What is THE HOGYOKU? Analysing AIZEN and URAHARA'S Greatest Creation | Bleach DISCUSSION

so the hogyoku is truly one of the most abstract concepts to emerge from the realm of bleach and it should be no surprise that the series is two greatest minds the chess masters kisuke urahara and sosuke eisen are the two who attempt to meddle with this seemingly god-like power the power to transgress boundaries that perhaps otherwise shouldn't be broken but what actually is the hokyoku now we don't have a lot of answers the series is purposefully vague about this strange and potentially eldritch creation and the hogyoku overall plays a pretty nebulous role in the story of bleach but one of my absolute favorite things to do here on the channel is to take a look at some of the slightly weirder concepts in the series and really try and dig deep and see if we can't come up with some answers of our own using what we have here in the manga and beyond and so in this video i'm going to try and go deeper into what the hogyoku actually is its role in the story its creation the main people who play a part in it and what it does and see if we can't break down the breakdown sphere that was terrible before we begin this video guys if you haven't hit subscribe yet make sure to do that now is you're in the perfect place for bleach content like this every single week and if you enjoyed the video don't forget to show it some love and support me by giving the video a thumbs up as well it really does help get the video more traction on the whole youtube algorithm it means more bleach fans like yourselves get a chance to see it and if you want to support me another step further we have a patreon on the channel as well now you can get videos like this one early and you can support me there for as little as a dollar a month all the names showing up on screen right now are people i want to give a huge shout out to as they are supporting me over there on patreon helping me do what i love which is bringing you content like this so a massive thank you to each and every one of you so the truth then about the ho goku is that we really know very little um there are an awful lot of unanswered questions surrounding this strange little ball how easy is it to actually create one of these how many people know how to create them how universal is the knowledge about creating a hogyoku and what does his existence actually mean for the world of bleach it seems as well to be a sentient being eisen mentions that the hogyoku has a will of its own but what is that will is it to simply find a master and then help it reach their true potential or is it something maybe even more malevolent than that the ho yoku is a genuinely fascinating if slightly under explored part of bleach but that's really what the crux of this video is going to be all about looking at the evidence we have within the manga itself to try and determine at least a little bit more about this strange strange little creation of both eisen and uroharas and speaking of eisen and urahara part of what makes the hogyoku so fascinating i think is that it does involve those two characters so heavily and they really are the greatest warring minds of the series almost the entire series has been commented on before as basically being a chess game between the two of them and the hogyoku plays an enormous role in that in the conflict of the iran karak now when i was doing some research for this video prior to filming i was trying to collate virtually everything we know about the ho goku in the story so far and so much of it is so vague and also where the hogyoku is concerned things can get a little messy there is a lot of seemingly misinformation or retcons or characters straight up lying about what the ho goku can do so that makes this even harder than it already was so i think probably the best way to do this is to start with what i think is a complete and hopefully as concrete as we can possibly get timeline of the hogyoku within the story of bleach and so our timeline begins not with keyscape but with eisen as to so much within the story of bleach seeking greater heights so sk eisen before he became a captain maybe even before he became a vice captain was trying to essentially figure out hollow vacation now eisen wasn't the only person pursuing this research but he was the first one at least the first one we know to come to the conclusion of a hogyoku as being the answer to breaking down those barriers between shinigami and hollow and so at some point before the main storyline eisen creates a hogyoku of his own the first one we know of in bleach's storyline but how does eisen know about the hokyoku in the first place and this leads me on to my first set of questions regarding this thing since the whole since the idea of a ho goku is so strange and ho goku's themselves are so powerful is this just common knowledge or did eisen just sort of have a happy little accident and stumble upon this thing um almost randomly during his research that's a little bit strange to me but regardless he's the first one to do it in his quest to create a hybrid being but i'll be honest the fact that both he and kisuke came to the same conclusion makes me wonder if the hogyoku was already a known quantity within the universe now we actually get to see this next bit in the manga itself eisen again clearly not a captain yet at this point enlists the help of some shinigami to basically go out into the rookonga and carve away souls of hundreds and hundreds of people both through congress citizens with shinigami potential and the souls of shinigami themselves and we actually see these people these lackeys of eisen come back present him these souls they have carved away and he takes the souls and adds them to his hogyoku which at this point seems to be little more than almost a glowing violet light which he is keeping encased in a tube of sorts um