The Fall of Bleach: 4 Years Later

four years ago i made a video called the fall of bleach how it happens at the time i'd been making videos for about half a year and had a tiny audience and that's why it was such a shock when at a party a friend told me that the bleach video i had uploaded earlier that day had been watched by 20 000 people i was happy the video was a big step forward for me in terms of writing editing telling a story and it went on to be the third most viewed video on my entire channel with over three million views but there was a problem the information that story was based on was wrong initially the reaction was really positive even bleach fans seemed to appreciate the video but over time that started to change people started to point out glaring mistakes in the fall of bleach and while i waved it off as people being angry on the internet at first eventually i was left with the uncomfortable reality that i had [ __ ] up and i've talked about this on twitter in other videos and in the description of that video but there would always be people telling me that i needed to remake the fall of bleach and the thing that pisses me off most about these people is that i agree with them the fall of bleach was built on a simple idea that the magazine weekly shonen jump ranks its series by order of popularity in its table of contents based on reader surveys and when i charted bleach's table of contents position over 10 years i noticed a trend as bleach went from the third most popular position to gradually falling all the way to the back of the magazine before being cancelled in 2016. my video charting how the decline in quality of bleach's story correlated that trends there's two huge problems here the first being the idea that the shonen jump table of contents reflects the reader's surveys is a heavily circulated piece of misinformation with no definitive evidence to substantiate it sure it's possible that a negative response to bleach in the reader surveys could have pushed it to the back of the magazine but it's equally possible that jump wanted to take bleach one of its most popular series and put it to the back to incentivize readers to read all the way through the magazine bringing eyes to lesser known series the point is we don't know it's a decision made by the editor-in-chief but the logic behind it is not available to the public the second is the idea that bleach was cancelled this became another heavily circulated piece of misinformation when bleach was announced to be ending in just five chapters which caused a lot of speculation given how abrupt it seemed and created an interesting narrative when combined with the misinformation about the rankings but again there was never any confirmation of this it likely had much more to do with taitai kubo's exhaustion after riding a manga for 15 years as well as a declining health and even kubo himself later stated in an interview how he ended the series how he wanted to so first thing we need to address did bleach actually fall in popularity well our best indication of that is in its sales figures if we look back at bleach's yearly sales we can see a top 6 million units in 2009 before a pretty steep decline bottoming out at around 2 million units in 2016 but yearly sales estimates can be misleading so what did the volume sales say we can see here that bleach's volume sales peak at volume 37 selling 800 000 copies before a similar decline kicks in leaving its final volume sales at just over half that at 440 000 copies there's still a little room for error here so i want to look at how bleach was performing compared to other massively popular series of this time and we can see that in this data table where you can see why they were called the big three one piece naruto and bleach selling dramatically more than any other manga not just in jump but in the world before bleach begins a pretty dramatic fall disappearing from the top 10 in 2012 eventually landing at position 22 in 2016. it is impossible to take all these figures into account and credibly argue that bleach didn't have a significant decline in popularity but if that's the case then what's the problem with that original video and the problem is that this is a gross misrepresentation of that decline and because i believed it that combined with my own personal disappointment in bleach led to me making claims that were insubstantial at best and straight-up misinformation at worst but the much bigger problem is that i didn't correct those mistakes soon enough when i checked the video stats earlier this year it was still getting thousands of views a week meaning it was still spreading that misinformation and in hindsight i should have done this a long time ago and for that there is no excuse and so to my audience to the people who love bleach and hell to taite kubo each one of you deserve better than you got for me here and i'm sorry that is the most important thing i'm going to say this video now what i want to do is re-evaluate bleach in its entirety and i gotta say it was a strange nostalgic feeling re-reading the first couple of chapters and i had to wonder what i would now make of this legendary series eyes unclouded by hay and i was shocked to discover it's still bad you lose again bleach fans you lose again okay no no no i'm i'm just i'm just [ __ ] around kinda we'll get there but before we do i wanna shout out dbz imran's video on bleach in which he addresses some of the flaws in my original video this video being a way more positive take on bleach than you're going to get here and while i don't agree with a lot of the conclusions he comes to about the quality of bleach's story he's a cool guy and you should totally follow him if you're into bleach and i hope by mentioning this it's gonna be taken as a sign of good fate that i don't consider my own viewpoint on bleach as one of some omnipian super being whose every whim reflects an indisputable truth rather i am just an awkward little square person with an opinion as valid and flawed as the next humans but one who just so happens to have repeatedly tumbled ass backwards up youtube mountain by complete accidents with a follower count which oh jesus fills me with an existential anxiety i can only express through this gift from indiana jones where a magical cup melts a man's face off and with that in mind let's begin one of the criticisms i regret most in that original video is the idea that bleach's art gets worse bleach style does change over the course of its run starting as a looser more playful style before evolving into something more rendered and moody but that later style does fit the more serious tone of later bleach and the kubo doesn't want to illustrate a lot of backgrounds who gives a [ __ ] whether it's chapter 6 or 600 the idea that kubo's artwork gives you anything to complain about is insane he's able to render battles with an explosive level of impact and spectacle while also able to imbue his characters with a really subtle sense of emotion kumo is a master at expressing visually who these people are and particularly through their clothing take the 13 soul society captains all of whom were the same basic uniform but each have altered it in some way with these little touches that are so subtle but so expressive this one page where he just uses tiny close-ups of different captains outfits to identify them and immediately you know who they are just from how expressive these little details are and this goes double for ichigo and his friends part of the appeal of bleach is that these characters