reading: bleach - the thousand-year blood war arc

[sword_logic]

here we are again! i finished bleach. like, the whole thing this time. my feelings have not changed much.

would i "recommend" it? i mean... if you have the nostalgia for it already in place, then yeah, revisiting the series up through the end of the winter war (aizen, etc.) arc is totally worth it. if you've never read bleach... maybe don't, unless you're willing to do 686 chapters with, like, no payoff. (except the winter war arc. everything up through there is great.)

okay so one thing as i get started: gigguk (the only man whose anime opinions™ i trust) did a really, really good video on The Shounen Anime Problem. it sets up a few major pitfalls that shounen series tend to fuck up really badly, which are

• setting a goal (i.e., becoming hokage) - because it's about the journey
• introducing a power ceiling - grounding viewer expectations
• scale of escalation - no baseless leaps or moving goalposts
• an established power system - escalating via complexity rather than raw power
• self-contained arcs - keeping things fresh

he also noted that the beginnings of long, Big Name shounen series always seem so good not because of nostalgia (though that obviously plays a role), but because of the more intimate, personal character interactions; things on a smaller scale that hit harder and that are more relatable. which like... woof. naruto and bleach fell into this pitfall so hard. (gigguk offers a lot of examples of the above points done well, fwiw; this isn't a video that slams on shounen series, and gigguk is a huge shounen fan.)

but anyways, specifically, gigguk mentions bleach as the G L A R I N G example of what happens when you Majorly Fuck Up on setting a goal, and he phrases it as the series becoming reactive rather than proactive and god. oh my fucking god. that's exactly what reading this felt like, especially the arcs after the winter war. i disagree to a point with gigguk that the series deteriorated after the soul society arc; aizen was always going to be a loose end there, and seeing that through to the end was always going to be a necessity. breathing some life (lol) into the hollows and showing the arrancar as a reflection of what shinigami are also brought balance and nuance to the morality of the show in interesting ways - or, well, it tried, and us fans are here to extrapolate. but! i'm getting ahead of myself.

i'll go arc-by-arc (as the wiki lists them for the anime, obvs minus filler) for this, since i think that'll the be easiest way to keep my thoughts straight. interestingly, the manga names two arcs formally as arcs: the lost substitute shinigami arc, and the thousand-year blood war arc (hereafter TYBW bc i cba to type all that out), but not the first two arcs. so, to start:

agent of the shinigami arc

man, this was hardcore nostalgia. this whole arc was just ichigo and rukia and chad and orihime and ishida running around, bonking hollows on the head, doing their best, and just... being friends. there's not much escalation; ichigo just whacks stuff with his borrowed sword. and it works! it's good, it's funny, it's sweet. i liked the sense of, like, the other shoe coming down that this arc had - you know that it's gonna have to end, at some point, but you don't know how until you see Other Shinigami show up for the first time and there's that real, real good "oh shit" moment.

7/10, very solid intro arc, not as good as nart's wave country arc but fuck, man, there's not much that could top wave country as an intro arc.

soul society arc

top tier arc. EXTREMELY good arc. i love ichigo's horrified realization at the scale of just what he's gotten himself into. it's not just "oh there are people who do stuff about ghosts" – it's a whole culture, a flip side to his entire world in every way, and god, he and the squad have so, so many good moments where they have to reckon with what it is that they're doing. chad vs. kyouraku is so much more, like, wow in retrospect. chad was nearly paste on the wall facing off against what amounts to the second most powerful shinigami in soul society.

and god, GOD, ichigo learning about zanpakutou and about zangetsu throughout this whole arc was truly fucking top tier. this was a case of good progression through an established power system (albeit poor scale of escalation, lol. bankai in three days, my dude? really?). kenpachi vs. ichigo is still, truly, one of the best fights in the series, and only gets better when seen through the "yachiru is kenpachi's zanpakutou" thing.

this is where i disagree with gigguk once more - he talks about the piccolo problem (powerful rival turned kind of powerless ally) and cuts to scenes with renji, and i feel like that's not renji's role at all. renji was ichigo's rival only because he thought that ichigo had done something to a dear friend, and when it became clear that their end goals were more or less the same, renji fucking begged ichigo to save her. i went through my livetweet thread for this and turns out i compared this to vegeta begging goku to kill freiza in the name of all the saiyans he'd slaughtered, and... yeah. (more on dbz later.)

what else... oh, lmao, i cried when rukia was facing down soukyoku and thanking everyone. this panel is so beautiful.

aizen's manipulations were really well done, too. reads really well when you go back to it knowing what he's planning from the start.

the winter war

uhhh god where do i start. i'm going to start with ulquiorra and starrk so i can get the most depressing stuff out of the way. so! i cried about ulquiorra! i think i started crying when ichigo found him again after nnoitra and just didn't stop, actually. what really stood out to me this time was one of ichigo's jabs at him:

not official viz trans, cba to go find that, but wow. don't know that i've got much more to say about that, honestly. between this and ulquiorra's second resurreccion and tousen's resurreccion... god. i wish we had gotten more about the arrancar later. i really fucking wish we had. i'm not a fan of romantic ulquiorra/orihime but the baseline concept of exposure to humans as something that changes arrancar is chef kiss.