very kind of almost homunculus-esque um there's definitely something quite sinister about this whole thing not least of the fact that they have had to actually go and potentially kill people to achieve this in the supplementary novels we actually learned that rangiku matsumoto had within her a nail of the soul king and that is what was taken from her when geen discovers her lying injured in the forest later on and we find out that the shinigami then presented that to eisen and he added it to his own ho goku so it could be that the hogyoku itself is fueled by and stems from a piece of the soul king but that's something we will discuss later on so eisen mentions that the reason he was doing this the reason he was taking all of these souls and feeding them to his hokyoku was in an effort to satisfy it and to complete it but despite doing so the hokyoku was never satisfied and what does a completed and satisfied hogyoku even mean in the first place is a completed hokyoku perhaps one allows for fusion because eisen of course eventually subjugates it and fuses with it which seems to be his end game with this thing and we know of course that even before a hogyoku is apparently complete it's already materializing desires around people because it affected orahime and chad and ruka etc so that doesn't seem to be a completed hogyoku it seems to already be doing that regardless so the whole thing is a little as i mentioned before nebulous what does a completed hogyoku even mean and then of course as eisen is you know creating his first hokyoku we have to come back round to our biggest question of all what is a hokyoku at the end of the day how does it do things like bestow upon its master something very similar to high speed regeneration although eisen comments that he would never hollow fight it definitely seems as though a hogyoku is at least in part hollow in nature as the final transformation it bestows upon eyes and is obviously very hollow-esque he now has three hollow holes and the hogyoku itself seems to float rather ominously in the center of one of them almost even like it's replacing his heart much in the same way as how a hollow hole and hollow mask actually works but then how does how does that work because presumably it's only shinigami souls that have been fed to this thing anyway if we continue on down our timeline a short while later kisuke urahara is researching ways to strengthen the konpaku of shinigami presumably just as part of routine research for the goatee 13 military they're thinking you know we're fighting hollows we need our soldiers to be stronger and holification is a way of doing that kiskay says that as part of his research into this he actually discovered hollowfication and created a substance to break down that barrier and that substance was the hogyoku and this we find out from him in turn back the pendulum essentially this all boils down to both eisen and kisuke were looking into hollow vacation for their own agendas and both of them came to the conclusion that hogyoku was the best way to do it in term of the pendulum we know that kisuke uses the hogyoku i'm not entirely sure how or what that even means but he uses it to stabilize the visors who have been you know infected by hollow rayatsu and in doing so he saves their lives and then all of them flee to the human world at some point after this during his time in exile in the human world kisuke decides that the hogyoku he has created is just too dangerous it's far too dangerous a substance to be allowed to exist in the world um and he tries to destroy it and he spends years trying to destroy and he is unsuccessful every time he has no idea how to actually destroy this thing that he has created and again that really comes back to the idea of this being a real kind of eldritch creation something that kisuke himself doesn't even truly understand um and he does he doesn't know how to how to be rid of it and this of course will be important later on and so with no way to destroy his hokyoku kisuke decides instead to try and deactivate and hide it so he places it within a protective shell and then at some point at the very start of the bleach story he approaches rukia and offers her a ghee guy secretly implanting the whole goku within it this ski guy of course as we know is designed to sap her powers eventually turning her into a normal human and successfully hiding the hogyoku forever unfortunately for kisuke however eisen has been delving into urahara's own research and has been continuing his holification experiments ever since kisuke was banished from the soul society and of course we see this in everything but the reign even as eisen has become a captain he is still progressing on with his twisted work and by looking into kisuke's own research eisen learns that rukia is the hiding place of the hogyoku at some point between turned back the pendulum and the start of bleach discovering the secret eisen sends rukia to karakura town both to lurky skate o'hara out and also to help start and test ichigo's growth and development as someone who could be a perfect hybrid obviously eisen is intrigued by him since he understands that the very unique heritage that ichigo has and of course the rest is history the rest is the soul society arc eisen posing as the central 46 tries to get rukia executed so her body is destroyed revealing the hogyoku which he can then take for himself of course ichigo and his friends foil this plan so eisen has to resort to plan b and once again this is using urahara's research that he has been meticulously pouring over since urohara was forced to leave seoul society he discovers a new technology that kisuke created to remove a foreign object from a konpaku and he does just this to steal urahara's own hogyoku eisen then flees soul society for waco mundo and it's important to know at this point that eisen has now two ho goku in his