are not just kids like in other shonen series but are teenagers and kobo communicates this beautifully through the clothing they wear you can feel the fashion of the early 2000s in each character design and splash page and it was stylish and cool but critically it visually communicated the idea of adolescence and that was the appeal of ichigo he wasn't a boundless spring of shonen optimism he had a bad attitude and a short temper especially in this one page where he expresses his disdain for the systematic authority of his school and teachers his willingness to fight corrupt systems becoming a much bigger deal later in the story but he was also just a lot of fun to watch especially when these zanier characters bounced off him like orihime i forgot how hilarious she is in the earlier chapters but this drawing of herself in the future is maybe one of my favorite panels in the entire manga after some supernatural hijinks cause ichigo to inherit the powers of rukia a soul reaper basically samurai grim reaper he's tasked with hunting and killing hollows monstrous undead beings who feed on the souls of the living dead and this leads him to a battle with his first big enemy grand fisher as it's revealed that grand fisher is far more dangerous than the other hollows but is also responsible for the death of ichigo's mother who died trying to protect him a trauma that ichigo has never recovered from giving this fight a real emotional waste as he's not just fighting a scary monster but his own inability to overcome his own grief gran fisher mocking ichigo with the image of his deceased mother and the really sad part is ichigo doesn't even win grandfisher escapes and this is the moment i started to really love bleach because grief isn't just something you can overcome in a single instant and ichigo's failure to defeat grand fisher is a fantastic expression of that this is the core of ichigo's character his inability to escape his own grief and how that fuels his desire to protect the people he loves and it's that motivation that drives ichigo through the first major story arc of bleach the soul society after spending two months in the world of living rookie is captured by two extremely powerful soul reapers and charged with the crime of transferring her powers to a human sentenced to death in just one month with ichigo and his band of supernaturally powered teenagers attempting to save rukia by launching an invasion on seoul society entering a dangerous new world defined by a rigid hierarchy with rules that feel cold and unfair and if that isn't a damn near perfect analogy for being a teenager entering adult society for the first time i don't know what is the real beauty of this arc however comes from the soul reapers themselves and that's because of how well developed they are both as an organization and as a community of people the soul reapers are made up of 13 different squads each led by a vice captain and captain vice captains being powerful warriors each possessing their own sword with its own special ability known as shikai and captains being dramatically more powerful having access to bankai spectacular ultra powerful techniques unique to each sword and it's just a lot of fun discovering what each captain and lieutenant can do and creates a tremendous sense of escalation as ichigo goes from fighting regular foot troops to vice captains all the way to captains which are depicted as these terrifying behemoths massively powerful and nearly impossible for ichigo and his friends to overcome creating an incredible amount of tension and drama whenever one steps onto the battlefield but even more than that the reason 13 court guard works so well as villains is because they kind of don't feel like villains at all there are monsters among them but most just feel like people the series taking the time to develop their history motives drives and most importantly relationships pick any two members of seoul society and chances are you'll be able to draw a kind of social spider web of interlinking relationships connecting the two and it's these relationships that are at the heart of the soul reapers take the captain of squad seven komamura and the captain of squad nine tosin komomora being deeply ashamed of his bestial appearance hides his face from the world but he's found comfort in his bond with tosin a blind swordsman who doesn't care what anyone looks like and it's really sweet but there are so many little relationships like this childhood friends rivals drinking buddies unrequited lovers there's a tremendous amount of time spent developing these characters and their relationships and it's from this that the battles of the soul society draw their emotion and you can see this especially halfway through the arc when ichigo faces renji abhirai one of the soul reapers responsible for capturing rukia but the beautiful thing about this fight is it's not just a good guy versus a bad guy as it's revealed that renji and rukia actually grew up together in one of seoul society's most violent criminal districts and learned to survive by forming a band of thieves with other children and eking out a life of impoverished happiness amidst the chaos but as the two grew older and closer they lose each one of their friends to the violence around them and so desperate to build a better life for each other joined soul society as student soul reapers bots become separated when rukia is adopted into a prestigious noble family headed by biakia and so renji and rukia's life together comes to an end because of this when renji finds out that rukia is going to be put to death it kills him he wants to be the kind of person who can save her but he also can't let himself believe that someone of his lowly status could ever stand against something as impossible and monolithic as the soul society and especially against his captain and rukia's own brother the massively powerful byakia and that's why ichigo's presence in seoul society torments renji because it forces him to confront that belief and that is the emotional core of this battle and so when ichigo defeats renji it's renji's eyes being open to the idea that he can make a difference and even if there's only a tiny chance it's worth taking that chance for someone you love and it's that realization that allows him to switch sides and finally face off against biakia this is what i love about the battles of seoul society each fight has meaning every fight has some emotional weight or reveals some new piece of information even minor encounters like chad vs kyoku demonstrate the ocean of power separating regular people and captains and as a result ichigo's showdown with kenpachi that immediately follows feels all the more desperate and terrifying because we have the context to understand how frightening the prospect of facing a captain is the battle forcing ichigo to overcome his own fear of death in order to move forward and save rukia in one of the most violent showdowns of the series each fight serves a purpose each fight tells a story and serves as a link in the chain that moves the larger narrative forward but it's in that larger narrative that begins to form around these fights soul society becomes one of my favorite pieces of shonen storytelling ever as we come to know the 13 court guard we start to notice that not all captains seem to trust each other some like the softly spoken eyes and suspect that something insidious is growing within the organization certain orders from the central 46 basically the shadow government of soul society don't seem to make