THE ZERO DIVISION - The Good, The Bad, and The Extremely Disappointing | Bleach DISCUSSION

okay yep i hear you guys and yes it is finally time to talk about the xero division the zero division is by far and away the most requested topic i get on this channel they crop up in nearly every video asking me to do a video on these guys and it's finally time but i'd be lying to you if i said i hadn't been putting off this video to some degree and there's a pretty simple reason for that i feel like the zero division has been hotly talked about in bleach since the series ended and with good reason they're a major point of contention among fans but i don't want to spend the entire video just dunking on these characters as i feel has been done before i wanted to bring something new to this conversation so i've decided i want to take an all-encompassing look at the zero division as a whole as a concept as individual characters um and see what i think kubo not only did bad because yeah obviously he did something wrong with these guys but also what he did well with them because i don't think they are completely terrible characters i think they are good inclusions to the bleach universe and we'll get into that so in this video i want to take a look at the good the bad and the extremely disappointing of bleach's zero division before we get into that however guys if you haven't subscribed to the video make sure to hit that button we are so close to 15 000 which is crazy to think about but if you love bleach you are absolutely in the right place for weekly discussions like this one long form content debates ranking stuff like that and yeah bleach brave souls and there's just everything you could want here so if you're a bleach fan and you're getting super excited for the anime coming back next year you're in the right place hit that button now we've also got a good community going on follow me on twitter join the discord we're getting close to 500 members now i think which is kind of crazy and yeah if you want to subscribe and be a part of the community that would be amazing really where do you begin with the zero division they are such a contentious topic among bleach fans i think some people like these guys but i think the prevailing thought truly is how disappointing they actually were and i think it's a really interesting lesson about managing expectations for something that i feel like was always going to disappoint i think the best place to start with the zero division is the legend of the zero division among the bleach fans and i'm one of these people you know i'm guilty of hyping up the royal guards maybe beyond what we could have ever reasonably expected but i'm not entirely sure that's fair i don't think you can pin all the blame on the community in that respect i think the zero division always were going to hold some kind of serious heft you know these guys guard the soul king and you have to remember that before the thousand year blood war arc blew the doors wide open all this sort of stuff the royal palace the royal guard the sulking they were regarded as pretty much the biggest untouchable mysteries in bleach you know we knew absolutely nothing about these guys and we were dying to know more the royal guard were mentioned pretty much properly for the first time by kyoraku sweet in turn back the pendulum arc when eisen questions him on the fact that kyrio hickafune has been promoted from the 12th division into the royal guard and eisen believes that she's been promoted to central 46 and kiroko reveals that's not the case there's actually a elaborate group of soldiers purposefully there to guard the soul king and we obviously know a little bit about the sulking at this point we know that eisen is trying to create an oaken which is a king's key to gain access to the palace and kill this mysterious figurehead but we know literally nothing else other than that we did assume after what kyoraku said in the term at the pendulum that if eisen ever made the royal realm he would have to face off against whatever the zero division actually was but outside of that we knew absolutely nothing and speculation was constantly rife i remember during the day of side arc people thought that eisen may end up facing the royal guard the mysterious foot appearing in karakoram town people thought that was the royal guard arriving to prevent the creation of the oh ken obviously it wasn't and the problem with eisen was that he never got anywhere close to the royal realm so we never saw any of the zero division we never got any kind of resolution on that speculation back in the day and that only fueled the fires further eisen's ambition was great but as a villain kubo never let him get anywhere near the soul king so we were left again wondering what the zero division were what it would take for them to actually act if uh eisen getting defeating the entire goatee 13 wasn't enough uh which i still find kind of weird but it makes sense when you think about it the royal guard clearly would have been happy to let him step foot on the royal palace but they would have obviously met him at the gates essentially so um that's really interesting but i remember thinking back in the day that i was expecting the royal guard to be more of a traditional goatee 13 squad you know i thought there would be a captain i didn't i wasn't completely concrete on the actual ranks because i was expecting them to be stronger than your average captain for sure um but i was i was expecting it to be more of a traditional unit fast forward to the thousand-year blood war arc and things are very different from the get-go the vandom riker introduces a brand new enemy who are immediately more ruthless and efficient than eisen and they managed to devastate the soul society within the first 20 chapters of this arc which is still crazy to me and i think a lot of us at this point expected the royal guard to show up pretty soon in fact kubo even hinted at it in a previous interview before the final arc came out saying that yes he would allow the royal guard to appear although he didn't elaborate on what kind of fashion that would be once uh kills yamamoto he even specifies that the zero division will now arrive since the principles of the