possession the original one he created right the start of this timeline using a piece of even matsumoto's soul to get there and the new one he has just stolen from rukia's body it's difficult to know exactly what comes next in the timeline at some point during this period of peace before the fake karakura town battle eisen offers kisuke's ho goku to his own one in an effort to complete and satisfy it which seemingly works it's just difficult to know exactly when that happens in chapter 229 we get to see eisen actually use the hogyoku we've known for a little while that he has been using it to essentially create iran cars at a rapid pace and make them more complete and more powerful than ever before and we see him actually doing this when he creates wonder weiss it's interesting as well because the hogyogu actively fuses with eisen's finger for a brief moment allowing him to complete the hokyoku momentarily and create one device and this is some nice foreshadowing to the fact that eisen would eventually subjugate and fuse with it entirely later on down the line it's possible that by chapter 249 when eisen reveals that he has shown orihime the hogyoku supposedly as a measure of trust um it's possible that he's already fused the two together by this point as the hogyoku we see here has a different protective casing to the one he took out of rukia but again it's effectively impossible to know at this point but i would assume that he probably has done as he probably would have done it fairly quickly after escaping seoul society and then flash very far forward to chapter 396 the final battle is well underway and eisen reveals to ichigo that he has in fact fused himself with the hogyoku which of course is his original hogyoku which is now complete having been fed kisuke's one and this hogyoku is going so far as to even protect eisen who claims that it now sees him as his master employing techniques that are very similar to things like high speed regeneration but it's not until chapter 400 that things start to get really crazy eisen is duking out with ishin and having already fought you know yamamoto the entire goatee 13 eisen getting tired you know he's reaching his limit as a shinigami even eisen has that limit of course this is the limit he wishes to break and so it's during this fight with ishii and you know is like what you seem to be slowing down if you you're tiring out already and eisen says yes it appears i have reached my limit and because of that the hokyoku is awakening and responding to the desires within his heart the hogyoku is beginning to understand who i truly am in the next chapter 401 eisen delves even further into this basically saying that the hogyoku he has now become its master and because of that it is starting to respond to the desires within his heart replacing his soul and transforming him into a being that will break those boundaries he mentioned before it's also in this chapter that we learn the truth about the ho goku that what we've been told to believe all along which is this orb was created for the sole purpose of destroying the boundary between shinigami and hollow is actually not what it can do although it seems like that on the surface the hogyoku's true ability is to essentially look into the hearts of those around it and realize their deepest desires now these are some acts and desires that the hokyoku has supposedly materialized throughout the series when kisuke urahara created it he didn't realize its true ability because when he created it he did so wanting to break the boundary between shinigami and hollow so that's what it did it was simply materializing his desire and he took that to mean that was what it actually did when rukia transferred her powers to ichigo she lost all of them instead of only some of them and that was the hogyoku materializing her desire to lose everything due to the guilt she felt about killing cayenne and then also when odahime and chad got their powers that was actually the doing of the hogyoku because they themselves apparently cursed their own powerlessness i want to just take a a brief detour for a second to say that when this chapter came out way back in the day um so you know 2009 or 2010 whenever it was this was very unpopular this was this was not popular because the hogyoku we had been firmly told exactly what it can do and exactly its place and role in the story to the point where it was involved in turning back the pendulum and now arbitrarily it's just this wish ball as i think people used to call it that can just do what whatever kubo needs it to do essentially it can now be used to retroactively explain literally everything that has happened in bleach up until now things like orahime and chad getting their powers despite not being around ichigo at the time they they received them you know orihime gets her powers when tatsuki is in trouble but now apparently that's the will of the hogyoku and that brings us back to that ever nebulous question what is the will of the hokyoku but for now eisen is revealing all this is also when eisens supposedly i have foreseen everything and planned everything out meticulously was beginning to stretch some people's suspension of disbelief a little bit as eisen reveals that he always knew that the hogyoku wasn't about breaking down the barrier between shinigami and hollow he just didn't know exactly what its power actually was um and so the experiments he did on shinji and the others to turn them into vaisards wasn't only an experiment on hollow vacation it was also to test the limits of the ho goku's powers he theorized that the hogyoku should never have been able to turn shinji etc into proper viseds but when it did that confirmed that its true power was actually realizing urahara's desires um and so he sent rukia to karakura town at this point to test it even further however eisen does reveal that the ho goku is only