sense like rookie's execution being repeatedly pushed forward and it seems to have something to do with the unsettling snake-like captain ichimaru gin who seems to be taking a disturbing glee in rukia's execution but as eisen grows closer to the truth he warns his assistant captain momo who may or may not be in love with him that there is some danger within seoul society and that's when boom holy [ __ ] eisen ends up murdered the next morning and you realize this is not just a simple rescue mission someone with the power to kill captains is behind a deeply [ __ ] conspiracy taking over seoul society and it's so exciting but that's when we discover hey guys i'm just gonna let you know that i'm about to spoil seoul society and it's two decades old and most of you have already watched it but if you haven't and you like shonen you should it's fantastic and it holds up beautifully so you can skip here if you want to avoid spoilers when momo's friends enter the forbidden chamber of the central 46 holy [ __ ] they're all [ __ ] dead but but then who's been given the orders and oh my god isn't still alive what is happening and then he stabs momo and she loved you eyes and she loved you and it's revealed that the true villain of this entire [ __ ] arc wasn't the evil snake man it was the soft glasses boy and so even when ichigo fights all the way to the peak of seoul society and defeats pyakiya rookie's brother and the personification of putting what society says is right over protecting the ones you love it feels monumentous ichigo has overcome the impossible system he's won until eisen appears and everything ichigo's learned all the power he's gained it is nothing in the face of this new enemy and eisen removes an ancient artifact in rukia's body that this whole execution was just deployed again and who alongside gin and tozen disappears into the world of hollows as he attempts to ascend the power of godhood and man it's [ __ ] fantastic the entire arc beautifully building to a shocking satisfying climax letting ichigo overcome his own trauma by literally facing the gods of death themselves and saving someone he loves while overturning a corrupt system while seamlessly revealing the true villain of bleach leading beautifully into the next major story arc and its pure shonen brilliance and i only have three tiny issues with it one ichigo is kind of a reactionary character two the world building of the soul society is a little weak this is a place where all people of every culture of every era are all crammed together in one gigantic afterlife but instead of expressing that through the world building it feels like kubo kind of just looked at feudal japan and went that and three i'm gonna frame this in the form of a question that we'll come back to later and that is how does ichigo win fights these are all such minor issues that if we were talking about seoul society by itself i wouldn't even bring them up but i do because they are the seeds to problems that will eventually grow throughout the series and have dramatic effects on later arcs and where those seeds start to poke through the surface is in the next major arc hueco mundo after a few skirmishes with the aaron carr eisen's army of massively powerful hollow people and totally not furries i swear to god they're not furries the wacom window arc begins and immediately we kind of have that same problem with world building this place is basically hell or at least a bad afterlife and think of all the crazy ways that's been portrayed in media but instead of that we kind of just get a giant empty desert and it's like cool at this point it's still not that big an issue but the much bigger problem with hueco mundo is it's kind of just soul society again and i was a little general with this criticism last time around so allow me to be more specific ichigo and his friends invade a land of extremely powerful death gods who are all part of a hierarchical organization in order to rescue their female friend who has been imprisoned for semi-mysterious reasons they immediately encounter a large enemy who they defeat with an overwhelming display of force before being split up and fighting their own individual battles uru fights a mad scientist who sacrifices his own minions chad is depicted as one of the most powerful members of the group before being squashed by an even more powerful enemy to demonstrate the danger of the opposing force one of ichigo's allies is a cute side character who eventually transforms into a sexy powerful fully grown woman who used to be part of the opposing force before switching sides former enemies of ichigo show up to help in the final stages of the battle and ichigo fights first a low ranking enemy then a wild middle ranking enemy with a b steel fighting style and finally in order to save the girl a massively powerful stoic and cold high-ranking member of the enemy force who previously defeated him and during this battle he loses control of his hollow side goes berserk before finally regaining control and saving the day before eisen reveals that the kidnapping of the girl is only the small part of a much larger plan this is not general structural repetition these are the same story beats and it's maybe the first indication that bleach is struggling a little with its long-term direction but worse by being so similar to seoul society it shows you exactly what's missing from hueco mundo and particularly in the iron car the problem with the iran car is that they're never given the time to develop as characters the same way the soul reapers were i can tell you every captain vice captain and even some of the seated chairs of the 13 court guard i can tell you about their backstories their relationships their motives even the really unimportant little side people because the series spent the time to tell you who these people were now with that in mind if you've seen bleach can you tell me anything about any of the characters on screen right now their relationships their goals how about this guy or this girl or was was this guy really in it i i watched this like two weeks ago was is this actually a character oh yeah no no it is that okay this isn't to say there isn't any characterization there is some and what flashes we do get of the iran car are really interesting neutral pointing out the hypocrisy of the soul reapers ul kiara slowly developing a bond with orohime and barrigan hurling his axe at eisen in one final act of defiance these moments are great but they're so brief feeling more like supplemental information rather than being the motives driving the character's actions with most of the irancar even sort of really important ones like halle bell given little to no development at all and it doesn't just make for less compelling characters but critically has a dramatic effect on how bleach's fights work when i talk about fight scenes i like to break them down into two narratives emotional narratives and technical narratives and to help explain this little think of a showdown from an anime as a game of chess the emotional narrative is the story that's brought the two opposing players to play this game of chess their backstories their journeys their relationships and what victory or defeat means to either one in other words the emotional narrative is everything that happens off the chess board while the technical narrative is everything that happens on the chessboard the physical story that unfolds through each character's actions the logical progression of moves and counter moves that leads to one character checkmating