(sort of) reading: bleach
Oct. 7th, 2020 07:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sword_logicmmm, nostalgia. very tasty. tl;dr for this post: i thought about bleach, then i read a fic* on a whim, then i thought about it way too hard, then i read up on canon, re-read some chapters i remembered liking, skimmed the ending, and now i'm big mad about it.
in sum: bleach deserved so much better than it got. good lord.
i know the common gripe is that it should have ended after the aizen arc – while i wholeheartedly agree, i do also think it's possible to continue a series (even for an extended time!) after concluding an event in a definitive way. was the like... anglo-saxon mythos stuff bad? (what the fuck were they called...) nah, maybe not, but it felt cheap to immediately give ichigo a path back to his powers. having a de-powered protagonist opens up so many interesting venues for character development, or even just character study. i think ishida also had... something similar? going on here? clearly this was not part of what i re-read, lol. it could have been cool. it was not.
but where i'm going with this is that the actual ending was godawful. like, depressingly bad. to the best of my knowledge, the author had pretty much zero warning as to "you have X more chapters left, finish now," and it really shows. there was clear setup for a cool team-up of old enemies banding together to fight this Big Threat that got totally shafted in favor of the big final fight — which is understandable, given a supposed time constraint, but that meant that two of my faves who showed back up got pretty much zero screen time. i think nel showed up for exactly five panels across five volumes. grimmjow "died" after like, ten panels? then came back via deus ex machina to be a deus ex machina for half a page then nothing more. you dangle the cat man in front of my nose like this? and take him away? you do this to me?
and the other thing that struck me was... okay, even in high school i knew this wasn't exactly a top tier feminist work or anything, but not only did every female character's bust size triple, there was some unbelievably nasty, uh, everything. upskirt shorts, down-blouse shots, and..... yoruichi's final form™️ was – i shit you not. i. shit. you. not. – a naked feral catgirl. 'nuff said! i want to black this out of my brain. cool power, horrendous execution. i am aghast at how awful it was.
oh, and the epilogue chapter was the classic "everyone marries and has kids" straighty mcstraighterson move. not that i was in any way expecting queerness, but does every female character have to start making babies during a 10-years-later? really?
however, to bring this around to a positive note, the arrancar/aizen/hueco mundo/whatever-you-want-to-call-it arc still absolutely fucking slaps. on this read orihime really stood out to me — her incredible empathy and kindness to everyone as a core trait was genuinely fucking awesome. there was a moment where mr. grimbo #6 "rescued" her from being beat up by two other hollows, and she insisted on healing them from their (very gristly) injuries before leaving – and their reactions of pure horror were very striking. what a cool way to pit an unendingly kind character against a world that is nothing but kill or be killed.**
i stopped before reading the ulquiorra fight, because it would just have made me way too sad. he was my favorite arrancar when i first read the series, and his death always stuck with me even as i forgot literally everything else about bleach. what a fascinating character. he did not deserve to die, though i suppose that's exactly why he had to die: so that we would know he had been deserving of more, in spite of what his nature should have molded him to be. ugh!! i'm so sad about the Man Bat. he was such a great character.
i can't speak for one piece, but it still surprises me that two of the Big Three have such a relatively small presence on AO3. makes me wonder just how much was lost to ffn, lj, content purges, fansites expiring, and the like. (god. i think i posted some of my own bleach fic on dA. lord.) also interesting to see was the breakdown on pairings in the bleach tag — ichigo/grimmjow was #1 with... only 1,359 fics out of 15k? and the numbers dwindle rapidly from there. rukia/orihime had 68 fics with most of them seeming to be in the tag only for a background pairing. god. >:(
when this all started my friend was like "ha, ha, are u gonna write bleach fic" and i said no but my god i am literally so angry about the ending that i Just Fucking Might.
*here's a link to the fic – it was a very fun read, in line with the series' sort of energetic and over-the-top humor, though fair warning for some (canon-typical) crassness. massively pushed all my werewolf-adjacent buttons, though.
**haha. hollows are sword logic.
so yeah, wow, i had forgotten just how gorgeous some of the art was. kubo's layouts are fucking impeccable. i never had the... experience, i guess? to appreciate the art when i was in high school, not beyond "fuck that looks cool," but re-reading parts of the arrancar arc (aizen arc???) really made me appreciate it. kubo's got a real sense for dimension and weight, and it's really present in the hollows' masks — not to constantly be talking about grimmjow, but his mask is a great example. ANYWAYS, on with the images. these aren't in a particular order, just things that stood out to me.
god, this is one of several spreads i'm going to be linking, but god. the mask fragments floating off ichigo's face, the fragments between him and grimmjow, the closeups on both their eyes, the silhouettes in that last panel, the way the sfx frame their silhouettes, everything is fantastic. it's nearly a shame there's dialogue.
ULQUIORRA... what a wonderful counterpoint to grimmjow in every scene they have together. what got me here was, god, GOD, all the intense motion in the bottom half of the first (right-hand) page coming to an immediate halt in the next panel - all that white space, the composition leading your eyes down from ulquiorra's composed face to grimmjow bleeding and clearly about to lose it entirely. fucking masterful.
this is another thing kubo is really good at, this kind of wordless chapter ending. the intensity of grimmjow's facial expression contrasted with the intentional bland serenity of aizen's, and the closeup of the sweat on grimmjow's eyelid, followed by ulquiorra's composure... the speech bubble down to orihime down to the moon... god.
this, THIS, T H I S was the answer to "it's almost a shame there's dialogue." ichigo's silhouette and the stark blackness of his clothes against the background, his fucking batlike silhouette, grimmjow looking down and ichigo looking up and god even the angles of their swords are opposites, grimmjow's fucking scar, the closeups on their eyes and their hilts, GOD. GOD!!! this is Sequential Art.
i know it may seem like all of these are grimmjow, but let me assure you: i know exactly what i'm about. ANYWAYS, the split on ichigo's face between two panels here and GOD the dripping blood linking the bottom two panels, the alternation between black and white in each panel..... chef kiss.
do i even need to say anything? god. the amount of motion in this one panel is staggering. the way grimmjow's tail echoes ichigo's silhouette. lord.
the closeup on ulquiorra's mouth. the stark emptiness of the next panel. the fact that grimmjow's face isn't even gloating, just concentrated. LOVE all the white space. i die.
slight tangent, but i think i latched onto bleach (specifically the arrancar) so hard in high school partially because i was in advanced spanish at the time, and understanding the added layer of spanish really upped my enjoyment of the series. in any case: god, the chapter illustrations are always incredible.
the rough inkiness of this is stunning - the way the sfx bend around ichigo, the way there are scraps of darkness floating around grimmjow, the force and movement of it all is so very good.
this is another one of those really good chapter-end pages - it really creates a sense of the conversation ending, with panel beats that mimic a tv show or movie closing out a scene. and this is where that dimension is really present too, in grimmjow's lips around his teeth, and the mask behind them. so fucking good.
and saving the best for last...
i literally stopped and gaped at this page for minutes. god. G O D. the backlighting on this panel—
—THIS ONE, this is so FUCKING STUNNING i don't even know what to do with myself. god damn. the way the lines are echoed in the next panel down. the emptiness of the last panel. jesus christ. this is one of the best two-page spreads i've ever seen. god. god!!!! i want to draw now.
