The Problem With Bleach

I first found bleach on the first Friday night of my second year of high school back then I made a weekly ritual out of tuning in to the late night bionics block on YTV which was the Canadian equivalent of both Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon but only the anime edgy and gross slash weird side of those Brands while they're more conventionally marketable family-friendly and late night adult cartoon Fair mostly ended up on ytv's non-public access sister Channel teletune which I didn't watch so much obviously because they didn't get enough anime though they did get the Canadian TV cut of Cardcaptor Sakura which despite being only slightly less butchered than what ran in America was easily the best and also only magical girl anime that I had ever watched up to that night now you might be wondering how any of this is relevant to bleach in 2022 and it's not really except for that bit about magical girls because Ichigo is a magical girl you see complete with his own Kawaii mascot but I'm doing a framing device type thing here using my own experience falling in and out of love with the anime to summarize the rise and fall of bleach in the public eye before I get into my own feelings on the series now that I've actually read the Manga and I figured that was as good an excuse as any to educate my majority American audience on how we in the adult swim deprived fourth world experienced anime in the days before Crunchyroll it was pretty great actually over the years we got a really solid lineup representing a broad spectrum of tastes and genres but I was an adolescent shown in [ __ ] at the time and Ghost in the Shell generally went way too long without anyone getting punched or exploded so I was really only staying up to see what happened next on FMA and Naruto and of course to finally see Inuyasha and Kagome hook up this week for sure honestly I think I was getting a little bored with anime at the time or at least with what was on TV but right before that night's FMA rerun I got hit with a musical cue and animation combination so sick that it still reverberates within my soul to this very day [Music] and then right after that night's FMA rerun it happened again only even harder [Music] we'll talk about that first time some other time what followed that opening also sticks with me to this day in particular the image of a jet black butterfly silhouetted against the ghostly Moon bleach had this surreal ethereal Vibe about it unlike any other anime I'd seen to that point a cool relaxed mature atmosphere at the same time through its Brash bullheaded protagonist Ichigo whom we first meet as he's beating the [ __ ] out of a whole gang of street thugs for knocking over a roadside grave and making a little ghost girl sad it maintained that fiery youthful energy that made me fall in love with other Shonen battle series when I was younger it also had something FMA had recently given me a taste for real substantial character development that saw that protagonist actually learning from his monster of the weekly mistakes and growing as a person quickly and dramatically which I wasn't really used to in my battle anime especially not in such a relatable contemporary context that spoke to my personal adolescent angst I might have been used to it if I'd seen more magical girl anime but there's no point lingering on what ifs even the monsters had this underlying Humanity about them that made them more tragic than detestable and lent the fights more emotional weight and thematic depth than they might otherwise have at the same time those care character arcs made those fights feel like they were contributing to a greater hole instead of just being one and done episodic fun again something magical girl anime would have prepared me for but here we are on top of that bleach had an insane sense of style in its direction and framing that set it apart visually as a more tasteful cinematic production than say Naruto or DBZ which mattered a lot to me as a child who was worried I might be growing out of anime but all that's ultimately secondary to the main thing that set bleach apart from all the other Shonen titles I was watching at the time aside from FMA it's pacing where those shows oozed like molasses between their major plot beats bleach sped ahead like a roller coaster zipping from mounting Mysteries to Major Revelations at an astonishing clip as it built up to ichigo's first encounter with a non-sub substitute Soul Reaper who obliterates him along with the series monster of the weekly status quo in the process kidnapping his magical girl assistant Rukia and launching us into another world for an escalating series of intense battles against the hierarchy of minor death deities that feels you know in retrospect and this might just be my brain on game journalism I really want to compare Soul society's particular flavor of Boss fight-driven narrative structure and World building to a fromsoft game specifically sekiro but at 14 I would have said a lot more like Naruto and Dragon Ball and not just in terms of structure and setting the jump to the other world also marked a clear and massive shift in the series pacing more and more fights began to stretch from single episode Affairs to two to three though that did feel somewhat appropriate with how the scope of the world and the