another to break this down in terms of an actual battle let's take frieza vs goku the emotional narrative here would be that frieza is a horrible space racist who validates his own existence by inflicting pain and misery on anyone he deems weaker than he is goku being a member of one of those supposedly inferior races whose people have been genocided by frieza now fighting to prove that frieza's power does not justify his actions as for the technical narrative i won't go through it all because it's a really long fight but the final stages of this battle are the famous moment where goku goes super saiyan which lets him finally fight uneven footing with frieza frieza in turn growing more desperate leaving him using his rather dangerous energy discs the fight ending with frieza's own attacks being turned against him this is the logical progression of actions the technical narrative that brings the fight to a close as long as a fight scene has a strong emotional or technical narrative it's probably going to be pretty entertaining with great ones incorporating both but i would say the strength of the battles in seoul society were in their emotional narratives and you can see that in the battle with renji look at the amount of storytelling that went into establishing who he is why he was fighting and how the outcome of that fight changed his future actions in that story and the problem with the battles of hoiko mundo is there is so much less character development it means the battles lack that emotional storytelling that was so critical in seoul society and i'd even say that of the really big fights like ichigo versus grim joe now i like grim joe i like his swagger i would let him buy me a drink but my problem with his showdown with ichigo is it lacks any kind of personal or emotional narrative that drives the conflict we get a little backstory about how grim joe ate his old hollow partners which does set up a nice contrast with how he and ichigo view relationships but it doesn't escalate the personal conflict between ichigo and grimjoe in any meaningful way and once grim joe is defeated he just disappears from the story as if his only real purpose was as an obstacle for ichigo to overcome yes i know he shows up for a cameo 300 chapters later it doesn't matter and compare that to the emotional narrative of renji and ichigo and it's so much less substantial i use the fight with grim joe as an example because it's actually one of the better encounters in hueco mundo but the reality is that the vast majority of battles are way worse most feel like they exist in isolation devoid of any meaningful personal narrative or the sense that they're part of a larger story and this leads to a second problem with bleach's fights and that is when you take the emotional narrative out of them it exposes how simple and repetitive the technical narratives of bleach's bottles are to show you what i mean here let's take eryu and let's look at how he wins his first four fights he wins his battle with girobo by unveiling his brand new weapon the sanre glove he wins his battle with myru by unveiling his brand new modification the let's still he wins this fight with werner by unveiling his brand new weapon the ginray kojaku and he wins his fight with sander wiki by unveiling his brand new weapon the celestinder i'm not criticizing any of these fights individually but you can start to see a pattern here each one of our used fights ends with him introducing a brand new element the audience has no prior knowledge of and it's that new element that solves the conflict in stage writing this is known as deus ex machina an unexpected power or event saving a seemingly hopeless situation but this is shonen so i'm gonna call it the star finger problem starfinger is an ability from stardust crusaders when in order to get jotaro out of danger star platinum is given the rather strange ability of extending his fingers and just stabbing people from far away the issue i have with this is that joturo's star platinum is a short range high damage stand meaning jotaro's problem he must overcome in his battles is how to close the distance between his opponents and deliver as much damage as possible and to do this he'll need to carefully observe and understand the abilities of his opponents and exploit the weaknesses of those abilities while they try and do the same to him this is the kind of psychological tactical battle that would come to define jojo and how a series that is 95 male models shooting ghosts at each other can stay so compelling because it leads the viewer on this wild ride of moves counter moves and counters to those counters thereby creating a strong technical narrative that leads the viewer through fights the problem with starfinger is it allows jotro to cheat the short-range limitations of star platinum bypassing the entire narrative of the fight robbing the audience of that story and bleach is full of star fingers now granted it is not the only shown in series guilty of this but it does do it a lot for example kenpachi defeats neutral by unveiling his brand new double-handed technique chad beats his first major enemy by growing a brand new demon arm and his second by growing a second brand new demon arm yurichi defeats saifon by unveiling her brand new shenko rookie defeats deroy by unveiling her shiikai yumichika defeats charlotte by revealing his shiikai hisagi defeats finder by unveiling his shikai toshiro survives halle bell by unveiling his bankai akaku defeats this guy by unveiling his bankai do you see do you see what i am saying well tough we're not done later on in the manga our heroes are being attacked by an enemy he uses the ability god's light and nana reveals her sheikai which just so happens to be reflect god's light and there's even an entire sub arc where just as all hope is lost the soul reapers have a final our reveal where it turns out they were all under a self-imposed power limitation which once released lets them deus ex machina their way to victory i could keep going but the point is that each encounter ends with something the audience has no prior knowledge of solving the conflict bypassing the technical narrative meaning the strategy or psychology of these fights don't matter because inevitably there will always be a final hour unexpected power or events that will save the seemingly hopeless situation and there are actual instances of characters using real strategy in bleach like ushoda trapping barrigan in a barrier so he can't avoid soifun's bankai and moments like this are the hypest of the entire series but they are few and far between far more common being what we just talked about and unfortunately the worst example of this is ichigo himself the way ichigo wins fights is universally through a massive surge of power he uses to overwhelm his opponents this is how he beats ikaku renji kenpachi biakia grimjoe alkiera and it carries all the problems we just talked about but because ichigo is our protagonist several more a huge part of the appeal of shonen protagonists is watching them gradually get better at something watching their fighting style evolve in fun and creative ways those new ways of fighting allowing them to climb to even greater heights within their world in hachimino ipo for example we watch ippo go from knowing absolutely nothing about boxing to gradually learning jabs uppercuts defense and footwork and then when he finally combines everything he's learned into the dempsey roll finishing technique it's one of the most exciting moments in shonen because we've been