capable of materializing what someone can actually realistically achieve so at least there there is a slight weakness in this thing i do kind of wonder though you know why the hogyoku only seemed to affect certain people you know why didn't the hogyoku have any effect on characters like uriu for instance who you know also spent time around rukia as well but much later on as eisen has begun to undergo this transformation he claims that now the hogyoku is understanding his heart is transforming him into a being that crosses the boundaries between the divine and the earthly as he puts it at some point kisuke finally arrives on the battlefield and we get a wonderful interaction between the two of them the two of them who have actually had some kind of involvement in the hogyoku this also shows a great dichotomy between their two characters in my opinion basically i akisaki shows up and says to eisen that you know it's a very strange look you're sporting all of a sudden um and eisen says well you know midway through evolution is always ugly at which point kisuke kind of has this strange sad look on his face and he's like i never said it was ugly and that's really interesting to me because obviously you know kisuke is a true scientist at the end of the day and this kind of this kind of um divolves into an entirely separate video but we'll go over it slightly here which is the rivalry between eisen and ki scan how eisen despite his you know enormous god complex has this real sense of inferiority around keyscape much like mayory does but on a slightly different level and you get you get a lot of that here in this conversation which i think is is really effective but you know kisskey says well i never said it was ugly so you know keys cave finds it fascinating more than ugly he's less concerned about the physical appearance than he is about what's actually going on here um but then eisen moves to kind of gloat to ki skate that you know i've i've actually subjugated the whole goku the holyoke that you failed to truly understand failed to truly control um again kind of gloating being like i'm better than you you know as a scientist i'm i'm better than you despite the fact that eisen was forced to steal kiskay's hogyoku and his research into the technology to remove it from a konpaku in the first place and at this point kisuke hints that he knows more than he's letting on by saying oh yeah the hogyoku that i couldn't control back in the day at least anyway implying that he maybe knows secrets about the hokyoku now that eisen does not and this of course annoys eisen eisen says well that just seems like a demonstration of sour grapes on your part that you uh that you you know you you failed to do this before i did i did it first so i'm better than you and i is very uncharacteristically just leaps up key scan stabs him in the chest being like you know you'll never have this chance again you've totally lost your chance to control the hogyoku and of course eisen lunging at kiskay like that is very very unusual for him but it's because of this animosity that he feels on a personal level to someone he thinks is looking down their nose at him he thinks that key skate is saying these kind of spiteful things well he thinks they're spiteful because he thinks that kisuke is annoyed that eisen has bested him about his own creation but really you know kisuki does actually know more than he is letting on then of course kisuke in there ensuing battle does try and kill eisen buys and survives it and the hogyoku continues to transform him even further and you get another lovely moment where eisen basically turns around and says you know had it not been i and then he he kind of recants and he says actually had it not been i who had subjugated the completed hogioku you would have just killed me and that's a really nice moment again kind of showing almost a big grudging respect to keyskate actually for once saying yeah you probably would have won that and then again much later in the timeline once eisen has defeated kisuke yoroichi and ishin and moved into the real karakura town geen betrays him obviously in revenge for what he witnesses right at the start of our timeline when matsumoto has some of her soul shaved away by eisen to create his original hogyoku this is geen's revenge coming into fruition and gene destroys eisen's body and is able to actually pluck the hogyoku from him and now i have to wonder personally why the hokyoku doesn't just up and abandon eisen right now because eisen is as good as dead at this point you know he basically he he would be dead and and gina's actually managed to take the hog yokus i'm surprised it doesn't abandon him yet clearly it thinks that he can go further which is why i assume it returns to him now despite not being actually in eisen's body at this point it still recognizes him as its master and it literally warps from gene's hand in back into eisen's chest again after it has reformed and transformed him into butterflies at this point but he has now become a being that transcends both shinigami and hollow which is what he originally set out to achieve which is what the hogyoku was originally kind of forcing upon him as it read his heart and then as we enter the final battle between ichigo and eisen and things do get interesting here when the hogyoku kind of senses that eisen might be struggling against ichigo it forces eisen's not even dead dead at this point but it forces a new and gruesome transformation upon him um and obviously we see him look now like a complete monster more hollow-like than ever but interestingly here for the first time eisen verbalizes hogyoku's own thoughts we've been told already that it is a sentient being um uh in its own way and it has its own mind its own will and eisen says oh you know i i understand ho goku you don't want me to you can't tolerate and you can't forgive me being bested