story had also expanded and certainly the payoffs to those fights and the long-standing Mysteries that were finally being answered kept me coming back but man by the time Ichigo finally came face to face with byakuya while I got appropriately hyped at all the appropriate moments particularly when and he went all hollow out of nowhere I sure was ready for the ark to just end already and for the series to move on to something different and new and cool again like what made me fall in love with it but that didn't happen instead a whole season of painfully obvious filler happened which I ducked out of fast then when I tuned back in Ichigo was training his hollow Powers with some dudes I didn't know inside a warehouse and then some Bad Dudes I didn't know who also had Hollow Powers showed up out of nowhere to kick everyone's asses and convince Ori he made to kidnap herself somehow meaning Ichigo now had to run off to another other world and fight an escalating series of intense battles against another hierarchy of minor death deities in order to save her and that's about where I gave up I don't quite remember what the last episode I watched was but I do remember talking to my friend who was still into bleach about five years after I quit and him saying no dude it's so [ __ ] good you got to see the latest fight and it was against the same [ __ ] dude who kidnapped Orihime five [ __ ] years ago in the same [ __ ] white desert Place presumably on the same [ __ ] night only now they were flying like Goku and Ichigo could go Super Saiyan demon and I chuckled to my friend casually changed the subject to Jojo and enjoyed the rest of my New Year's evening content in the knowledge that I'd made the right call and gotten out of bleach when the getting was good not long after that news broke of the anime going on Hiatus to give the source material time to catch up and when it became clear that it wasn't coming back anytime soon I once again felt that Vindication I wasn't alone either as talk around the anime Community had it at the time bleach was easily the worst of the big three and thus deserved to be the first to end it was bloated and repetitive when wonky inconsistent power scaling weak World building Garbo pacing bad fights and a formulaic by the Numbers plot that is only ever shaken up by out of nowhere aspoles great fashion and great theme songs but that's about it and that's how I thought of bleach for many years until I finally cracked and read one piece that is and came to realize just how big the Gap in quality could really be between a weekly Shonen manga and its weekly anime adaptation from then on at the back of my mind there was always this niggling doubt about bleach so when they announced the Hiatus was finally over that bleach would be returning to television for a high quality single season rendition of its Thousand-Year blood War finale that would even fix some things Kubo didn't like about the ending I decided to bite the bullet give it a read and see how the manga really lived up to all that anti-hype to put it mildly I was completely blown away bleach is easily one of the best Shonen manga I've ever read and most of the criticisms I had against it were clearly either created or greatly exacerbated by the anime or simply misconceptions born from my own incomplete perspective on the story such as the idea that Ichigo is a poorly written protagonist who wins every fight with an out of nowhere aspole that's actually not true at all but now I'm left with a big problem namely time specifically YouTube run time it takes a lot of it to fully and comprehensively explain what makes bleach great because bleach is an extremely holistic manga that is to say all of its parts are intimately interconnected in such a way that explaining for example how Ichigo fully earns each of his big power-ups requires digging deep into almost every emotional beat of his character Arc plus all of his friends and several enemies arcs the metaphysics behind at least four different yet related magic systems and the full cosmology behind at least four different planes of existence both from a theological perspective and in terms of magic particle physics all subjects which ain't nobody got time for unless they're already a bleach fan but the catch there is if you simply leave it at saying that those aspects of the story exist and inform each other in many complex and important ways that ultimately make the stories substantially better the bleach antes will tell you that you're just making [ __ ] up to cover for the worst Rider in all of Shonen manga history who never planned anything and retconned everything all the time and didn't bother with World building and can't tell stories or especially right fights for [ __ ] none of which is even remotely true but if someone who hasn't read Bleach saw both of those statements next to each other on a random internet forum for example they'd have no way of knowing that and no motivation to dig any deeper let alone deep enough to actually start seeing all those connections for themselves luckily this isn't a context-free forum argument but a carefully scripted video and the Bleach Manga does have several independently self-evident qualities that I can use to at least start making the case that tight Kubo is a genius and you need to read this manga the most obvious of