goatee 13 have been destroyed and he actually planned on waiting for them to come out before striking again obviously that doesn't quite work out for him ichigo arrives and starts messing things up for him but finally when the dust settles on the first invasion we do finally get that fabled arrival of the royal guard chapter 516 aptly titled the squad zero really wastes no time uh and the vanden reich have only been gone from seoul society for a single chapter at this point and the zero division are already arriving and expectations were undeniably very high as i said already the zero division were carrying an enormous weight with them the weight of expectation the expectation of the entire fan base was on these guys but we had no idea what to expect and from the get-go i remember thinking it was more low-key than i had anticipated the 10 turin which is their method of travel is essentially just some kind of rocket propelled pillar uh and it lands uh in front of the captains who go and meet them outside the walls of the sailrite say which i also thought was kind of weird but i remember thinking okay there's a single pillar that's not what i was expecting i was expecting essentially in my mind i always imagined some kind of royal palatial gate opening and these guys coming out similar to the gate they used to eventually travel to the royal palace later on in the arc actually so i was a little surprised and then kiraku clarifies that actually there are only five members of the zero division and each of them are captains and again i was like okay that's not what i was expecting but i can go with this and then we get to see them i want to talk briefly about the initial fan reaction to the zero division uh and it wasn't good um i remember people being incredibly unhappy with how goofy these guys initially seem to be and i think there's a difference between goofy and different um i don't want to overly generalize here but i think people were really hoping for at least some kind of stoicism you know like a serious group of warriors characters akin to like biakia or you know someone who prides themselves a bit more but the zero division were very very different to i think how everyone anticipate them to be and i imagine that is actually what kubo was going for the zero division arrive blowing instruments shouting like with the zero division with the zero division we're here we're here they got this flag going on and it was like very much played up for laughs and you have to there's a lot of things to take into account here when it comes to talking about their arrival because their first impression wasn't fantastic among the fan base i'm not entirely sure what kubo was going for here because the tonal shift was enormous as readers and characters we had just been through pretty much the most devastating stretch of chapters we had ever seen in bleach the quincy's first invasion to this day is still regarded as pretty much one of the strongest parts of bleach but it was so bleak it even reigned in seoul society for the very first time in the canon manga around the point when yamamoto was killed but you have to remember that we have just come from back to back chapters of the shinigami getting their butts kicked getting their asses handed to them getting killed left right and center um and yeah they were killing some stern ritters but this was the first time we'd ever seen these bad guys and they made one hell of an impression then the royal guard arrived and again maybe this was the fan base's fault but we'd already associated them with the most serious of events in seoul society and when they finally arrive they don't seem to act in a way that befits the events that preceded them no one even mentions yamamoto no one even mentions the majority of the shinigami that have died none of that is brought up at all the royal guards seem completely aloof completely distanced from everything that's just happened in the soul society and frankly they don't seem to care and i remember people finding that to be very very jarring very very weird that we've just been through this brutal beat down of the soul society biakia and kenpachi aren't even here to witness this because they're both comatose and the royal guard don't seem to care at all in fact karinji tenjiro who is the sort of brash loudmouth of the royal guard tells unohana that pretty callously that if you know she had been better prepared they wouldn't all be pushing daisies as he puts it which basically means they're all dead um and it was yeah really really weird some people found to be a bit tasteless on the royal guards part to just kind of come down and essentially crap all over the shinigami who had who had done their best in many ways to fight this villain that they weren't expecting and you know you you can completely see where the shinigami are coming from i don't particularly like soifon i think she's prone to almost petulant outbursts that don't really befit a captain but i had to side with her on this one she has a go at the royal guard basically saying you know we were down here fighting tooth and nail to protect the sailrite getting killed and you guys are sitting pretty upstairs not doing anything about it and then you have the goal to come down here and basically say that we failed you know you didn't help us but then karingy replies with an interesting retort and it's karingy's reply here that i think really cements the angle kubo is going for with the royal guard karingi says you're the goatee 13. it's your job to protect the seireite and it's our job to protect the royal realm if you can't do that then you dishonor the name of gotei and i thought that was really fascinating so kubo intended for the zero division and the goatee 13 to be far more separate than i think i ever anticipated um there you know the the mission of protecting the royal palace is so intrinsic to the core of their being that they see any they see any failure of the goatee as just a huge transgression and i found that to be really fascinating and i thought it was super interesting because you can see both sides of the argument i could see where soy phone was coming from but when tengero corrected her i could see where he was coming from and he is right