by a human which is really interesting for the first time to me at least it feels like the hogyoku is calling the shots here this is where it feels like the hogyoku is perhaps more in charge than eisen is even though eisen is the so-called master of the two of them at the moment the hogyoku is the one that won't tolerate him being so injured by ichigo and this is really reinforced i think by the fact that hogyoku now sits very smugly in the absolute center of eisens being perhaps even replacing his heart at this point now after being hit by mugetsu ichigo's ultimate attack eisen loses most of his powers they are stripped from him in one massive strike and at this point he seems to think that the hogyoku is still working with him as his zan puck toe crumbles to dust eisen comments that the hogyoku has declared i no longer even need azan pakto i'm beginning to transform even more than i already am however this is absolutely not what i think is going on here and i know there is some debate about what's actually happening here um but for me day aside has been entirely about eisens delusions and them collapsing around him him being wrong about literally everything um it's about the death of a god in more ways than one not just his physical defeat but also the fact that someone who has been in control over a hundred years is now losing his mind and everything is going wrong for him you know we've seen it when he incorrectly assumes that ichigo has thrown away his rayatsu and we see it again here where he incorrectly assumes the hokyoku has decided he doesn't need a zampak toe anymore the hokyoku has already abandoned him at this point we see that in literally a couple of pages what i actually think is happening here is eisen is paying the price for having abandoned his son pakto he's turned his back on it and as a response his armpakto is fading away now obviously the two of them would have a chance to rekindle in moochen for the next three years or whatever it is before he returns in the thousand-year blood war which is why he gets his arm puck toe back um that's my thinking anyway but it's very symbolic i think here that eisen thinks he's on the edge of receiving another power up but in reality everything is disappearing for him so the crumbling zan puck toe to me at least feels like a literal representation of him turning away from it and we know the hogyoku can't be forcing another transformation on him because we know it's already decided to abandon him after being hit by mugetsu when kisuke shows up on the scene he mentions that he knew it would be nearly impossible to kill eisen after he fused with the hokyoku which of course we know to be accurate as kisuke has spent years trying to destroy this thing only to find it completely impossible and the hokyoku then strips eisen of all his newly acquired power as it seemingly leaves his side however ichigo actually counters this idea after the fight has concluded when he has a nice little chat with kisuke after the battle is over ichigo challenges the idea saying that he wonders if perhaps the hogyoku never actually abandoned eisen and instead gave him what he wanted deepest in his heart perhaps even subconsciously which was to lose his powers and become a regular shinigami on the same level as everybody else because he's been alone at the top for so long i think there is probably some truth to this on some level but as i've mentioned before on this channel i do take umbrage with this idea and i do wonder if maybe ichigo is not quite on the mark here or if there's at least an element of both sides at play and the reason i think that is because eisen explicitly says back during the big fight that the hogyoku is finally starting to understand who he truly is as it is reading his heart and as it does that it's replacing his soul with one that can actually transcend hollows and shinigami so he clearly does want to achieve that form at some point then there's the fact that ichigo argues that because eisen was born exceptional maybe maybe he was seeking someone who could see his own viewpoint which is perhaps why eisen was coaxing ichigo along helping in his development but an ichigo mentions that when eisen couldn't find anyone like that he gave up trying and instead wished to be brought down to the same level as everybody else however if that's the case i'd argue that hogyoku hasn't really given him what he wants at all because despite having his hybrid powers seemingly stripped away from him he is still absurdly more powerful than virtually everyone else in the series to the point where in the thousand-year blood war his rayatsu is still enough to decimate a nearby soul making him as lonely if not more lonely than ever before but maybe that's his curse and that's basically it then for our comprehensive timeline for the ho goku as it appears in bleach now as i mentioned during my research i came across a bunch of oddities and what i feel like are some inconsistencies surrounding this thing definitely i think kubo struggled a little bit with the serialized format to really include the hogyoku both early on and then bring it back into relevance later on clearly he wanted it to have a massive role in eisens development as a villain in the final battle but some things had to be changed along the way so i've got a couple of should we say oddities i just want to discuss very briefly in chapter 175 when eisen is kind of explaining his grand master plan he mentions that many people looked into the field of hollow vacation first but many of them stopped pushing their research due to laws and ethics eisen says that his own research into hollification was basically exclusively focused on giving hollows shinigami-like abilities the ability to cancel a rayatsu or to destroy zan pakto he then says it was ki skate urahara who working outside of the seoul society's kind of scientific community