those quality I think is the strength of bleacher's dialogue kubo's writing is well balanced and fast-paced like a great movie whether ichigo's talking [ __ ] with his friends or [ __ ] talking the guy he's about to throw down with there's a ton of playful back and forth in every exchange and every last character has a loud and distinctive voice which is impressive enough when we're just hanging out in karakura town with ichigo's buddies meet and eccentric weirdos like Don kunanji Mr Hatton clogs and ichigo's Dad but it becomes exponentially more impressive from Soul Society onward as our heroes begin exploring new worlds and literally every single new character they run into within them with even the most minor of speaking roles is his or her own distinct brand of goofy little anime guy take the low ranking Soul Reaper who Orihime and uyu get into a conversation with while they're sneaking around Soul Society in Disguise he's not just a generic he's a small fry who acts like a big shot to hit on women and that's conveyed entirely through him acting like a big shot to hit on Orihime he's just a random dude who never shows up again whose only purpose in the story is to reveal a little more about how the court guards are organized and add a tiny bit of tension to their sneaking around before they actually get discovered later yet 500 chapters on I still remember his bit if not his name though he did have a name which is in itself more than most background moocs like that ever get the ones who get fighting rolls on top of their speaking roles are even more fleshed out and memorable than that unsurprisingly since one of the running themes in Bleach is that its duels are all conversations wherein the characters learn more about each other and each other's points of view through the Clashing of their blades I'd say most of them are every bit as memorable as the best Jojo villains you can name and by by the time Ichi goes through beating up biakuya Eisen you watch and their respective armies the mangas established close to a hundred of them each each fully distinct from all the others in personality power and design this massive cast does have its downsides anyone who's a fan of totsky can attest to that bleach struggles to build the same sort of raw hype that drives the fights of Naruto and hiroaka because most of the characters involved in its fights aren't really built up before they show up and the ones that are built up often kind of get left by the wayside unless they're topping the popularity poles but there are also huge upsides because almost every fight introduces at least one quirky new character and ability and most of the Supporting Cast gets to fight not just Ichigo and his friends the resulting clashes of Personality are incredibly varied and intense even if the vast majority of them go through the same I showed you my release now you show me yours formula each duel has its own entirely distinct Vibe and The Vibes that kuba so crafts are almost universally Immaculate and that's not to say bleach can't do hype the bit where Kenpachi Zaraki is all like oh yeah you're not the only one who can use fancy sword techniques and then he starts holding his sword with both hands for the first time in his life is a strong Contender for the most thing in Shonen but hype is just one of many interchangeable Vibes that Kubo employs to tell his story anyway back to those designs I won't dig too much into the fashion aspect since I already covered that extensively in a video a couple years ago the one thing I didn't fully appreciate back then not having experienced the full story is just how good Kubo really is at expressing individual character tastes through their fashion choices on top of those choices being almost universally fly as [ __ ] unless they're on Urdu but that's also just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what makes bleach's Designs Great the manga's cast is hugely diverse in terms of age body type race and even gender identity if it's not the most visibly inclusive title in Jump then it's certainly close and those features aren't just Skin Deep they inform characterization Chad's half Mexican heritage not only gives him a very different cultural perspective from the rest of ichigo's friends but also all sucks him to discrimination and bullying that plays a major role in defining who he is and forging his unbreakable ride or die bond with Ichigo who also faced bullying for his orange hair from people who thought he was half Japanese bleach's character and environmental designs also tends to be Laden with symbolism and here Kubo draws from a much wider range of influences than your typical mangaka incorporating not just Buddhist and Shinto iconography but abrahamic imagery and even some Mesoamerican design elements in the skeletal masks of the hollows which again aren't just surface level features well the Mesoamerican elements kind of are but Buddhist and judeo-christian philosophy respectively greatly informed the goals of and ideological divide between Shinigami and Quincy's and beyond that they even Define the nature of their powers Quincy's derives strength from the blood of their founder slash save your figure while Shinigami and Hollow powers are a manifestation of the individual's strongest spiritual attachments to the material world but with all that said