the goatee 13 is supposed to be the court guard squads that protect the seireite and yeah they failed um but it's hard not to feel sympathy for and it's hard not to react negatively to these new characters who are just coming down here and being like you guys you drop the ball hard you drop the ball really hard and you expect sympathy from us and i think it's i think it's really important to remember who the royal guard actually are they are the five chosen shinigami there to defend the king and so they have this self-important view of their righteous mission which i think is very fair moving on if we look at the zero division as a whole their role in this arc is very similar to say the vizards in the irancar arc and to a lesser extent execution in the fullbringer arc they are the new faction that's introduced primarily to help ichigo gain some kind of new power or boost his power to fight the villains to come the royal guard however are used quite well i think in this regard and this is some of the things i like about them so i want now to talk about what i really enjoy about the royal guard characters as a whole and their concept and all that sort of thing before we get into the negatives a bit later on so discussing what i think kubo did well with the royal guard i immediately have to say their individual designs now when they first arrived people were not happy with this at all as i said already they were expecting a more serious group of characters more shall we say traditional or trope characters that were immediately apparent to be very powerful however the majority of the zero division make up that um personality dichotomy that i've mentioned before about characters like kisuke and kyoraku they have this very very goofy exterior um they're all kind of messing around not necessarily taking things seriously but all five of these characters um can become incredibly serious and dangerous when the time calls for it and i kind of like that the zero division are very very over the top but in terms of their physical appearance i love all five of them and i think somehow kubo completely knocked it out of the park with these guys not only are they incredibly unique but they also fit perfectly among the rest of the captains in the series not a single one would stand out to me as being poorly designed compared to their predecessors um in the series kubo is a master of taking a generic uniform and making it unique for the individual characters i love that ichibay you could look at him and be like he's this typical old bull dude with a beard but i love the fact that he has the massive monk beads and that's enough to make him stand out um karingie has the very short hairy and he obviously has the whole yakuza appearance oetsu has like a puffer jacket for his heyori it's just so incredibly well done um but my absolute favorite design out of the five of them is without a doubt senjimaru shutara she looks incredibly cool there's so many layers to this design yet she somehow manages to not look ridiculous i love the sort of sun headdress she has on i love that you can't see her arms but you can see these spider-like appendages she has coming though i'm saying it now it sounds ridiculous but kubo's art pulls it off no problem and combine that with her whole um concept and combine that with her whole spider-like concept she's like this weaving seamstress each one of these weird like mechanical arms is like you know sewing things and i think she's just got such a cool design which you know leads me to get a little bit annoyed later on when nothing is revealed about her but we'll get into that we will get into that but bleach as a series has always been renowned for having incredible art but if any kind of criticism was directed at that art well the biggest one would be no backgrounds but i think the second biggest one would be it definitely starts to suffer from same face syndrome as kubo's art style homogenizes as the series goes on i don't think this is necessarily a bad thing i don't think it's anything you could really blame kubo for he obviously grew comfortable drawing certain types of faces but i remember seeing gin joe and i remember seeing fukushima and thinking both of these guys look almost identical to eisen facially just the face uh and it is kind of throwing it does kind of throw you off and then kajamaru hidatamo shows up at the start of the thousand year blah blah and it's like it's another eisen ivan as guerrero shows up it's another eisen so many of these characters look very similar and yet somehow with the zero division kubo created five characters that look nothing like anyone else they don't look anything like anyone else the only one that looks remotely similar to anyone is hikafune in her slims down form she's kind of the generic beautiful woman in bleach but in you know the fat hickey funny she looks like no one else and i i really respect kubo for that and in with many of these characters it's completely subtle differences but like ichibe hiyosa bay has a facial makeup that looks like nothing else we've ever seen in the series you know he has weirdly shaped eyes he has massively expressive eyebrows and kubo is able to masterfully swap this guy between looking like a goofy santa claus to looking like a blood thirsty demon monk and i just think the design work on all five of these guys is sublime some of kubo's best um and honestly a lot of people disparage the final arc for this sort of thing but like i think a lot of the stern writers look fantastic as well and you have to remember there's 27 or so of those guys but characters like as not one of the best designs in the series kang do looks incredible bg9 kerge looks incredible so many of the final art characters really stand out to me but we're talking about the zero division and all five of them look awesome as far as i'm concerned their individual personalities are a little harder to gauge because we don't get to spend too much time with them ichibe is a very interesting character he's very very authoritative but he's also quite it seems like he's fairly easy going but i don't think he actually is under the under the sort of funny exterior i'm cringy kind of your typical brash hot-headed dude but he's