SHUNSUI'S BANKAI, EXPLAINED - The Theatre of War | Bleach TYBW Discussion

there was plenty to be excited about for fans when heading into the final arc of bleach but i think one of the things that fans were most excited for was the possibility of finally getting to see some of those unrevealed baankai that we hadn't seen at that point in time and i know for myself and i think for much of the community as well kyolaku shinsuis bankai topped that list as one of the banco we absolutely couldn't wait to see this bankai was unique it had been teased since the fake karakura town arc but also it was one of those few promised ban kai that kubo himself had actually brought up in interviews that he was planning on showing in the thousand-year blood war so that only increased anticipation further and it's really hard to gauge whether or not this bankai actually delivered or not despite kyoraku being my favorite captain kat in kyokotsu being one of my favorite zanpakto it's also all very abstract the sheikai is quite abstract and the bankai we received in chapter 647 is even more so i think there's it's a weird situation with this bank because i think people had huge expectations but at the same time didn't know what to expect and so in this video we're going to take a look at kyoraku's baankai which we did eventually get right near the end of the series katin kyokotsu karamatsu shinjuku i'm going to do my best to explain what i think this bankai actually is what it does how it works and what it represents we're going to look at the themes and the imagery surrounding the bankai and also i'm just going to give a little bit of an idea of how i might have changed the ban kai to maybe make it a little bit more satisfying for those who've been waiting for so long before we begin guys if you haven't subscribed yet make sure to hit that button now we're so close to 60 000 subs and i would love to hit that milestone so if you haven't hit the button yet i'd really appreciate you doing that for bleach videos like this every week also give the video a thumbs up if you found it enjoyable useful anything like that because it does help to increase the reach on youtube it just means that more people get to see it and also i do have a patreon now as well if you want to help me out over there if you want to support me even just a little bit more i would really appreciate it in fact we're very nearly at 50 patrons now that's a milestone i would love to reach so if you want to support me for as little as a dollar a month you can do and it all goes a long way to helping me do these videos so thank you very much and i hope you enjoy so if kyoraku shikai katenkyo kotsu reflects the playful childish and unpredictable side of kyoraku that he very often showcases to the world then his ban katen kyokotsu karamatsu shinju reflects the inner darkness of kyoraku that slightly more morose version of him that he often kind of keeps hidden away at least until the thousand-year blood war rock rolled around and he had a lot more responsibility to shoulder i think when he started having to carry those burdens we saw that inner darkness of kiraku come out a little bit more there were small hints to it in the previous arcs but the final arc is really where you get to see it and his bankai fittingly represents that so kyoraku's bankai is undeniably pretty abstract it is kind of difficult to glean exactly how it works just by looking at it in the manga i'm going to be using the viz translation as i think that's probably going to be the most reliable one for me at least anyway um but yeah i think probably the easiest way to start this video at least is just to go over the ban kai first what it actually does in the manga and then we can try and pick it apart afterwards the bankai tells the story of a pair of lovers who agreed to commit suicide beneath a withered black pine tree essentially i told you it was pretty dark um it does reflect uh kuroku's kind of sad but romantic nature that melancholy aspect to his character that's also very theatrical and in many ways i think the themes of this bank i really do reflect him very well the story of the barn kai is presented in a four-act play so i think like i said the best way of doing this is just going over the acts one by one however before we even get to the axe we have to set the stage and i think this is how the bankai actually initially activates kiraku uses his bankai in chapter 647 and i just want to point out as well in one of my last videos about ranking the battles in the iran car arc i mentioned the ikaku's bankai reveal is one of my favorites as it's such a quintessential bank i reveal featuring all the tropes that i absolutely love and i think kyoroku's actually nails that as well there is a sense of believing its own hype with kyoraku's bankai i think they knew that people were so excited to see it it gets great um build up there's a lot of kind of buildup to that there is a lot of scene setting with this bankai as well whereas with characters like kisuke and kenpachi it can kind of feel like their bananas just sort of come and go when by all means they should be just as hype as kyrakus but kyoroku's is handled really really well i love him like running away from the fight to kind of just prepare himself lying up against the wall thinking that he's exhausted all of his options and he really hopes that nanal doesn't get caught up in this it feels like the usage of katin kyokotsu karamatsu shinjuku is warranted which i think is really important um and that makes it all the more exciting to see it finally unleashed but once kiraku activates his bankai before we see any of the acts in play the whole world is blanketed by a darkness a sinister darkness that creates this melancholy feeling in the air the temperature seems to plummet people get the chills and the effects of this are felt apparently all throughout the varvel as far as ichigo and his friends with orihime noting that she feels like she's shivering and she feels horrible inside chad mentions that the temperature actually hasn't fallen and the sky hasn't actually darkened but it is like an illusory thing