okay so starrk - this is a point in the manga way past what i had read originally in like, whatever ancient year that was. but oh my god, coyote starrk's death. jesus christ. i was crying giant fucking ghibli tears at this point.

hello! i want to fucking die! this was the absolute fucking worst! it's not even that i had any particular affection for starrk (or, oops, viz says stark) - the sheer fucking implications of this for every other arrancar are absolutely god damn devastating. i feel like i'm being vaporized just looking at these two pages.

so onto worse suffering: final getsuga tenshou :-) cried my way through this whole thing, too, lmao. ichigo's face at the very end was also truly devastating. ichigo does this thing: he gets this one particular really soft look in his eyes when he defeats an enemy that he didn't want to defeat, or in a way that was out of his control, and it's very good. it's the patended soft look. examples:

(this one was accompanied by "the patented soft look but i can barely see it bc i'm crying" lol)

and i didn't take any screencaps of the aizen showdown itself because. well. i was crying. but i LOVE this look. ichigo's a shockingly not-hotheaded shounen protagonist tee em, and he's honestly really sensitive to his friends and their feelings (and his own!) and i really enjoy that about him.

god... i have so many thoughts about the arrancar, i think that might merit its own separate post. lots of thoughts about the cat man.

oh yeah, i forgot about the visored flashback section. lmao, that was just really poorly placed, imo. that would have been a really, really good way to add time (and closure!) between the end of the winter war and the start of the lost substitute shinigami arc. speaking of... grits teeth.

the lost substitute shinigami arc

so this was... not nearly as bad as i had remembered it being? granted, i got up to maybe two chapters into this arc the last time i sat down to read bleach? which was in i think 2010 or so, so my memory of that was both incomplete and muddled. that was the summer i sat down and reread (and finished) fullmetal alchemist, then reread naruto, then reread bleach, and then read homestuck. college was good times indeed and actually time is fake because that cannot have been ten years ago. what the fuck.

ANYWAYS! not as terrible of an arc as i remember it being. ichigo's "normal life" stuff was actually fucking hysterical. this kid is a fucking sports club mercenary in his final year of high school. HE LITERALLY GETS PEOPLE TO PAY HIM TO BE ON THEIR SPORTS CLUBS. he works for an odd jobs company with a lady who refuses to take his shit and gently, firmly repeats to him that adults should always be there for children - especially when isshin is not. i really, really would have loved to see this part of the arc drawn out to be longer, and drawn out to show more of ichigo's feelings of missing his shinigami friends and recovering from the emotional toll of... well, everything. but alas.

however, this arc is where bleach started getting super, super fucky and i honestly loved it. there was a real sense of panic and urgency by the time all the tsukishima stuff got into full swing, and it was really delicious. i just wish there had been more time for ichigo to be without his powers, and then more time for him to settle into his fullbring before soul society decided to just. like. snap their fingers and give him his shinigami powers back. Because Reasons.

ginjo's motivations were also completely incomprehensible to me, honestly. i could not tell you on pain of death what his fucking deal was. it would have been so much more interesting if he'd actually had specific beef with soul society; he would have been that much more relatable to both ichigo and the audience, having seen firsthand just how fucked up soul society can be. however, the tsukishima fuckiness was utterly delicious and that made this enjoyable.

ichigo's fullbring look was also super bomb, and so was his combo shinigami/fullbring look. i'm really sad that that got ditched during TYBW. i sure am rewriting that in this fic that is definitely not 13,450 words so far. (it was supposed to be funny and short. it is neither of those things.)

ah, a patented soft look that i'd missed:

and some more fullbring looks:

this strappy knee-highs thing? hello? why did we get rid of this?

criss-cross. it's good. it's a super good look. the one we got after this was garbo, honestly. cowardice!

thousand-year blood war arc

(LONG INHALE)

it was bad. i will talk about three things: yhwach as a villain, bazz-b and jugram, and grimmjow. the rest was just... a fucking mess. it was a mess.

first things first: grimmjow. i knew he was going to show up; the first thing i read of bleach after all this time was, after all, the volume where he shows up again. (volume 69. nice.) i grabbed it without any context, just wanting the Him, and... i mean, i sure got the Him. but the point here is that i knew he was coming, so i truly cannot fathom how unbelievably frustrating it must have been to not know whether or not he's coming, and to live through THESE THREE SPECIFIC THINGS:

for context here - the Super Very Dead guy was a quincy sent to hueco mundo to exterminate hollows or recruit them for use, urahara & co (orihime, chad, baby nel, halibel's fracciones) (harribel? viz is halibel) were about to get their shit kicked in. and you do. this. and THEN.

(that's chad's shoulder.)