also not because he's not particularly reckless he's actually comes across as very intelligent i think despite being the loudmouth rude guy of the group then you have senjumaru who is sort of not necessarily quiet but she's quite biting she's quite sarcastic again they're all very powerful so you get the impression that they're all quite sure of their own abilities i think hikufune is possibly the one with the least amount of personality she's not really explored as much as the other four other four members um you kind of get the motherly vibe from the food that she produces for ichigo and renji um but it doesn't necessarily go any further than that and then oetsu obviously has this kind of crazy vibe going on where he's like super over the top um everything's a massive show um and i like that about him and he he he's again very capable of flip-flopping between super super super over-the-top goofy and like really dangerous so the personalities they're fine then they're nothing necessarily home to shout about but none of these characters gets explored enough to really talk about that sort of thing and in fact can't for your own world goes into a bit more detail about itchy bay which i find to be really interesting um we'll talk about this more in the car for your own world stuff but he is one of the progenitor characters of the world and as such he he has this expanded world view that i think explains his detachment to the kind of goings-on of the rest of the world because he is so uninvolved with that sort of thing he is very much he is more concerned about the fabric of the universe itself ichibe i really really wish cooper had gone into more because i think there's so much fascinating law there but we'll get into that another thing i love about the zero division is how seamlessly they are integrated into the universe of bleach as a whole i absolutely adored the prerequisite criteria that they all needed to have contributed something to soul society's history that is what gets you the promotion and i loved that i thought that was so so good it was such a smart way of instantly uh making them a part of bleach history and it immediately makes them important characters despite already being in the zero division the fact that they they have had these prior contributions is just so cool it's so smart even if some of them are not necessarily worthy of that in my opinion so karingy is a weird one um he makes it he gets into the royal palace for his healing techniques and i think specifically the healing hot springs he has and yet they're very impressive don't get me wrong he saves biakia kuchiki's life despite biakea basically being dead uh and we know that keyskate copied these springs but is that really worthy of a position in the annals of soul society history i think it might have been cooler if he had actually developed kaido you know the healing kedo that would have been really cool um but regardless he gets the hot springs hiking is the creator of the mod souls which again i think a few people actually guessed i think i predicted it in one of my earlier videos um completely shutting down the filler's oko yoshima um but hikifuna yeah creator of the mod souls again they could have gone into so much about that because project spearhead is barely ever talked about in the series it's kind of like dealt with in the first few chapters of bleach and then never talks about again so um yeah it's it's tough to say because hikafune that is quite a major contribution but i don't know it's also been very irrelevant for a while but she is also there as well for her rayatsu imbuing abilities that that you know again she grants to renji and ichigo shitara senjumaru is the only one out of the five where it's never explicitly stated what she does however it is mentioned in kant for your own world uh and i think it's also very obvious you can infer what she what she created just based on her abilities and her skill set the fact that she's a master's seamstress she's all about weaving she's all about needles and threads and stuff like that and she deals with their clothes when they arrive at the soul palace it's very clear to me that she is responsible for the uh the shihaku show that the shinigami all wear the uniform of the soul society that seems very obvious to me um ichibai hiyosave pretty fascinating i remember originally thinking that he because he was the monk of perception i remember believing that he was going to be the one who created the conso ritual you know where shinigami purifies the soul that's what i thought but no actually he is in charge of naming everything in the soul society and i thought that was really really cool so ichibe named shikai he named baankai he named he probably named zampakto even though he didn't create it you know he named he probably named sayrete he named sen's iq he named everything basically everything in soul society's history can be attributed to itchy bay in terms of its names i thought that was really cool but then we get to the main one which is oetsu nemaya and he is credited with creating the zhan pukto and that's kind of crazy that is huge i remember finding that out being like what that has game-changing ramifications for the bleach universe and we find out a little bit about him that you know he has a forge so he's pretty much responsible for creating the asachi um because to create a zampak toe you give her empty a saucy to a shinigami who then imprints their their soul on it through training and then being able to perform shikai is one of the requisites for passing the academy so uh oetsu creates the cheese but he has a unique relationship with them and he knows the location of every single zampato in the soul society and so utterly fascinating i found that to be so fascinating um but it's also in the early stages of the royal division's appearance that i think kubo makes a fatal error um and it is this fatal error that leads to people being so disappointed with them in the future and that is the absurd proclamation that they are combined stronger than the entire goatee 13. and i remember reading that and i and and a part of me is hyped like you're supposed to be that's the whole the whole point of that sentence is just to get you excited