developed the hogyoku except in chapter 416 eisen mentions that he was the one to come up with the idea of hogyoku first it is highly possible that he was lying about literally everything during this speech in end of hypnosis as he does mention later on which we'll get to but that does seem a bit weird to me like why would you lie about it details that just i don't need to be lied about during your kind of big grandiose moment this idea of him lying about everything back here is reinforced by this next point again which is actually brought up in the manga itself but this is when eisen says that he originally only noticed rukia had the hogyoku within her after she went missing in the human world but in chapter 398 he reveals that he already knew she had the hokyoku within her and that's why he sent her to karakura town in the first place now this is as i mentioned actually addressed in the manga eyes and says that you know if you think i'm telling the truth or you think i'm lying now what makes you think i'm still in the truth back then which implies that yeah he was lying about not knowing that but again i question why even bother lying about that in the first place it does make sense for the character involved but it's undeniably a little confusing also in chapter 175 eisen mentions that the reason keyscape was banished from the seoul society was for creating an untraceable gigan one that would strip the user of all of its riatsu over time and it's not just eisen who says this this line has been parroted by a number of characters in the earlier stages of bleach um but of course once you get to term at the pendulum you realize that's absolutely not the case and also eisen would be fully aware of the real reason as to why kisuke had to leave the seoul society this is one that is a retcon i think but i'm absolutely fine with it because i think turnout the pendulum provides a much more interesting answer and it does also include the creation of the ghee guys anyway and then in chapter 176 when eisen retrieves the hokyoku from rukia he notes to himself that this thing it's so small this is the hogyoku amazing but eisen should already have his own hogyoku by this point in the story that he has been actually feeding souls to since before he became a captain so he should already know what it looks like and we know from looking at the hogyoku's they look exactly the same again this one feels to me it feels like the main point of contention for kubo as a writer was that he just hadn't decided that eisen would have his own hoe goku yet that kiseke's one would be the only one in existence that was created back in term at the pendulum for the sole purpose of saving the visors but then eventually he decided that it makes more sense for eisen to have also come to this conclusion and then fuse the two together and then finally in chapter 401 eisen reveals that he already knew ki skate urahara had succeeded in turning shinji and the others into complete vizards however looking at turnback the pendulum we know that those experiments were conducted in the 12th divisions barracks and they were then whisked away by tessai and yoroichi before really anyone got a chance to see them also eisen himself actually mentions in everything but the rain which is about 20 years prior to the main storyline that he's still trying to track down shinji and the others so i don't really know how he would as of yet determined that they were proper advisors especially since when shinji appears in front of him in the fake karakura town he kind of says to eisen you know how do you like our new look we've gotten pretty good with these masks implying this is the first time they've had any communication for over 100 years and so as we kind of come to the close of this video i've got a couple of more smaller points i would like to mention but we kind of get back to that major question of what is the hogyoku because really we haven't as of yet been able to answer it there are some small little points i do want to bring up that i think are quite interesting again in chapter 175 there's a really intriguing panel that shows kisuke as a captain working in a lab and there is a mysterious shadowy silhouette behind him of someone who looks like they're either talking to him or acting a little suspiciously now it could just be somebody working in the lab with kisuke around the creation of the hogyoku before kubo decided that keyscape made it alone but i like to think that this is actually kind of foreshadowing the idea that eisen would eventually steal kisuke's own hogyoku it looks like you know somebody is watching his works from afar which of course would be eisen in term at the pendulum as well tessai notes that and tessa of course being a you know majorly powerful shinigami the kido core captain he would know a lot about the magic of the world for instance notes that the hogyoku its very existence its very power feels like it's trying to stifle his own existence it feels like he's trying to suffocate him out of existence and i think that's really interesting because to me that tells me that the hokyoku is inherently malevolent or at least there is something about it that is really not quite right it goes back to this idea of it being this eldritch force that just should not exist in that sense it really does feel like the one of the strangest things to be in this universe really something artificial almost that absolutely should not be here because it bends and breaks the laws of bleach and it feels like that all those who go after it are cursed you know kisuke had the foresight at least to realize that this thing is wrong and it should not be it should not be allowed to be and he tries to destroy it but fails um and you know he's kind of haunted by it in a sense and then eisen actually goes after and pursues and embraces the hogyoke and we see it twists him into a monster