YOU GO TO HUECO MUNDO. AND YOU DO. THIS. YOU DO THIS TO ME? YOU DO THE SINGLE MOST TEASING THING POSSIBLE? AND THEN REFUSE TO SHOW GRIMMJOW NOT ONLY IN HUECO MUNDO BUT FOR ABOUT A HUNDRED MORE CHAPTERS? FOR FUCKING REAL?

this sub-arc (quincies in hueco mundo) was a fucking MESS. not only were the events incredibly fucking vague (because ichigo ended up leaving almost immediately - hence him not being the one to be kicking quincy ass in the first screencap there), but nel had the briefest fucking role imaginable, the halibel's fracciones were.. well, they were alright, actually. but halibel herself only showed up in one panel where she was literally tits out and in chains. tits out. in her resurrecion form. in chains.

(this is, incidentally, where everything started going to shit in the "female characters" department. i think orihime's chest managed to double in size by this point somehow.)

but like, okay, the whole "not showing grimmjow as a major player in hueco mundo" thing was really infuriating because of this page in particular:

a) probably the handsomest panel of grimmjow, ever. congratulations on your fucking face, my dude. b) this would have been a great springboard for establishing, like, a sense of home for the hollows. they've already got animalistic characteristics, so it's not a stretch to make them territorial. that would have been great additional motivation for them to join the shinigami in the war against the quincies (as if that was ever touched on at all, but whatever. what the fuck ever.).

anyways grimmjow showed up for like ten panels and then "died." and then he showed up for five more panels about 40 chapters later. and that was it.

on to point #2 before i give myself an aneurysm: bazz-b and jugram.

i wasn't expecting to really feel anything about the quincies and for the most part, i didn't. hell, even uryuu's motivations were uh... underdeveloped, to say the least, and yhwach i'll get to later. but yeah, none of the quincies were really "relatable" enemies or anything like that. horribly paced mess of a plotline, too. this is where the dbz comparison comes back into play: when i re-read dbz last month, my tl;dr feelings on the plot were that it has momentum, it keeps you engaged while you're reading because it's snappy and fun and you want the good guys to win, but the second you stop to think about what's happening, it falls apart entirely. this whole arc was the same way. :/

but back to the quincies: bazz-b and jugram were the only two that actually got a backstory; several chapters of it, actually. considering that jugram was yhwach's 2IC, it kinda makes sense that they'd be the ones to get a bit more meat to their story. the flashback was pretty standard, i guess: they knew each other as kids, and then pretty much lived most of their lives on the run together after yhwach's auswählen killed their families. they wanted to join his army to get close and get revenge, yadda yadda, whatever. but ngl, jugram being the source of bazz-b's power was a "huh" moment, and bazz-b getting killed by his former friend (after begging him to "call [him] bazz like he used to"!) definitely did push a button or two for me.

but this. THIS.

a solid forty or so chapters after jugram kills bazz-b and is utterly emotionless about it, we get... this. this was the single most emotionally impactful moment in the manga for easily well over a hundred chapters. maybe because i'd been spoiled for all the other major plot twists, i don't know. but wow. way to make me care for a villain. fucking kudos here, man.

and now: yhwach as a villain.

aizen was a chess-player villain. he sat at the table, beheld the entire board, and maneuvered his pieces with exacting care. he was manipulative to the core in the way he treated every single one of his subordinates. even at the end, when he spoke with rukia again, his congratulations to her for her promotion to lieutenant were meant to pluck the strings of her sympathy.

but at the end of the day, the king and the pawn go back into the same box, and yhwach wasn't here to play chess. he just wanted the box. he rotted the table to get to the board. called his pawns his children, his family, and discarded them for power on a whim. not even aizen faked that kind of affection; he was clearly disgusted by the arrancar, and they were only ever a means to an end.

aizen was scary because he played mind games. yhwach was scary because he spoke truths. this is probably the single most chilling page in the entire series:

this is so fucked up. i love this so much. it's so deeply fucked up. this is the kind of thing that'll keep a hero awake at night years down the road. god, i wish we'd gotten to see more of ichigo's trauma. (that's asking far too much of a shounen series, though.)

i think yhwach would have been a much more interesting villain if he'd been set up as the Big Bad at the start of the series. the whole 900 years/90 years/9 years/9 days thing would have been a bomb source of time pressure throughout - and it would have set up aizen to have had good intentions at the start (creating ouken as a backup, or something). aizen would have made an amazing distraction/red herring villain if yhwach had been introduced earlier, and it would have called into question the similarities between yhwach's and old man zangetsu's designs that much sooner, and with that much more credibility.

eurgh, yeah, i'm not gonna get too much further into this because it's honestly a total bummer how poorly the series ended. however, i 13k-and-counting words on the way to fixing it, by which i mean manufacturing excuses for ichigo and grimmj[TRUCK PASSES BY, HORN BLARING]nd plenty of headcanons to shove in there for good measure. i might make a headcanons-specific post later, idk. we'll see! for now i'm just gonna go write more. "short fun fic" my ass.