I like both Fairy tail and Black Clover but both are series a lot of the Anime fandom overall seems to dislike because Fairy Tail is "friendship is power" and sometimes they win fights by bullcrapping about friendship.
Honestly, I don't think the problem with Fairy Tail is that it likes to invoke The Power of Friendship. That's a staple trope in the genre that almost every shounen series makes use of and it's given Fairy Tail some of its best moments. The problems with Fairy Tail are more based in bad writing practices. For example, it's not a problem that former enemies become allies or have redemption arcs, but it
is a problem that it becomes extremely repetitive. It's not a problem that friendship motivates the characters to new heights, it's a problem that it's the soul justification for winning unwinnable situations. It's biggest problem is that it has an expansive cast of extremely interesting characters and most of them are routinely sidelined in favour of hyping up two extremely dull protagonists in Erza and Natsu - especially Natsu who's just an even dumber Luffy, but with Ace's powers. For example, Laxus' big return and redemption is completely undercut by Natsu, and don't even get me started on Natsu and Gajeel vs Sting and Rogue.
I do agree though, that because of our cultural awareness of all that bad stuff, people are totally unwilling to acknowledge the
good stuff in Fairy Tail - and that stuff really does exist. The Fairy Tail guild alone has a bunch of great characters present like Grey, Wendy, Levy, Gajeel, Laxus, Cana and so on and so forth - all of whom would be better central characters. Hell, even Lucy gets progressively better as the show continues, she's fantastic in Tartarus (the last arc I watched). The music is fantastic too and there's some individual scenes/fights that are up there with the big names in the genre.
All the love for Naruto I'm seeing in here makes me happy though. It has a similar problem where people seem to only want to remember the bad stuff - the final arc, all the filler, Sasuke's story arc being handled terribly, Sakura most of the time. But the world is really interesting, the overall story is compelling and it has some of the best character writing in the genre despite having a
huge cast of characters. So many of the prominent characters are interesting, compelling and/or likeable and several of them undergo excellent development. This was the first time I saw a series in this genre that had more than two or three characters actually grow and change - and one of them was the protagonist! Compare that to One Piece where the world itself and the mysteries surrounding it are typically way more interesting than the characters that inhabit it.
Don't get me wrong, there's definitely big flaws in both shows and we can and
should criticize them, otherwise writers will repeat those mistakes. However, I think it's important to point out what series do right as well because there's a lot for creators to learn from that too.