that's actually giving them the sensation of the chills inside right to their very core and i think that is truly fantastic scene setting really kind of emphasizing the feelings of despair and the gloominess of the battlefield as kyolaku arrives anew and so we get act one of the play this one's honestly pretty self-explanatory it's a sharing of the wounds basically if you have injured your opponent prior to the bankai being used you will then have those wounds reflected upon you lil shot kiraku in two separate places with perfectly round bullets there are bullet holes punched through kyoroku and as soon as the baankai activates lil gets those same injuries blasted into his body kiraku notes as well that no matter the extent of the injury you will not die from it so really i think act one is just done to set up a level playing field between the two combatants kiraki notes it is a prologue of sorts so really it is part of the whole scene setting getting them ready for the main event and it is just to create that level playing field it's also great because lil is kind of freaking out at this point you know he's supposed to be intangible he's not supposed to be able to take any damage and kiraku just says to him you know you need to be quiet i don't want any more talking during acts the uh the show is about to begin the performance is about to begin so you can kind of imagine like the curtain being lifted at this time and unveiling kind of essentially the horrors that are yet to come for lille we then get act 2 which in my opinion is the most confusing and abstract of the four of them and i will go into greater detail once this little recap is done so essentially this one is the pillow of shame and leel is stricken with an incurable disease which essentially looks like the plague covering his face in like boils and blood is running out of every orifice from his eyes his nose his mouth it looks genuinely pretty gory um and i actually have to say i can't wait to see how the anime tackles the ban kai i think it's really gonna help actually i think it'd be really great actually seeing darkness descend upon varvel seeing how they use music here to really generate this sinister atmosphere i hope they go crazy with it to be honest um because i think that would be absolutely fitting but anyway leel is now bleeding out of everywhere on his face and act three begins which is known as the abyss and essentially kiraku and lille are both just thrown into this massive ocean of water that kind of comes out of nowhere um and it's visually kind of hard to comprehend because does the ocean just start somewhere in the sky and it's like a cube of water that they're trapped in at the end of the day it's illusory it's not real so you kind of have to assume that maybe everyone else can't actually see this it's kind of weird to think about but basically the idea behind this is once you've been thrown into the water your resolve starts to fade away and you begin to panic and you grow scared and kyoraku says that they will now stay underwater until one of their one of them runs out of rayatsu so at this point you're gonna get the impression it becomes a battle of endurance though i think there's a little more to it than that i don't think it's quite that straightforward and then we move to the final act which is essentially a one-hit kill move kiraku creates a string of rayatsu around dilbarrow's neck and cuts his head off in one move using the blood-stained throat-cutting shears essentially and that does seemingly finish off leo barrow kioraku brings down one of the most powerful stern ritter just by using his bankai and so that is the four steps of his bank i kind of explained to you but now i want to go into in a little bit more detail to see if we can kind of analyze how this thing actually links together and how it actually works so looking at stage one then the sharing of the wounds like i said it's pretty self-explanatory that one but there are a couple of little bits and bobs i want to just talk about briefly kyoraku obviously hasn't actually wounded lille at this point and therefore gets away scot-free when this part of the bankai activates but if lil had been injured prior to the bankai being used i'm assuming kiraku would have also been hit now one thing we don't really know is are the baankai's acts intrinsically linked is the fact that lille got injured here what triggers act two i think it is i think that's essentially what kyoraku says when he says the man feels shame at taking those injuries so you have to assume that if kiraku had been hit by the reflection of wounds he too would have been hit by the plague that leads me onto my next question then does getting hit by the plague mean that you get affected by acts three and four whereas kuraku doesn't and i have to say i don't think that is the case i think kiraku is still affected by three and four he just isn't quite as weakened as lille would be because he avoided two it's already getting a little bit confusing i know so act two then is the weirdest one to me um it feels very disconnected from the rest of them and i can kind of understand contextually how the others actually happen but just suddenly contracting essentially the plague is pretty out there and i think now is a really good time to talk about the story that's being told here as it took a little while for it to actually click with me what was going on and it actually helps to really bring the bankai together in a neater package for me at least anyway so the story kiraku is telling is about a man and a woman two lovers um who like i said the name of the bankai is the love of suicide now what actually is going on here is it starts off with the man hits the woman and then he feels great regret at doing that and that is supposed to be the sharing of the wounds the man who feels that regret gets hit by it i think it's mostly figurative it's not literal but he gets injured in the same way that he has hurt the woman he he feels that pain in his heart for what he has done as he feels that regret for the injury he has caused he sort of like collapses into what i would guess