there with him since the very beginning this devastating move the sum total of his entire journey and it's beautiful likewise think of all the crazy inventive attacks luffy learns to do with his rubber body or the wild [ __ ] naruto pulls off with the shadow clones these moments don't just look cool they are the physical embodiment that our protagonists have grown and evolved and that is the core of shonen but ichigo doesn't really work like this his power surges are generally justified through brief and often really abstract feeling training sequences that feel disconnected from how ichigo actually fights when i first saw hollow ichigo use his sword like a chain and sickle projectile weapon i thought that was going to open up a really cool new fighting style for ichigo but that never happens instead the show just has these points where it tells us that ichigo is now stronger or faster or some ambiguous combination of the two he gets new swords and outfits but after his bankai reveal and soul society there's never a feeling that the way he fights or the moves he uses is evolving in a meaningful way which means that his fights just keep ending in these same big surges of power but i patchwolf you handsome devil i hear the comment section cry goku and frieza also ends in a giant power surge and look that's a fair point but the difference is that goku going super saiyan doesn't end the fight it's just one part in a logical progression that leads to frieza being sliced in half by his own energy disk goku does get a big surge of power but he still has to use it creatively to beat frieza ending the fight in this little moment of storytelling where frieza's undoing is his own anger and hatred being turned against him and it's that level of storytelling that's missing from ichigo's victories because it's always just a giant surge of power that allows him to just bypass whatever plot obstacle stands in his way and it's this lack of storytelling that leads to one of the most anti-climactic moments in bleach but first i want to mention that the sales data does not agree with me on a lot of this stuff the irancar arc was actually when bleach's sales were at their highest and anecdotally a lot of people love it and if you're one of them i'm not trying to say it's bad just to me that this is when you can start to see the weaker storytelling aspects of bleach really come to the forefront and hell even i'll say it gets a lot better in its second half the battle over kakarin town and the reason for that is we start paying off a lot of those relationships we established in seoul society seeing towson finally get his sight back and tell komamaru you're even uglier than i imagined is such a painful sad moment for these characters but it's a motion like that that makes the battle with eisen meaningful and eisen comes across as a genuinely terrifying villain a cold calculating genius who's manipulated this entire situation from the very beginning there's some really fun revelations and a genuine feeling of hopelessness as eisen approaches a god-like state as each of the remaining heroes hurled themselves against him only to be effortlessly crushed and so when it finally comes down to ichigo versus eisen it feels desperate and tense and exactly how a final showdown should this is the anticlimactic moment i was talking about at this point we've watched ichigo overcome his fear of death and protecting someone he loves over and over and over we've watched him save people we've watched him overturn corrupt systems and with those motives exhausted the character starts to feel a little lost and so in the final battle with eisen it doesn't really feel like there's much of a story left to tell and because of that the encounter with eisen doesn't really feel personal or meaningful to either character and i think that's a huge problem because for a final showdown like this concluding nearly 10 years of storytelling there has to be some emotional weight to it it has to say something about its characters that's more nuanced than just good versus evil for example let's talk about yusuke vs tagoro from yuyu hakusho's dark tournament saga at the heart of this fight isn't the question of good versus evil but whether it's better to live a life of simple mediocrity surrounded by the people you love or to throw everything else away in pursuit of a single-minded ambition and it's because of that question that this fight still haunts me a decade and a half later after i first watched it and especially considering the 80-hour weeks i've had to put into this video just a little meta humor there for you folks it's that storytelling i just don't get from ichigo and eisen especially when the solutions of the conflict is so brief and insubstantial ichigo's dad appearing in the final hour offering to teach him a brand new technique and after a brief training sequence ichigo is powered up so much that eisen that this reality warping god can't even touch him ichigo blows eyes and away in a giant surge of power and that's it and in that instance all the storytelling potential we've been building since the beginning of seoul society it all just disappears and it is so profoundly disappointing i can remember reading this when it first came out and that being the moment i first lost faith in bleach and on my reread that has not changed my own disappointment to say this moment heralds much bigger problems for bleach as it's here where those two other tiny issues i had with soul society have grown to the point that they will now have disastrous effects on the series because ichigo is such a reactionary character who only responds to external events as opposed to pursuing his own ambition there is now nothing to push the character forward meaning something external now has to happen him in order for the story to continue and that leads to the second problem bleach's world building kubo tends to write in a way that means we're only given as much information about bleach's world as is immediately relevant to the plot but compare that to something like one piece i don't think it's any coincidence that one of the longest running and most successful shonen series also has some of the strongest deepest world building where villains characters places and concepts are introduced sometimes hundreds of chapters before they become a major part of the story but what that means is once the story arc ends oda has a near infinite number of directions he can take the next story arc without losing any narrative momentum because he's already given us the context and information to understand why we should be invested in the next part of the story bleach does not work like this with eisen's defeat concluding every major story point and character arc it means a few tiny unanswered plot threads aside there is now nothing strong enough to pull us into the next major part of the story and so kubo now has to invent a new reason for bleach to exist and the results is the fullbringer arc one part of the fight with eisen i enjoy but haven't mentioned is how ichigo loses his power in that final attack it's a big sacrifice for ichigo cutting him off from the world of the soul reapers and bringing his character back to just being the regular teenager we met at the beginning of the series and that's kind of powerful after everything we've been through especially with him now having to say goodbye to rukia but the reason i don't mention it till now is because the central premise of the fullbringer arc is to undo all of that with new character genjo claiming to have