for these characters whether kubo had any intention of actually following up on that kind of bold claim i don't know but there was just no way that was ever going to stick um and you know what maybe they are ichibe himself is clearly one of the single strongest shinigami to have ever existed same probably goes for oetsu it's harder to say about the other three but they're all obviously very skilled in their own way but saying they're stronger than the goatee 13 combined means they're more powerful than yamamoto kyoraku kenpachi biyakia hitsugaya all these characters put together and apparently these five guys are more powerful than them and it's such an absurd statement that it's so hard to believe and when they don't live up to that it's all the more disappointing because you kind of feel like were they ever going to were they ever going to live up to that and i kind of want to talk now about the the fate of the zero division because in my eyes they were always doomed to die you know the zero division were always destined to lose at some point and the problem with that is not only are they not particularly well established characters they are the guys directly in the way of the end game of most major villains in bleach if a bad guy in bleach wants to be more successful than eisen which i think was always going to be the way for the final arc because you naturally build on stuff like that in the story the zero division had no chance of survival now it's the manner of their defeat that gets people so unhappy but the zero division you have to understand were pretty much always destined to lose eventually they they were never going to successfully guard the soul king if the stakes were going to be raised to an adequate point for the final uh final battle but it is the nature of their loss that gets people so unhappy so i think it's probably time we talk about that now we talk about what we don't like about the zero division what was so fundamentally disappointing about them and this is probably the section of the final arc that is the hardest to defend i think and i want to do an entire video maybe more defending the final art because i truly do love it i love the final after pieces it's bleach at its most ambitious it's bleached at its most mad and it's bleach where the tropes of the series really come out in full force and depending on what you want from bleach you might absolutely love the final arc like i do but i i can totally see why it is eternally frustrating so let's dive in now to the defeat of the zero division and why that was so disappointing so about two-thirds of the way through the second invasion uh uh bark announces that he is going to assault the royal palace and he has basically free reign to get in there by doing so you can rightly assume that he is going to face off against the zero division and yet he he arrives in the royal palace starts trampling the royal palace and the zero division i'll become aware of his presence kubo makes some odd choices immediately off the bat here and i think it's pretty clear that something was wrong however i always wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt and i always believed he was building to something more with this so let's look at a timeline of events of what happened so uh back arrives at the palace with hashwaffe and uryu in tow kurinji arrives to defend the palace and i this is cool so far this is awesome cringy arrives literally on the landing platform has some really cool lines about this is the royal palace we don't allow walking's here um and he starts fighting the sold at so far so good i know i like this uh this is the build-up i so i believed anyway to a bigger fight then kubo starts intercutting it with giselle back down on the ground fighting ikaku and yumichika and i remember thinking why are we cutting back to this fight that let's face it no one's really that bothered about we've been waiting for the invasion of the royal realm since the iran corrupt that's what the entirety of that ark was building to and now that we're finally here you're showing me a fight between gisele and ikaku and yumichika like what is going on um i i'm not that bothered kuvo i'd rather see the invasion but kubo shows us the whole fight with that and then he shows us the pepe fight and it's like what do you but i was calm because i thought okay once these stomata fights are kind of out the way we'll get a proper battle in the royal realm but this is where the ark is really going off the rails at this point um random stuff is happening all over the shop the zombie battles are really messy um and just lots of weird stuff is happening and then we do finally go back to the royal palace um and unfortunately that messiness permeates into this battle as well we we don't see any of koringi fighting their soul that really because he's immediately struggling with uh nyanzol weisel um then we do get we do get a good moment where you har bark is confronted by senjumaru and the royal division soldiers and i will say that i love the way this was done i love the way yuhawak silently defiantly takes a step towards her going up the steps not saying a word and yamamoto finally gets mentioned by the way by the zero division when she says you've gone mad by defeating genry aside but i love that and she says become the rust on the soul king's blade and that was really cool and then nyan's all shows up and this is when things start to get a little bit weird you hobart is not really bringing the game yeah and and this still feels like build up to something greater there's one stern ritter fighting in the royal palace and he is just terrible like sumatra w is so disappointingly bad senjumari one shots him and you're kind of thinking like okay she's very powerful as we as we were told to believe whatever's coming next is going to be big and then you know what happens you know what's coming so you hobart prepares a proper invasion of the royal palace the sold that arrived in force to fight the divine soldiers and to fight the zero division he uh introduces the shutstoffel four incredibly powerful quincy supposedly his own elite guard made up of the most competent fighters in the vandemic gerard leel pernider and everyone's favorite