is like a terrible depression that gives him this horrible incurable sickness um and he comes out it's manifested in the barn clay it's just loads of blood but i think he's just supposed to be almost incurably ill like a depression now although the woman is the victim here she is still his lover they are still supposed to be in love so she essentially gives him the option that they can both kill themselves together as like a lover's pact and they decide to do this by throwing themselves into this freezing cold water um and once they do that all of their resolve will evaporate and this is important and it was actually at this point that i kind of clocked that kyoraku is referring to himself and leel as the characters of the story here so in act 3 the abyss they both get plunged into the water and lil immediately panics and tries to escape by flying towards the surface only to find it constantly getting further and further away he's confused about this but kiraku says you know you can't escape you've already committed to this you agreed to be thrown in here you volunteered now of course lil did not volunteer for this but in the context of the story he did the character he's playing did volunteer to be thrown into the water lille is playing the abusive man kyoraku in my opinion is playing the woman so kiraku mentions that the two of them being thrown into the ice cold water like this is designed to test their resolve however leo tries to escape and in the context of the story this is the man reneging on his promise to the woman and trying to flee and not actually going through with the suicide and this actually really helped me make a lot more sense of the whole situation kiraku says to lil you know you're trying to get away trust me i know how you feel but really you're just being selfish you know you're just thinking about yourself you're breaking your promise and i was reading this like what is he talking about like why is he being selfish i don't understand it and it did clock to me finally that kiraku is they are playing the characters in the story leela's the man kirak is the woman so lil is breaking his promise to kiraku and trying to escape their certain death situation which then leads us on to act four and act four again is pretty straightforward but kyoraku just cuts leo's throat and what's happening here is in the context of the story the woman essentially grows tired of the man and his betrayals and all that sort of thing and she just cuts his throat you know kyoraku says that a woman's pity can be cruel but also this woman has no time to lend an ear to a petulant man so beforehand after stage two she was like all right we can do this together this is your this is your chance this is our chance like be together in death but the cowardly man tries to escape even that fate and the woman's like well i've had enough of you now and this is the new form of my pity and she slashes his throat in bleach terms kyoroku essentially generates that figurative regret that leel is feeling into a white string and he cuts his throat so that's basically it that's the story of the two lovers played out between lille and kyoroku and it's it's scary to think because leel is completely unwitting in this he doesn't know the story he has no idea what's going on so you kind of have to assume that once kuraku uses his barn kai you're in major trouble because you know unless you somehow have research on the barangay prior you are you have no idea what's going to actually set off the next stage and kiraku is very much in control here katin kyokotsu has always been predicated on the notion that the the kind of games between the two combatants have to be fair and i think the same is true here what makes this bank a little bit difficult to comprehend is that kiraku suffers no ill effects whatsoever i think it might have been good to have him suffer at least the first two effects um maybe have him injured lille somehow before the banankai and then feel those wounds himself show the blood coming out of his mouth and stuff that would have made it a lot easier to digest and then when the two of them hit the water have it so that leel is the only one who tries to flee allowing kiraku to take up the role of the woman at the end and kill him another thing that i find to be fascinating is that in between acts 3 and 4 katan herself actually arrives on the scene draping her arms behind kyoroku and also when he activates his banankai you can see her silhouette doing the same thing to him and what i think this is supposed to mean as well is that the two of them also represent the two characters in this story um but perhaps in a slightly different way they perhaps represent them as two lovers who would actually go through with the pact together they live and die together and that's reinforced to me by a cat in quite literally saying to kyoku i am your sword after all we agreed we would die together and that really kind of makes me question like did kyoku think he wasn't going to get out of this you know when he activated his bankai maybe kiraku thought this is the end for me this fight i'm probably going to die here um there's a lot going on in this battle in general regardless of the ban kai you know like kiraku basically does nearly pass away after this moment until nanal saves him and katherine is like let me drift you away um and that's interesting because that makes me wonder as well like how far is the the theming of this baankai actually going because if you if you consider the moment where kyoraku realizes that lil is still alive despite having his head cut off and he rests against the wall and katyn is like fall asleep and i'll take us both away and that's supposed to be them committing suicide in the story but then kyoraku reneges on that promise by waking up to help nanao so that's actually fascinating obviously he doesn't get his head calf but there's so many layers here it is difficult to know exactly what's going on but i think at the very least those the four stage act play makes a lot of sense it makes a lot of sense to see kyoraku and lille as representations of the man and the woman