a way to restore ichigo's power and so ichigo joins the fullbringers a brand new cast of characters with a brand new villain and even brand new fullbringer combat system the art of summoning souls out of anime objects to manifest weapons and special abilities which does lead to ichigo fighting with a giant swastika for a bit but you know that has different cultural connotations in japan than it does in other places so we're just gonna move right past that in fairness the new combat system does feel like kubo's attempt to revamp the repetitive battles of bleach and there are some really cool ideas here like tsukishima's sword which implants him in your past so that he becomes the most important person in your life creating some great drama as he turns all of ichigo's friends against him and his fight with biakya is genuinely the kind of tactical mind game fueled encounter that i wish bleach had more of honestly i have a lot of sympathy for kubo here there is no manual that can tell you how to keep a weekly manga series relevant for 10 plus years and i respect the chances he took in this arc attempting to do that the only problem is that i don't think those chances pay off once again it's very difficult to get invested in the full bringers given how little character development they get and how disconnected they feel from the rest of bleach's world and about halfway through the arc ichigo gets his powers back and we drop all semblance of the new fullbringer combat system making it just feel kind of pointless and that is a criticism i would level at this arc as a whole as once ichigo's powers are restored the story just meanders on the fullbringers being revealed as the villains the soul reapers returning to defeat them ichigo beating arc villain ginjo with yet another giant surge of power and at the end of it all there's just a feeling that nothing really happens the world and story of bleach haven't progressed in any meaningful way except undoing the one aspect of the battle with eisen that gave it meaning and i don't think the problem here is as simple as one bad storyline but how the long-term problems of bleach have left both the story and our protagonist with no meaningful direction resulting in an arc that feels at best like canonical filler and at worst like a giant waste of time i don't think it's any coincidence that this was the point in the series where bleach's volume sales started to fall but it's also after the fullbringer arc that the bleach anime ceased production and it was pulled off the air and this is really strange for multiple reasons namely because bleach still had an entire story arc left to go but more bizarrely the bleach anime dvd sold crazy well like better than naruto better than one piece well and that's likely due to how strong the anime's production was so why was it cancelled was it cancelled this has been a subject of speculation for quite a while now and so let's talk about it in a little intermission i like to call was the bleach anime actually cancelled i'd say the thing to know about the dvd sales is they only amount to a fraction of bleach's overall audience with half a million lifetime sales now if you factor that into bleach's total unit sales i.e the tankobon dvd sales make up just point zero four percent of that and so it's not really a helpful metric in understanding why the anime was taken off the air to answer that question we'd have to do something super awkward and boring like dig into bleach's japanese tv ratings which we're about to do this is how bleach's tv ratings charted over time but two things to know one the four different colors represent four different time slots and so aren't directly comparable to each other and two due to the massive amount of filler contents in the bleach anime this shouldn't be taken as a reflection on bleach's core story but what's interesting is that the fullbringer arc which is here on average performs worse than the majority of bleach's filler arcs struggling to stay above 2 audience share which is a massive decline when it used to average between four and five percent at a similar time slot and so bleach was taken off the air and replaced by the rockley and pals naruto spin-off despite still having an entire arc to go and incidentally the dvd sales show that similar decline so was the bleach anime cancelled due to consistently declining ratings we can now answer that question with an absolute definitive yeah probably but that is us inferring information from statistical data and not confirmation from an official source and so if new information arises i'll be happy to correct that the fullbringer arc had a disastrous effect on bleach both in its sales and its tv ratings and because it didn't advance the overall narrative of bleach in any meaningful way kubo now enters the final arc of bleach facing the exact same problem he needs to restart the entire series with a brand new storyline and you know what this time he kind of [ __ ] kills it the thousand-year blood war arc begins with soul society being invaded by a secret army of quincy a race of people thought to have been wiped out in a violent war with the soul reapers a millennia ago and it's it's great the quincy has already have a place in bleach's universe because of her you and watching them decimate soul society with technology that disables bankai meaning our heroes can no longer rely on the power that's protected in this entire story it is devastating and shocking especially when the quincy's leader yacht their psychotic and terrifying king kills captain yamado the leader of the soul society and the strongest oldest soul reaper and it's such a fantastic way of turning bleach's world on its head so much so that bleach actually saw a huge surge in sales at this point but unfortunately it wouldn't last the thousand-year blood war is interesting easily better than the fullbringer arc with some really fun villains some cool long-term payoffs like nemu finally getting her moment to shine some great fights like kenpachi versus grebby in fact there's just a lot of kenpachi which i appreciate but as great as the start of this arc is eventually the long-term problems begin to set in one of the main ones being ichigo himself the conflict with the yacht and seoul society is great it's super compelling but it creates this problem where ichigo our protagonist begins to feel like a side character in that conflict initially he doesn't have any more motive to stop yachts than any other member of seoul society meaning ichigo and joche's inevitable showdown could lack that personal edge that made the earlier fights of bleach so compelling and was arguably missing from his showdowns with eisen and ginjo and i think kubo knows this and his solution is a lot of backwards writing what i mean by this is the thousand year blood war contains a lot of retroactive exposition characters explaining how the whole story has actually been super connected the entire time like the revelation that ichigo's mother was actually a quincy but the reason she couldn't defend herself against grand fisher is because the moment she was attacked was coincidentally also the moment that yachts awoke from a 900 year slumber and momentarily drained all quincy of their power meaning in a kind of ashton kutcher butterfly effect kind of way yacht is responsible for the death of ichigo's mother and they lean on that plot point a lot there's also another subplot where yatch is actually the man who lives in ichigo's sword for the entire series and has been secretly controlling his actions