perhaps the most brilliant thing about bleach's character designs is also the simplest and most obvious contrast Soul Reapers wear almost all black with white accents while a wrong car and Quincy's wear almost all white with black accents this obviously creates a very clear and strong divide between the sides of bleach's biggest conflicts but that's not why it's genius it's genius because these high contrast designs look absolutely [ __ ] gorgeous in the default black and white manga format in a way that almost no other style of character design does with Silhouettes and tone patterns that read clearly even at stick figure sizes allowing Kubo to create some of the cleanest most eye-catching page compositions ever printed in Shonen Jump perhaps even more than Akira Toriyama in his prime Kubo is a master of guiding the reader's eye across the page using dialogue bubbles negative space clearly highlighted areas of interest and well-defined lines of action to create a sense of dynamic motion that flows through every one of his still images which lends the fight to compelling cinematic flow matched in their Elegance only by those of the original Dragon Ball and by incorporating not just classic Shonen influences but also Design Elements clearly lifted from Shoujo Manga which we know he reads because again Ichigo is a magical girl plus Kubo can actually write women he's able to leverage that sense of cinematicism in even slice of Lifey dialogue scenes adding some Doki Doki fuofu a sparkle to the cutesy romantic moments between Ichigo and Orihime and greatly upping the comedic value of the hanging out at school scenes Kubo is simply one of the best and most versatile visual storytellers In The Biz and beyond that his best Pages which are almost all of them from Soul Society onward have a Sublime mathematical Beauty about them a perfect balance of visual elements many of the greatest Shonen manga artists are known for their ability to make characters pop off the page at you but kubo's Talent lies more in how he Blends those figures into the page making each one an essential piece of the greater composition for my money the series iconic diegetic English title card pages are definitely the best example of this talent in action and of course none of those is more iconic than God of Thunder 3. Kubo Bliss as a dabbler in graphic design I sit in awe of what Kubo can do but it kind of eats at me that even with all I know about that field and manga unless I also become fluent in Japanese I'll never be able to fully appreciate the Brilliance of his designs because the other best examples of that Talent are bleach's calligraphic kanji and sound effect Splash Pages featuring some of the most striking brush work you will ever lay eyes on the full impact of which is simply impossible to translate to English as are many of the more poetic subtleties of the dialogue luckily today's sponsor Rosetta Stone is here to help Rosetta Stone is a pioneering immersive language learning app that emulates the way we pick up words as babies instead of rotely memorizing the English equivalents of whatever words you're learning Rosetta Stone has you build vocabulary by linking sounds directly with the images and Concepts they represent so while you're learning you're only ever exposed to your new language they also use Advanced speech recognition software to teach you not just what to say but how to say it of course they also teach you the basics like the hiragana and Katakana alphabets which pretty much anyone can pick up quickly to at least read the sound effects in most manga obviously learning kanji takes a fair bit longer my favorite part of Rosetta Stone is definitely the bonus material which lets me practice my pronunciation and tone my Literacy By reading stories poems and other passages that are geared to my current vocabulary level I got to tell you there is nothing more encouraging about learning a new language than seeing a piece of totally foreign text and realizing that you actually understand every single word all these great tools can be yours to use for life at the link in the doobly-doo for a massively discounted one-time subscription of 179 dollars with their cheapest monthly subscription you'd pay that much in less than two years and this way you get all 25 languages not just one so if you ever want to really get into k-dramas or telenovelas in the future you're already covered don't miss out on that great deal click that link to get Rosetta Stone today now admittedly most of the strengths that I've discussed so far are surface level things that make bleach widely appealing but not necessarily good I haven't really dug that deep into the real meat of the story yet but that's not for lack of material bleach is an incredibly deep series rich in philosophical underpinnings and even richer in lore with several of the best thought out magic systems in manga I could easily Go full vati Vidya here detailing the series greater cosmology in fact I got about 3 000 words into writing a script exactly like that which is roughly 20 minutes of video essay before it occurred to me that nobody who's not already into bleach would actually watch that unlike one piece this series doesn't really have a reputation for Great World building that non-fans would be curious about in fact the general consensus seems to be that