in that story so now that the explanations are at least somewhat out of the way i do have a couple of questions myself namely how does this bank i work um we just don't get enough evidence i don't think do all four stages naturally progress from one to the other does this last stage trigger the next one it would seem like it does as i mentioned lille getting affected by act one seemingly triggers act two and kiraku isn't affected by one so he doesn't get two but then they're both affected by three and i really think the only way it works is by looking at them in the context of that story and it is funny because kiraku does kind of explain it to you it's just like really obtuse you just have to kind of get in there and get the nuggets of info out as i i think i've kind of done so i hope this video has been kind of useful to you if you didn't already know but yeah i think the best way of looking at it is just to break it down really really simply leel is the man kiraku is the woman the man hits the woman feels terrible about it and therefore comes down with an incurable disease possibly some kind of depression or something like that in the actual story the woman being his lover kind of forgives him and says you know we can both like go through with this lover's suicide pact they throw themselves in the water the man being selfish backs out of his promise and tries to escape and the woman her pity now turned to cruelty feels nothing for him anymore as he's a petulant child and she cuts his throat that's basically it what really intrigues me as well is this bankai does seem to be an area of effect bankai kyoraku says he doesn't want nanao to get caught up in it so how would that work nanao obviously never wounded leo so you have to presume that she wouldn't get affected by act one if she was there therefore she wouldn't get affected by act two she doesn't have anywhere near as much reaction as either of these two guys though so the abyss would presumably be pretty difficult for her to withstand um and i kind of guessed that kiroku could warn her if they were both there at the same time but if she's being afflicted by this some buildings away she might just try and escape to the surface at which point does kiraku just cut her throat it's really difficult because kiraku does seem to have a level of agency in this bankai that implies he is very much in control here while also being subjected to its whims so that it's a little bit confusing and just to wrap this video up then i just want to talk about reception to this bankai like i said it was immeasurably anticipated easily one of the bankai people were most excited to see and when we finally got it i think people were a little disappointed you know people were a little bit like what is going on here you know does this banankai really relate to kiraku how does it relate to kating kyokotsu and just what the hell is going on it feels very very nebulous and i get that i felt similarly about it when i first read it although i do appreciate it the amount of thematic work that's gone into this bank i do think is incredible my issue with the ban kai is nothing about it feels tangible there is no connecting through line yes you've got the fact that it's based on this story it's telling a play but all four of the acts look dramatically different they look dramatically different they feel dramatically different and therefore there doesn't feel like there is really anything contextually binding them together bear in mind as well this is a manga it's a visual medium so we really should have seen something to help us think like this this is all part of kiraku's barnacle this all makes more sense to me visually so how would i have gone about changing this well i'd have kept the acts all that sort of thing exactly the same like i said i love all that i think that makes total sense but just from an art perspective i would have done something small those black pine roots that appear at the very start of the barn kite i'd have made them an actual thing like have them burrow into the ground and stay there for the duration of the ban kai or even better have them form into a withered black pine tree that just hangs around in the background very ominous very haunting reminding you constantly that this is all part of kyoraku's bankai all falls under the same umbrella and then even if the acts do feel all very disparate they can kind of come together under this one umbrella so visually you know i love the whole black pine thing i think it looks really really cool but you only see it a couple of times and it's very much um a figurative thing when you do i think now i think they probably do actually appear at the start of the barn code but they seem to disappear after that so i would have just had like a tree or something looming in the background just to remind you that yes this is all part of the same package essentially but that's basically it for kyoraku's bankai i really hope this video helped you i think it's hopefully helping me to be honest to talk about it out loud but it is kind of confusing contextually it is a bit weird and i know people were a little bit disappointed with the banco when it first came out but you have to understand it is incredibly thematic there's a lot going on here under the surface as well it tells a really interesting story and it's really cool seeing kyoraku and lille being the characters in that story playing out but that's it guys i really hope you enjoyed don't forget to leave a thumbs up if you liked the video do let me know in the comments below what you thought of kyoraku's bankai did kubo do the new captain commander justice in one of the final battles of the final arc i'd love to see your comments down below and until next time guys i'll catch you later i'll see you then

Channel: MrTommo2304

Views: 164,318

Keywords: bleach, bleach manga, bleach anime, kyoraku bankai, shunsui bankai, bleach 2020, bleach discussion, bleach 20th, bleach anime 2021, bankai, aizen, ichigo, sternritter, Bleach TYBW, MrTommo2304, MrTommo2304 bleach

Id: JYS5FCcd_UA

Length: 23min 52sec (1432 seconds)

Published: Fri May 14 2021