tortoise knows is not their own and in fact, he comes from one that didn't have any magic. He and Marice once lived in an advanced futuristic city called ScienCity. Marice however was the only one who could harness magic, called "Evolution", which could turn normal animals into anthropomorphic ones. However a cruel general locked her up in a tower, using her power to evolve the animals then breeding them to become soldiers and shipping them off to war to fight for humans while said humans just sit back with no harm to them. The "treasures" Happy quests for: The Smile Heart, Ether Moon and Healthy Crystal, were really Etherois devices meant to help Marice control her power created by a scientist named Dr. Magicia, who resembles the sun face being that sucked up Happy into the animal world in the first place. It's later revealed Marice is actually a artificial human, she was created by Dr. Magicia to be a weapon for said general. When the Beast Musketeers were gravelly injured protecting Happy and Marice from the general. Magicia transported their consciousness into the devices to keep Marice from losing control of her power and they sealed her away so that they could be someday be strong enough to help control her power which could destroy everything if it went out of control. Magicia then fuses with trans-dimensional power and use that to transport the MF animals and the tower to a world where no humans exists where they would build their own society. All the animals there are descendants of the MF animals. As for the statue of Happy that Agi, Boo Boo and he find at the tower, that is really Happy frozen in stone by Tortoise to take The Slow Path back to the present day of the story, now with the knowledge and required EXP to free Marice from her seal.
- The Slow Path: During the events of ScienCity, a younger Tortoise shoots Happy with a "Lock" beam, a magic that can turn any organic object into a statue and make them impervious to harm. Tortoise does this so Happy can return to the present day time of the story. Mostly to avoid a time paradox, but also because he didn't have a way to restore Happy to normal at that point and would find a way to do so in the intervening years.
- Trapped in Another World: It opens as a loving parody of isekai series of sorts, with Happy getting swallowed by a giant face and winding up in a World of Funny Animals, where he's heralded as a prophesied hero by a tortoise elder who appears to have forgotten half the things about what Happy needs to do to get back home. As more of the world's circ*mstances are revealed to Happy, however, it starts taking itself more seriously.
- Title Drop: The name of the book of this series? It's a book Marice wrote chronicling Happy adventure in the animal world.
- "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue: The end of the book sees where all the residents of the animal world ended up after Happy eventually returned to his own world.
- World of Funny Animals: The world Happy gets sent to is completely populated by talking animal people not unlike himself.
- Wretched Hive: Wild Town, a town that dictates it's leader by whomever has the treasured Ether Moon. However an uprising occurred in trying to get it and the Ether Moon ended up lost, plunging the town into chaotic hellhole with no leader.
- Year Inside, Hour Outside: In the end, from Natsu's perspective, Happy was only sucked up and spat out in a matter of minutes. While the whole series likely took place over several months when Happy was in the animal world.