bleach's world is flimsy and slapped together which it's not but that is an understandable misconception to have because the manga gives very little about its world away for free and a lot of the explanations it does provide are given by Layman who don't fully understand those details themselves or Specialists who only fully understand certain aspects of the world and are lacking knowledge in other areas so those explanations are often incomplete or even partially Incorrect and it's up to the individual reader to spot the inconsistencies with the art and other info and parse what's true and false though apparently ryogo narita's bleach light novels do help by spelling certain things out more explicitly in the manga though basically the only information that you can fully rely on about the inner workings of spiritual pressure and the differences between Shinigami arankar vizard Hollows holes humans quincies and fullbringers comes from the series various mad scientist characters urahara kurutsuchi Eisen and sial Opera and three out of four of those guys are cryptic [ __ ] who get off on being smarter than everyone else and like speaking in riddles and obtuse technical terminology while erhara is simply not very good at explaining [ __ ] to people who don't already understand it as a writer I cannot emphasize enough how much I respect this naturalistic show don't tell approach to World building nobody in Bleach ever says anything purely for the sake of the audience all pertinent lore information is conveyed through fully in-character conversations or through consistent commonalities in the artwork but Kubo only occasionally tips his hand that those visual Clues even exist at all like how renji's zontac toe permanently loses segments after biakuya breaks it in its Bankai form so it's very easy to simply not notice the complexity and depth of the World building if you're not already looking for it kind of like how it's easy to think Souls games don't have much narrative if you don't bother with flavor text or actively hunting down NPCs between boss fights only worse because it's a comic in a children's magazine so there's zero expect that you should have to think about it anywhere near that hard if you do though you can find interesting connections everywhere that help to flesh out the few tidbits of lore that Kubo does feed directly to his audience for example we learned toward the start of the Soul Society Arc that time passes differently in the spirit and human worlds and if you get lucky while traveling through the wibbly wobbly tiny whining spatial membrane that separates the planes of reality you can even arrive in the other world before you left the first one later in the fight with Eisen we also learned that this membrane can function somewhat like Dragon Ball's hyperbolic Time Chamber allowing Ichigo to get in three months of training in the space of an hour but the actual difference in time between Soul society and the human world is never explored or expanded upon beyond that at least not explicitly however the Quincy side of the storyline does give us two key dates with real world analogs that together suggest what that ratio might be those dates being the first death of your watch exactly one thousand years ago and the Quincy genocide approximately 200 years ago your watch is heavily heavily implied to be the source deity of every abrahamic religion within the bleach Universe with his name including the same four letters as the abrahamic god Yahweh but his character design and status as the son of the Soul King most explicitly connect him to Jesus who as we all know died two thousand years ago the second important date the Quincy genocide is a clear analog for the Tokugawa shogunate's persecution of Japanese Christians which started in 1614 400 years ago and with these two data points we have just enough information to conclude that the ratio is two to one that is for every one year that passes in Soul Society approximately two pass in the human world though this is only an average and the differential does appear to fluctuate from year to year right now you might be thinking okay Jeff it's neat you could piece that together from Clues throughout the story and a bit of real world context but lots of stories hide supplementary lore like that it's nothing really special and you'd be right if it was only the supplementary details that bleach delivered this way but the series takes this same approach to exploring how its power systems work and I'd say that's a pretty important detail for a battle manga bleach certainly has moments where characters stand around monologuing about what their powers do but generally in very basic terms and almost exclusively for Powers whose mechanics would be impossible to depict with visuals alone like the sword that makes things twice as heavy every time it cuts them or the sword that inserts things into an object's past and how those swords do that is rarely if ever dug into kubo's preference wherever possible is to let his art do all the Talking when biakuya busts out his shikai all you get is Yo [ __ ] watch out them cherry blossoms are made of Swords actually which is exactly enough to understand what his power does and then when he finally unleashes kageyoshi senbonzakra you can simply observe with your own eyeballs that it's way more tiny swords