uh you know both physically and mentally by the end of day aside and so right at the end here let's finally go back to that question of what is a hoe goku and i think we just don't have a concrete answer but i've got a couple of small ideas so a hogyoku is supposed to be a sentient being with a will of its own and what is that will what does it want is its will simply to find a suitable master and then push them to greatness before you know abandoning them if they can't achieve their own goals the fact that it abandons eisen like that feels quite callous and it does feel like the hokyoku is egging him on in that final battle you know it forces that transformation on him when it thinks that's what he needs to defeat ichigo and then it's you know eisen believes that it thinks he is failing it so i do wonder if the hogyoku is seeking out a worthy master perhaps that's what it actually wants um and you know those it doesn't consider to be worthy as we see with test science actively trying to blot out their existence which again is is a really cool idea we know when hollows now kind of the process that behind the birth of say gillian's you know menos when hollows all come together loads of hollow souls kind of come together and a dominant mind takes hold maybe something similar is happening here we know that the hogyoku is created by carving away hundreds and hundreds of shinigami souls and maybe eventually they coalesce and a dominant mind comes forth obviously not in the same way as as a hollow they don't really seem to retain any kind of individuality um but it maybe it creates even like a sort of hive mind of these souls um it's really it's really hard to say it does get very conceptual at this point and then finally i do wonder if the hokyoku is well and truly connected to the soul king himself um it does seem like this kind of unnatural power is normally attributed to the soul king and what the hogyoku can do seems to be very reminiscent of gerard valkyries the miracle you know he is the heart of the soul king and he cannot die you know he comes back to life many many times over which is exactly the same as what happens when eisen is put through the ringer by the hogyoku essentially coming back with a new form again and again and that's exactly what happens to gerard he gets a new form every time he resurrects and the idea behind the miracle even though it's a little bit weird and it feels like kubo simplifies it as the actual fight takes hold but the original idea behind it is that it it materializes the wishes of the masses in gerard himself so that he can achieve the impossible and that's you know exactly what the hogyoku is it materializes the will of those around it so effectively they can achieve their truest potential and eisen himself says the hogyoku is mostly just a guiding light you know used to help people achieve what they can as i mentioned briefly earlier i think in kant for your own world it is alluded to that hokyoku's are essentially created with a sort of fragment of the soul king acting as a lynchpin which are then fed shinigami souls to kind of feed on almost and then power up and it that makes a lot of sense to me in a way because the sulking is apparently so god-like he has all his weird powers and that would make sense that the heart of a hogyoku is a piece of him and therefore that's why it can do all these crazy things um you know it's almost like because because of gerard is the heart of the soul king a small piece of him almost is within the hogioku which is how it can continually revive people and stuff like that but at this point we are getting very much into conjecture and speculation because really i have no idea we know with mimi hagi and pernida that soul king body parts can gain their own sentience after a while so maybe that's exactly what's happening here with the hokyoku as well but that's pretty much it for this pretty exhaustive and unfortunately um fairly i would argue inconclusive video on the hokyoku but it was a lot of fun to delve deep into one of bleach's greatest mysteries i think this thing is so weird and i do think a big part of it is that it's purposefully vague because we're not supposed to truly understand it much like the characters in the series itself it is this eldritch abomination of a creation that kisuke regrets and should never have come across and eisen embraces and you know wants more from and it is very difficult to control it it is very difficult to understand what it actually wants you know what does it want and so to me the hogyoku is a fascinating footnote in in bleach history it's one that i think kubo struggled with a little bit and you can really see that when you go back and reread big chunks of the iran korak where there are some there are some pretty big loopholes being made for eisen to get through for things to start making sense you know i truly believe that eisen never had his own hokyoku up until kubo decided that was what had to happen um but regardless i hope you enjoyed this video maybe it should shed some light let me know in the comments below i would really really appreciate it what do you guys think of the hogue what do you think it actually is and what do you think of its role in the bleach universe i would love to hear down below alright guys but until next time make sure you subscribe if you haven't done already and then i'll catch you later see ya

Channel: MrTommo2304

Views: 204,936

Keywords: bleach, bleach manga, bleach discussion, bleach tybw, bleach anime, bleach new anime, bleach tybw anime, bleach new chapter, bleach hell arc, MrTommo2304, MrTommo2304 Bleach, bleach anime trailer, bleach tybw trailer, bankai, tybw anime, bleach hell chapter, aizen bankai, urahara bankai, hogyoku bleach, what is the hogyoku, hogyoku explained

Id: usVCD_415Qw

Length: 41min 53sec (2513 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022