the whole time granted that was kind of ison's deal too but his actions during seoul society did establish him as a master manipulator whereas with yachts it feels way less justified my problem with this stuff isn't that i think kubo's making it up as he goes along i don't know if he is i don't care if he is a lot of really great manga authors have been open about the fact that they improvise large parts of their story and so i really don't think it's a problem if you can do it right but i don't think kubo does as the issue with this kind of retroactive exposition is it's a very cheap way to try and solve long-term story problems and i say cheap because it's really easy to write like this it's really easy to retroactively explain how any situation was actually the plan of some evil genius for example do you honestly think i actually made those completely obvious mistakes in my original video [Laughter] oh you poor fools i planted those inaccuracies there knowing the video would be controversial knowing that controversy would spread it across the internet like a virus and knowing that four years later i could just release another massively controversial bleach video and the fact that you've watched this far into the video means my plans worked your watch time will fuel youtube's algorithm spreading this video across the world and destroying bleach's reputation once again and i won't stop i hope you're looking forward to the fall of bleach eight years later because i'm just going to keep making videos like this until bleach's reputation is nothing but ash and rust see this is why i don't think ichigo is a well-suited protagonist of a long-term series as the story has to constantly bend itself around him to keep him relevant and that leads to the kind of contrived writing we just talked about and because of that it strains the fictional credibility of the story making the main narrative thread difficult to believe in but unfortunately this arc is haunted by more old problems than just this especially in its battle heavy second half one flashback segment aside the wunder reich are massively underdeveloped as characters which has the knock-on effect of draining the emotional narrative from these fights exposing the weaker technical narratives of them the vast majority of which end in star fingers again these moments always look [ __ ] cool but in terms of creating a technical narrative that pulls the reader from chapter to chapter they fail with sales at this point continuing to fall what's the biggest blow for the thousand-year blood war and maybe for bleach in general is how it ends just as the final showdown with yachts was getting started it was announced that the next volume of bleach would be its last meaning the story only had about five chapters to go fans were shocked posting laundry lists of unanswered plot points that the remaining chapters would have to conclude but from a storytelling perspective yacht is now a godlike being the power to see and control the future it left no room for a believable or satisfying conclusion instead what happens is uryu uses a brand new weapon to disable yoch's godlike abilities and ichigo slashes him with a giant completely unexplained surge of power every time i read through this i always feel like i've missed a chapter or read something wrong and then i reread it to discover that i haven't and if the fight with eisen was disappointing this is just devastating because there is a good story here yauch fighting for his desire to bring an end to death and suffering ichigo fighting for the idea that it is death and suffering that give life and hope meaning and i think that's a beautiful message but the problem isn't with that message it's with the storytelling that surrounds it we get two epilogue chapters and that's it that's the end of bleach which brings us back to the very start of this video when i made that original fall of bleach video i wasn't driven by a need to [ __ ] on something that was already being plenty shot on i was driven by the disappointment of years of watching something i loved turn into something i didn't and by any conceivable metric you can see a lot of people felt that way nearly half its audience and i think it's important to acknowledge the viewpoint of those fans because to me being a fan isn't unconditionally loving something it's understanding the reasons you do love that thing and being honest with yourself if those reasons disappear but four years later the fact that i still have problems with bleach doesn't mean i wasn't wrong in that original video i was but that doesn't mean i don't still have problems with bleach or that a lot of people didn't and if you're a massive bleach fan right up till the end if you've watched this entire video disagreeing with every point i make then i have only one thing to say to you thanks for watching the video i really appreciate your willingness to hear me out on this and i think it's cool you are willing to engage with an opposing viewpoint and what's more if you do love bleach if it's something that makes you happy in this cold and insane world then [ __ ] volume sales [ __ ] tv ratings hell [ __ ] me what do i know i have a platform it doesn't make my opinion any more valid than anyone else's if something brings you happiness don't let other people's opinions detract from that and if people use this video to try and explain why you are wrong for enjoying bleach i think that's kind of pathetic and not why i do this after eight years of hiatus the bleach anime is coming back for its final arc and i think that's awesome and i say that because yeah i do criticize kubo but the only reason i'm willing to talk about his work on this channel is because i recognize the oceans of potential the guy has he's an insanely talented illustrator capable of writing great characters and telling amazing stories he has everything a person could need to write the next big shonen series and i want burn the witch to be that series and i say that because despite everything bleach is always going to be a special series to me it's always going to be the series i watched just as i was leaving high school and entering the adult world reflecting the fears and anxieties of that time in this big beautiful battle anime and it's because of that i'm always going to care about bleach it's just my job to be as honest as i can about the media i care about and that's why i wanted to do this i don't expect everyone to like my videos and i sure as hell don't expect everyone to agree with them but i do care a lot about what goes up on this channel and i hope that's apparent and that's why i'm going to be unlisting the original fall of bleach video and with that that's about all i got to say about bleach thanks for watching friends thanks for joining me today oh boy can't wait to see the comments on this one if you want to see the original wrong video i'll leave a link in the description as i don't believe in hiding my mistakes but at least this way people can't get to it without going through this one and if you'd like to help this channel stay alive you can do so over at patreon.com forward slash super ipatchwolf where for just a single dollar you can have your name listed with these beautiful people right here special thank you this week too barbara cuttle vincent heavenly dog new kirk diaking fighter lacy buchta and deep not that deep as ever find me on the currently on hiatus let's play the boss video game podcast or on twitter at ipatchwolf friends take care of yourselves and i'll see you next time