now and therefore way more dangerous this preference does kind of come back to bite Kubo in the full bringer Arc because the whole thing's a giant JoJo tribute and stand style High concept powers can be especially frustrating and confusing for readers if they're not properly explained but generally speaking it really works to the series advantage to let each fight's choreography and visual effects speak for themselves Dragon Ball is such a fun easy breezy read in large part because key is such a visually intuitive power system Toriyama doesn't have to waste time explaining how kamehameha's work because he can just show you a Kamehameha working but the downside of that is it's kind of simple poorly explained and limited in narrative utility post Dragon Ball battle manga have tended to set themselves apart with more complicated and intricate Power Systems that are really fun for Die Hard fans to sink their teeth into and speculate about but the trade-off for that is generally that your characters have to spend a lot of time standing around explaining that bungee gum has the properties of rubber and gum in case that didn't give it away I've been reading Hunter Hunter since it first dropped on the Jump app and I [ __ ] love it to be clear togashi's plotting is the best in the business and then is a really really cool system but man the characters sure do spend a lot of time looking at charts and doing math all over Pages where there could be more art of fights happening and I love me some math and charts but one could very easily argue that that represents a failure to fully leverage the strengths of manga as a medium and I could Levy that same criticism at many of my all-time weekly Shonen faves from JoJo to one piece which I don't say to diminish any of the other great things about those stories or even to downplay the quality of their art only to emphasize how hard this thing that Kubo makes looks so easy actually is to do especially on a weekly schedule bleach has a hugely versatile and expressive power system wherein every major character has a truly unique ability that reflects some aspect of their personality and creates fun problems for their opponents to solve yet its fights retain the effortless intuitive fluidity of the genre's originator because he's just that good at drawing damn near anything he can imagine especially butts he's really good at butts and this by itself doesn't make bleach unique kohe horikoshi displays much the same talent for butts and almost purely visual fight Exposition and hiroaka but quirks are an ill-defined power system with no clear origin that can kind of just do anything the story needs them to whereas zonpocto Quincy abilities Hollow Powers Resurrection full brings keto Cerro blut chunpo Sunny though and hiron kyaku all have rigidly defined conceptual limitations on what they can and can't do that separate them from each other except those last three they're just different flavors of flash step but all of them also physically or metaphysically interact with reishi the elementary Spirit particle that bleaches entire universe is made of in meaningfully different way ways that are all logically consistent with one another and with how that particle tends to behave in its natural state which Kubo would have had to plan for from the very beginning to depict as consistently as he does the intricacies of reishi are comparable in many ways to Aura in Hunter Hunter or investiture from Brandon sanderson's cosmere two of the most acclaimed Power Systems in modern fiction and I think the only reason Kubo doesn't receive similar praise for his is he doesn't really Flex with it like that all most characters ever directly explain about the Power Systems of bleach is what their specific powers do usually in vague or poetic terms the rest is buried in background dialogue between the researchers at Soul Society fight banter between mad scientists the technical minutiae surrounding specific magical items or ideas that do get brief explanations like the Kishi Converters on urahara's spirit world Gates or the barrier around the cerete and most prominently in the very specific Tales of how certain battles go down and the broader patterns that are observable in how the members of each faction in the series fight the only one of these patterns that Kubo ever explicitly calls out is that of the Iran car and even then he only really covers the basics in the most basic terms possible around the midpoint of eisen's War we see a couple Pages explaining that the powers of the Espada are all manifestations of various forms of death Powers they appear to have possessed in some form or another since before becoming a wrong car back when they were vasto Lords looking back lower level Hollow Powers don't really fit that death theme most of the ones that Ichigo fights early on do more typical evil spirit type stuff but there is a common link between all of them and the Espada they all prey on human fears and anxieties as death is our ultimate fear it only makes sense that the ultimate Hollows would embody it though they can only rule over it as a wrong car using the power of a soul Reaper which is typically attained by conquering and externalizing one's spiritual attachments the root of sorrow and fear in the form of a blade made of hollow corpses this prevents those attachments normally