asking and i remember i remember loving that chapter chapter 599 too early to win too late to know is one of my favorite chapters in the series because the ship stock will arrive and i was like oh my god yes battle royale in the royal palace everything is about to go down we've got one dude for each of the uh royal division i didn't necessarily think we were going to square off in one-on-ones like that but i did think we were going to get a proper fight between both sides um and that chapter ends with little sniping senjumaru and obviously it's not her i don't think anyone believed it was actually her getting killed but i remember thinking like this is gonna be mad this is gonna be like this is gonna be the fight we've always wanted to see and the anatomy of what follows is worth a video itself but i do not understand how kubo possibly believed that this would be satisfying or good writing so to break it down very briefly what happens is the shutstop will think that they've killed the royal guard the royal guard revealed that to be completely fake oetsu takes out every member of the shutstaffer on his own uhobark revives the stuffle the stuff will off-screen the royal guard and that is it that's all that happens and it's like what have you done what the what have you you've systematically destroyed the royal guard in a single showdown um so i think we have to break it down a bit further than that so let's let's look at this fight now uh between well it's not even really a fight between the zero division and the uh shutt stop or themselves um yeah let's do it so once the zero division revealed themselves to actually be alive and fine here kirio hikufune traps the shutstoffel in a massive tree of life cage really cool stuff like that's the kind of crazy stuff i was expecting to see from these shinigami oetsu then steps forward and somehow takes out every single one of them in pretty much one hit and that's just bad writing it doesn't matter what you're trying to do in that situation it's really bad writing if you're trying to hype up the royal guard you haven't really succeeded because these villains have never been established before they're only powerful because you've told us they are powerful they haven't done anything to prove that so when they get taken out in one hit it doesn't really hype up the royal guard it just makes us disappointed in the quincy's that's all that does when the quincy's are frankly inevitably revived in that situation a you kind of call rubbish on that but b it doesn't hype up the quincy's it just makes the royal guy really disappointing when they are taken out off screen um no one wins in this situation because the quincy's are first disappointing then the royal guard are disappointing and no one is hyped up and it's just so poorly done a lot of people have criticized bleach in the past particularly in the final arc for having flip-floppy battles that are not even in the slightest either someone is kicking someone else's butt and then some kind of reversal happens and then the butt kicking happens on the other side or it's just a straight stomp and this fight is so emblematic of those problems it's not even funny even though i'm laughing it's sad laughter um i'd love to i'm gonna do a full video dedicated entirely to this fight because it's so bad but oetsu takes out all all of these members in like one hit and it's kind it's just nonsensical i know he claims that his saya fushi is a one hit one kill zampakto but it's like why you know i i get that he's supposed to be incredibly powerful i like that he has a non-traditional sheath because the sword will cut straight through it but it's not good for us as readers it it doesn't make any sense from a writing perspective to try and hype up the shutstoffel and then kill them off immediately and then do the same for the royal guard it doesn't make any sense whatsoever so oetsu taking out everyone is a flash in the pan moment of coolness you're like that was pretty badass and then you sort of think about the ramifications you're like actually maybe it wasn't that was actually kind of bad um because you have to remember as well that a lot of people really wanted to like the stone ritters but kubo didn't give us a chance and when when asking survives oex's onslaught and has a one-on-one with him what was the point in that why would you do that why would you i remember being devastatingly annoyed and you can see my review of chapter 602 i couldn't believe what i was seeing i couldn't believe that kubo would resurrect asking at the end of 601 and then kill him off a chapter later it doesn't make any sense it doesn't make any sense outside of wanting to give ask in a second fight because he is one of the more prominent stimulators um but it's just it's so badly done and the annoying thing about the fight as well is no one shows anything off osu just cuts people down um gerard attempts to swing at oet suets who kills in one hit osu kills lil in one hit he throws his sword into a giant hand like i know you know you don't know what pernider is at that point but he just lobs his sword into the hood and apparently that's enough to kill it um the whole thing smacks of just being lazy i think maybe what i what i think potentially happened here is that kubo was beginning to feel the time pressure he was like i want to do an entire royal realm invasion arc where the soul society is now invading uh bark and i don't have time to have major fights for all these characters and have a big battle here so from that perspective it makes sense to rush over the zero division because we don't know them as characters we're not as invested as in them as we are in the goat a13 it was always going to be the goatee 13 that eventually saves the day in one form or another it wasn't going to be the zero division the zero division are really just scapegoats and that's what's so disappointing they were always set up to fail and whether it's a combination of the fan bases expectation for these characters but also the blame does lie with kubo for creating a group of warriors who already had expectations around them but he did not help himself by being like the royal guard are stronger than all the goatee 13 combined so when the shutstoffel