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 1,358,945

Keywords: Bleach, The Fall of Bleach, Ichigo, Tite Kubo, Shonen Jump, Aizen, Rukia, The Fall of Bleach How it Happened

Id: LbBgrSUPUH0

Length: 57min 43sec (3463 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/LittleMann]

Turns out the true villain of Bleach...was me.

Wow, who could have predicted the true villain of Bleach looked like a younger Isshin.

[u/Huaun]

I'll forever call any Anime Deus Ex Machina as the "The Starfinger".

[u/Liamliam1995]

I was always surprised at the accusation that eyepatch's original video (despite the misinformation) is what caused people to view bleach negatively when I remember people hating the last 2 arcs and especially the ending of bleach before the video came out.

[u/dave323]

This video brought back so many memories. I remember being in high school flipping out with my friends about how cool Bleach was. Even with the dumb narrative stuff pointed out by Eyepatch Wolf, my teenage brain thought it was the hypest shit.

But then we hit the Fullbringer arc. Even back then, I thought it was super contrived for Ichigo to lose his powers and then immediately get them back. I dropped the series for years, until I heard it was ending, only to be disappointed again.

[u/jpatel02]

Every time Eyepatch brought up how much he regretted the original Fall of Bleach video all I could think was "Yeah, but you're still gonna keep it up because it's popular and gets ad revenue, right?"

So when he revealed at the end that he's now unlisted it while still keeping it in the description of THIS video because he doesn't believe in erasing mistakes, he absolutely got my respect (and my like). A+ move, MegaPegLegHamster.

[u/Noobie678]

So Shonen Jump's Table of Contents is as illusive as YouTube's algorithm?

[u/theswerto]

IT WASN'T A MAGICAL CUP IT WAS THE ARK OF THE COVENANT. AAAAAAAAAAA NOW WE NEED A NEW VIDEO TO CORRECT THIS GLARING FLAW!

[u/Slumber777]

This video does a much better job at explaining what went wrong with Bleach.

Good job, SEW.

[u/Dalek_Kolt]

It's really easy to retroactively explain how any situation was actually the plan of some evil genius.

Why Kingdom Hearts' writing infuriates me in a nutshell.