As a member of Fairy Tail, Lucy just might have it the hardest. She spends her childhood admiring the guild as an inexperienced Celestial Mage, then one day out of the blue gets invited to join the team. It should be the happiest moment of her life...except then she realizes the group is filled with nothing but drunkards, people who don’t know their own strength, and idiots who like to get in brawls every night.
Still, it isn’t all bad. Lucy manages to find a home with the guild that she couldn’t attain even with her own family. They’ve even helped her reach her full potential as a mage...through fighting some of the strongest people on the planet. So in honor of Fairy Tail’s “main character”, we’re looking at ten facts only true fans know about Lucy Heartfilia.
10 WANTS TO BE A WRITER
While most of the members of Fairy Tail don’t really say much about what they want to do when not going on quests, Lucy is a bit different. She has goals and desires which aren’t quite the same as her partners. She’s always wanted to be a writer and keeps a journal chronicling the adventures of her and the rest of Fairy Tail as they go.
Eventually, Lucy's intention is to turn her journal into a novel and get it published, becoming a world-famous author.
9 WAS NAMED AFTER A MERCHANT GUILD
Though the author Hiro Mashima originally thought up the name of this character while listening to The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” there had to be a different origin for her name in the series. The Heartfilias were both working within the merchant guild “Love & Lucky” when Layla became pregnant. The sign on the guild was actually missing the letter “K,” and deciding they liked how that looked, they agreed to name her Lucy.
This naming was actually prescient, as Lucy grows up pretty lucky in her own right, and was even referred to by her father as “Lucky Lucy” growing up.
8 WATCHED HER FUTURE SELF DIE
This is a pretty dark way to come full circle. In a comedic OVA series, Lucy went back in time and saved her younger self’s life. During the second half of the Grand Magic Games, Lucy is visited by a version of herself from a dark, ruined future.
In this timeline, the Eclipse gate opened and allowed a number of dragons to enter the present day, laying waste to it with their incredible powers. Future Lucy tries to go back in time to help them deal with the dragons but dies trying to protect her past self from a version of Rogue from the future.
7 CAN SUMMON THREE CELESTIAL SPIRITS AT ONCE
Celestial Mages have a number of specific limits to their powers, based on contracts agreed upon by the mage and the spirit themselves. These rules can be any number of things, even coming down to what days of the week the spirit is available to work. Most importantly is the ability to have enough magic to summon them.
Most mages only have enough magic to summon a single spirit, with some of them having enough to summon two. Lucy’s powerful enough to summon three, which puts her in an elite class of Celestial Mages, which is why she was able to summon the Celestial Spirit King once.
6 SAVED HER PAST SELF'S LIFE
During the OVA known as “Memory Days,” Natsu, Gray, Lucy, and Erza are all cleaning up in Fairy Tail’s storage room when they’re transported to the past by a mysterious magic book. The group gets up to some hijinx in the past and all wind up meeting their past selves in ways that are mostly humorous.
However, in Lucy’s case, she winds up saving a carriage that’s gone out of control from crashing. When she meets the person inside, Lucy is surprised to learn the person inside is her younger self. What’s the point in living a life full of adventure if one can’t go hopping about through time?
5 HAD A ROCKY RELATIONSHIP WITH HER FATHER
Lucy’s mother Layla passed away when she was much younger, thanks to the effort she expended in attempting to open the Eclipse gate. After this happens, Lucy is raised primarily by her father Jude, who puts all his time into working on his company and leaving his daughter on her own. He even once hires the Dark Guild Phantom Lord to kidnap Lucy and talk her into marrying a duke, to increase the wealth of the Heartfilia family.
The two eventually patch things up, but are never quite the same, making it all the more unfortunate when he passes away after she was away from the world for seven years thanks to the events occurring on Tenrou Island.
4 COMES FROM A LINE OF CELESTIAL MAGES
How mages come across their powers varies from person to person. Some people are taught like Natsu and Gray, while others - like Erza - are born with their abilities. Meanwhile, some people seem to have it in them going back several generations. This is the case for Lucy, whose mother Layla was also a Celestial Mage who had a special connection with the spirits she summoned.
Over the course of the series, however, we discover it’s not just Layla and Lucy though; in fact, going back 400 years, the Heartfilias have always been Celestial Mages. This is crucial, as they were also meant to be guardians of the Eclipse Gate, a gateway through time which can only be opened by Celestial Mages.
3 CAN CHANNEL A CELESTIAL SPIRITS POWER INTO HERSELF
After being repeatedly chucked into close-quarters combat, Lucy finally develops a way to make herself more useful in battle. Instead of simply summoning the Celestial Spirit, Lucy has developed a way to imbue herself with some of the Celestial Spirit’s magic, allowing her to Requip in a similar way to Erza.
Known as “Star Dress,” in doing so Lucy is able to use both her and some of the Spirit's magic. Later, she comes up with a high-level version of this spell known as Star Dress Mix, which combines the powers of two different spirits together.
2 HER ULTIMATE SPELL IS URANO METRIA
As mages, Fairy Tail's members spend a lot of time casting spells which result in either being more effective at physical combat or imbue weapons with energy to make them more effective at slicing or hitting things. Even Lucy’s guilty of this, but she also has a number of other spells as well.
Lucy's best one is Urano Metria, a spell which was downloaded into her brain to help her defeat Sorano of the Oración Seis. The spell surrounds an opponent with lights resembling stars that explode all at once. This is an ability Lucy’s only used a handful of times, as she barely has enough magic to summon it without help.
1 ORIGINALLY USED CARDS
Characters often go through a variety of different changes before they’re materialized in fiction. Certainly, with Hiro Mashima’s primary Fairy Tail group, they were all vastly different before he settled on what we’d come to know as their primary appearances. Erza originally looked more like an Amazonian wild child, while Natsu had horns.
Lucy looked mostly the same but was initially supposed to use cards rather than keys. Mashima eventually changed this idea, largely because cards had been done too often. Nonetheless, Mashima would create a character that did use cards in the hard-drinking Cana Alberona, introduced later in the series.