are revived apparently stronger than ever somehow and oetsu is one-shotted it's like right okay so osu's just killed all of them and now he is being killed it's completely unfair first of all it's comes out of nowhere that you hobart just i don't know he just kills everyone everyone gets nothing makes sense in this fight um hikifune and tenjiro basically the last time you ever see them in this series is them failing to protect oetsu um and yeah the last the next time you see all the royal guard they are dead they're lying dead on the floor can't for your own world confirms they have in fact been killed and yeah it it's so disappointing to be so invested in the idea of the royal guard and have it pulled straight away from you just before they get their chance to shine and it's so annoying because no one shows anything cringy activates kin pika you better believe you don't see what it get you don't see what it does you never see it again um in terms of actually being used uh hika fune senjumaru are they going to use those unpacked toes no why didn't senjimaru actually just activate hersheykai against weizel like how hard would that have been ah i'm getting angry talking about because it is one of the worst it's one of the most egregious mistakes that kubo made was this set of chapters um you know we didn't need to see pepe we didn't need to see pepe fight that's three chapters that could have been used for this royal guard battle kubo has never been a planner he doesn't plan what he writes and he is he's admitted that when he gets to a point in the story where he's stuck he just introduces more characters um and it's here that that problem really just comes to the forefront and something that people actually cared about that the community was actually invested in suffers as a result and the royal guards maybe they could never have lived up to the idea we had for them but irregardless they were handled very very poorly um and it's just the fact that the battle is such a light switch it's such a oetsu kills everyone then they will come back to life nonsensically pretty much yeah the australian makes sense on paper the execution leaves a bit more to be desired again this is another video in and of itself but the inconsistencies with you harbox auschwitz are completely absurd in my eyes um like the fact that i like the fact that kubo draws and writes this stuff and doesn't seem to realize the mistakes he's making boggles my mind like nanana and basby get hit square in the face with the aswalan and they survive robert acutron gets his skin stripped from his body the moment it happens and there's no explanation for it says those who are hit with the light they'd lose their life that's not true basbian nanana continued to live basbe faces off against hash off later on and says those who were hit with the light died no they didn't you're still alive not only are you still alive you have your shrift doesn't make any sense doesn't make any sense nanana keeps his shrift he keeps his shrift like the the idea is if you are not hit by the light your volston dig is stripped away from you and that's okay that's cool that's consistent with what we see little toto loses her wings and you can imagine that basby and nanana have probably lost their vossen digs as well because they never use them again but they supposed to lose their lives if they get hit by it and it's like kubo mentions that mere panels after it happens and how has he not realized that he is contradicting himself mate this is a whole this is a video in and of itself i don't want to go too deep into the house while i'm right now but just that whole that whole section just doesn't make any sense um and then the shutstop will come back for a completely unsatisfying comeback lil barrow just little barry is the only one who does anything he shoots the royal guard and says line up in a row and i'll kill you all at once you never see gerard he's you see him once asking you see once pernader uses his new pound powers to break open the cage of life that's pretty cool i guess but you're supposed to assume i think that the fight between the shuttle and the royal guards happens while uh arc is fighting ichibe and you don't see any of it the next time you see them they're all dead and it's like okay i'd have absolutely loved to have seen that instead of seeing pepe you know and these are these are the decisions that i can't defend kubo for because they don't make sense i don't understand what part of him thought people wouldn't want to see the royal guard fighting and would want to see pepe instead the only thing i can think of is that he really thought that the popularity of characters like biakia and miuri and zombie hitsugaya completely superseded that of these new characters and if that is true that that it really does betray a lack of confidence and faith in your wider fan base um and you know it's not hard to blame cooper for being shook after the biakia situation but yeah it's just so disappointing i don't know what more i can say at this point other than doing a form video for the actual anatomy of the battle but you don't see any of it and then you do get the fight between itchy bay and uh buck and i feel like this fight was supposed to be consolation for not getting an actual fight between the royal guards it feels like that to me because the itchy bay fight is everything i think we ever wanted from a royal guard battle ichibe goes ham against juha he uses everything at his disposal he uses incredible keto he uses forbidden kido that um tepusatsu move i think it's called he uses his shikai his bankai both of which are insanely creative ichimonji is such a cool powerful zampato worthy of being wielded by a royal guard member and if you had said to me back in the sort of late 2010 era that one day we would get the quincy emperor the revised emperor of a quincy army fighting the leader of the royal guard i would have been like you are pulling my leg like that sounds like a dream come true and that fight is incredible apart from the ending which is a little bit i don't really like it that much but you know that the rest of the fight is amazing and it's it's clearly there to make up for the fact that we don't get anything else