embodied in the chain of Fate from consuming a soul from the inside out and turning it Hollow hence why Ichigo and The Wizard or visor however you say it were saved from hollifying when they Unleashed their zonpok toe though they're still at risk of losing themselves to the Beast inside until they truly Master their deepest fears a process which normally takes a lengthy spiritual journey toward personal Enlightenment but Eisen kind of cheats using the hogyoku which is wait [ __ ] I accidentally started writing that vati video again sorry I'll keep the rest of this brief by observing the commonalities and the powers of the Soul Reapers particularly the 13 court guard captains we can similarly deduce that they're all able to use the spiritual energy generated by their bodies channeled through those blades to embody or subordinate an aspect of the material world to their will that might be an element like fire or water or the very ink in which the world of bleach is rendered a physical property like weight or the state of being alive or a concept like fun and games human perception the beauty of sword fighting insatiable unethical curiosity or the thrill of violence itself obviously that's a very broad category that allows for a wide range of abilities but it doesn't directly overlap with the hollow and Iran cars manifestation of fear concept and Quincy abilities while being similarly Broad in what they can do all follow their own consistent internal line of logic which I'll let you figure out for yourself by watching the new anime or just reading that part of a manga every fight in every Arc of bleach contributes in some small way to expanding our understanding of these Concepts but naturally the fighter you can learn the most about bleach's cosmology from is of course Ichigo himself despite the fact that he has zero interest in exploring or explaining any of it by engaging with his character Arc though understanding what he and his friends are going through at each stage of his emotional journey and seeing how he and the rest of them overcome those weaknesses and insecurities and reading up on at least a little Buddhist philosophy if you're not already familiar you'll gain a much deeper understanding on not just how the power system works but what those Powers really represent and why only Ichigo with his unique origin quirks and personal obsessions can fully contain all of them but discovering all of that for yourself is one of the single greatest joys of reading bleach and if all of my gushing so far has convinced you to give the series a shot I really don't want to rob you of that experience by spoon feeding all of it to you if I haven't convinced you by now though I really don't know what else to say I [ __ ] love bleach both for how simple and seamless it is to read and for how rewarding it is to think about and pick apart it's elegant balance of accessible action and cavernously deep subtext is about as close as it gets to the platonic ideal of show don't tell but I think ultimately bleach shows the limits of that very narrative ideology if people don't know what to look for or simply don't believe it's there at all due to negative preconceptions born from bad experiences with the show or its fans they simply won't see it and on top of that a lot of it's just really hard to see even without all the padding and filler in the anime greatly increasing the noise to Signal ratio for the lore and themes of the series hell I honestly don't think I'd have picked up on even half the stuff I did in my read through if not for all of the years that I've spent getting good at parsing piecemeal buddhism-based World building and Elden ring sekiro and bloodborne plus the last year and a bit that I've spent binging Brandon Sanderson novels since the spiritual way in which he thinks about World building and character development is very similar to Kubo just way more Mormon and with way way more Exposition some might even say too much but few would ever accuse Brando Sando of putting too little into his stories and worlds or call it an [ __ ] when a radiant busts out a new elf in the middle of a tough fight the problem with bleach is ultimately a problem of perception created by over specializing toward a lean efficient manga optimized storytelling aesthetic and greatly exacerbated by a rushed adaptation that bloats and distorts kubo's Vision beyond recognition luckily it's an easy problem to solve by simply reading the manga for yourself and the new Thousand-Year blood War anime is doing a much much better job of capturing those qualities so hopefully that perception will change I'm Jeff THU professional anime lorfiend assuring you that it is in fact that deep Bro foreign

Channel: Mother's Basement

Views: 799,360

Keywords: Mother's Basement, Anime, Anime Analysis, the problem with bleach, tite kubo, bleach anime, where did bleach go wrong?, why is bleach good, shounen jump, thousand year blood war, Bleach, the fall of bleach, bleach is bad anime, bleach is good manga, one piece, naruto, hunter x hunter, stormlight archive, brandon sanderson, bleach worldbuilding, yhwach, ichigo kurosaki, bleach mother's basement, manga analysis, bleach retrospective, ichigo x orihime, soul reaper, quincy

Id: TstsiNMWQ_8

Length: 41min 56sec (2516 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 04 2022