kubo was like if i give these guys a fight between the emperor of the vanden reich and the leader of the royal guard effectively at this point in time the leader of the shinigami as a whole maybe they'll overlook that we didn't get the rest of the fights and to some degree perhaps he's right it's a good length fight it's a great fight both sides go all out and it's just everything i wanted from those battles but i wanted more and maybe that's on me i don't know i was very disappointed with the rep and then it jabe dies as well and then he kind of comes back and he never see him again and it's like great brilliant thanks kubo i guess um it's just what we we really needed context we really needed and i i i was preaching this preaching this back in the day that we would get a flashback of the earliest days of the soul society we would get to see the zero division in the earlier days we would learn more about them but we know nothing about them and that's the fundamental difference between them and the vaisards at least the vizards got term at the pendulum at least execution we know more about giriko kutsuzawa's past than we do about most of the zero division and it's just it's poor time allocation more than anything else um which led to them being pretty shallow can't for your own world has done a pretty cool job of explaining more about the zero division and about their past as progenitors of the soul scientific really cool stuff but i would have loved to have seen it in the manga it should have been in the manga as far as i'm concerned it should have been in the manga um i do consider khan for your own world to be canon thank god but this should have been in the manga there should have been a thousand year flashback uh the friend stuff with hash wolf and basby that's awesome and that's to make that's the beginnings of that flashback and then we don't get any more when you hobart ends that chapter by saying i'm going to call them the stern ritter and shonen jump is like we'll find out the creation of the stern return no we don't not really and i was so excited that that was going to lead into that thousand year flashback that i've been waiting for and we don't get it uh really disappointing really there's no other way putting it it's crushing it disappointing uh and that is one of the big issues with the final arc is a lack of context uh to back up the to back up the war it's called the thousand-year blood warlock and we don't find out jack about the thousand-year war pretty much other than the quincy's lost that's all we find out really we don't see any of it and it's such a shame um such a shame but that's pretty much it for the zero division i think i ended up going on a bit of a rant i think um i didn't want to dunk on the characters like i said and i did talk about what i loved about them like ichimonji is so cool it's such a good sound packed toy but like people wanted to love the zero division um and there is a lot to love i love their designs i love their contributions to soul society history the way they're integrated into the law i wasn't a big fan of kubo's tonal handling of these characters start of their appearance but i grew to like it i liked the emphasis on them uh during the mini sort of training arc i thought that was cool even though he skipped over shooter basically entirely who was pretty much the coolest one and ichibe again that's clear time issues i think um ichibay is the royal guard member you barely see any of his training you get a little bit of it and a bit more of renji but i'm losing my voice i'm losing my voice uh but yeah disappointing there's not really a lot more to say but i will say more in the future uh i'm going to definitely do a video on that fight between the or maybe even what could have been you know because i have in my head come up with bangko ideas so basically all of the royal god and sheikah i did i think i think it's probably pretty obvious that the big spoon is hikifunaishikai and the big needle is senjimaru shikai or it's their sealed form it could be the sealed form um because all the royal guard again another awesome thing about them they have weird zam puck toe apart from oetsu but he is the zampato creator so that's fair and even then he has a weird sheath so kubo just puts so much work into these guys i always felt that kubo put more effort into the royal guard than he needed to in many respects um he did such a good job with them but like with most things in the final arc it kind of fell apart towards the end and yeah they ended up becoming probably the most disappointing faction of all of them in bleach i i may i potentially i think that's fair to say but this video has been almost an hour long um if you're still here at this point i hope you've enjoyed this beefy discussion on the zero division i we know i knew we'd get there eventually i told you i'd do one on them because i wanted to for ages um but yeah that's pretty much it for me guys let me know in the comments below what you thought of the zero division in bleach what do you thought of the royal guard have you enjoyed this discussion on them do let me know in the comments and like i said if you haven't subscribed yet make sure to hit that button now and push us towards 15k that would be amazing um but i really don't think i can think of anything else to say about them just yet if i can if i do we'll come back with another video in the future but i'm not sure my voice can handle it right now but thank you so much guys it has been a pleasure um talking about the royal guard and i just i wish i wish we'd got more and maybe the anime will give us more that so that's potential video talk about what the anime could give us in that fight to make it a lot more fleshed out alright guys but until next time i shall catch you later see you then

Channel: MrTommo2304

Views: 493,770

Keywords: bleach, bleach discussion, bleach manga, zero division, bleach zero squad, squad zero, bleach anime, royal guard, bleach soul king, MrTommo2304, MrTommo2304 bleach, bleach 2020, bleach anime return, bleach new anime, bleach anime trailer, bleach 2021, bleach final arc, discussion

Id: aY_LeCn4mMA

Length: 52min 11sec (3131 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2020