**spoiler warning- this post assumes
full up-to-date knowledge of the Bleach
manga. If you are not caught up now,
come back when you are**
Some
of you might recall that, way back in 2014, during the series’ big final-arc
wrap-up, I took to this page to vent about the long-running degeneration of Naruto from what started out as a
genuinely great story with immense potential into just another pulpyDBZ-knockoff. Well…much to my dismay…here
we are again- another of the Big Shonen Three, Bleach (Naruto and One Piece being the other two), is in
the middle of its own concluding arc, and in a frightening parallel to what I
experienced two years ago, I can’t help but reflect back on how great the
series started out, what high hopes I had, and how far things have fallen in
the interim. And this one is much more
painful; Naruto, at least, had a few
really good parts towards the end to soften the blow of its collapse. Bleach
has just gotten terrible. Really,
straight-up, head-scratchingly terrible.
The
funny thing is, if you had asked me for my thoughts after I had first read the
Soul Society Arc (“officially” ending with Chapter 182), I would have earnestly
argued that Bleach was BETTER than Naruto and One Piece; it had the same amount of endless possibilities inherent
in the design of the world and its powers, but was ALSO the only one with a
main character who was actually a smart, interesting, and capable story figure
with real depth to him beyond “Imma be the best because DURNIT, I want to!” Or at least, it started out that way….come
gather ‘round, people, wherever ye roam….
Ichigo
has become completely bland and forgettable, and it’s beyond sad.
When
Bleach started out, Ichigo made for a
really intriguing main character. Or at
least, he had the potential of being one.
In complete contrast to Naruto and Luffy, both of whom had “phenomenally
stupid” written in as core character traits, Ichigo was a top student,
considered a weirdo and outsider for actually caring about his studies (and was
also a bit of an outcast for deliberately bleaching his hair, which is where
the series got its name from). Plus, and
again, entirely unlike the early days of Naruto,
while he obviously needed training at the appropriate moments to prepare for
the level of fighters he would face, even at the beginning he was by no means a
slouch in battle, and could always handle himself.
Yeah,
he had the same basic personality (headstrong and stubborn as a bull), fiercely
determined to stand by his friends and do the right thing, carried an
overwhelming inherent fighting power, and by virtue of his parentage (although
like with Luffy and Naruto, we didn’t learn the details until much later) was
more or less “destined for greatness,” but that’s all pretty rote for a Shonen
series. All the extra stuff- the bleaching
of his hair as a way to defy social norms, his mature bearing, and his sharp intelligence,
plus the fact that his journey was set up to be one of having to balance the
nature and needs of different worlds, offered a lot of possibilities to create
a really great personal and emotional arc to accompany the cool hackey-slashey
fighting bits.
Which
makes it especially disappointing that all that potential, which the early arcs
mined pretty effectively, all but disappeared once the Espada showed up and
have never returned since then. It’s
rather ironic, in a way. Even in the
midst of its decline, Naruto still
partially redeemed itself by satisfyingly completing Naruto’s arc from bratty,
weak, idiotic child into a powerful and mature (though not necessarily more
intelligent) Hokage. Ichigo, meanwhile,
has become a cardboard cutout of his former self, simply allowing himself to be
moved from Point A to Point B by more colorful and interesting characters so
that he can instantly learn each new rote superpower needed to defeat the next
bad guy (I’ll come back to this point shortly), all the while never once
cracking a smile and grimly promising to handle everything, rinse, wash,
repeat. At this point he’s barely a
factor in the closing arc of his own series, which gives me the impression Kubo
just stopped caring about his own main character. And if the author can’t be bothered, why
should I?
Anyone
remember Chad, or Orihime, or Rukia?
Because Kubo doesn’t.
Remember
when Bleach was just as much as much
about the relationships between Ichigo and his 3 best friends as it was about
swinging massive swords and wrecking spirit demons’ shit? Yeah, those days are long gone now. Rukia has had a few interesting moments where
her powers have advanced, but she and Ichigo barely see each other, and Chad
and Orihime’s utter lack of narrative relevance has been a running joke for
years now. The friendships and
relationships that bound together those four, plus Ichida, were the heart and
soul of the series, and its absence is painfully noticeable.
The
stereotypes. Oh God, the
stereotypes.
Let’s
be honest here- Japan is not exactly known for well-balanced, reasonable takes
on foreigners and cultures outside of Japan.
I mean, only someone completely removed from any direct experience with
Western Christianity could come up with shit like this, even as kids we all knew there was something really messed up aboutMr. Popo’s existence, and let’s not forget which character in Yu-Gi-Oh
was intended to be an American stand-in.
That
being said, Bleach seems to have
deliberately gone the extra mile to stuff in as many bizarre cultural and/or
racial stereotypes as it can in its final arc.
The Espada, with they’re ridiculously flamboyant half-Spanish names and
phrases were bad enough; I mean, is there any particular reason Kubo made
Spanish the default setting for an army of actual hellspawn? Did he just have a really bad experience that
one time he holidayed in Barcelona?
Apparently
that was just the tip of the iceberg, because then along came the Quincy
Sternritter, resurrecting a supposedly extinct group of in-universe magic users
as the final bad-guy group and making them one of the more outlandish examples
of Nazi wannabis I’ve ever encountered, using hilariously perverted forms of
German words for their ranks, attacks, and forms (typing the word “Sternritter”
alone is probably shaving years off my life).
And
yet even creating another Nazi group stand-in wasn’t enough, because even
within the Sternritter some characters have been so bizarre as to be impossible
to place, including an absurdly homoerotic Luchadore, a zombie-creating lesbian
necrophile, and a sad rehash of the weakest Espada of them all. For all the stakes Kubo is trying to build up
with the final arc about the possible end of existence itself (the main villain
has already literally killed God), the cast of baddies he’s set up for the
final fights are so outlandishly cartoonish, EVEN for a Jump series, that it’s
impossible to take any of it seriously at this point.
The
sexism.
I
considered lumping this in with the category above, but Bleach’s terrible treatment of anyone missing a Y chromosome is so
legendarily ubiquitous, it deserves its own special mention. For all the shit I gave Naruto about dropping
the ball with Sakura, at least they
never gave her several boob transplants and made flimsy excuses to stick her in
vastly underequipped battle armor.
Kubo
has gone the opposite direction, seemingly determined to up his own anti every
arc by finding new ways to strip away whatever dignity the women in the Shinigami
world have left- I would call Yoruichi’s most recent transformation into a
half-human, half-cat sex slave (and no, I’m really not exaggerating there) the
absolute bottom of the barrel, but I will refrain from doing so for fear Kubo
will read this and get it in his head to prove me wrong out of spite.
The
worst, though, isn’t that nearly every woman fighter in the Gotei 13 is
guaranteed an early death-by-lower-back-shattering; it’s how insidiously he’s
brought Orihime, who like Ichigo started off as a decently interesting character,
down to the same objectified level. All
the other gals had massive, front-and-center tits from the start, so there wasn’t
much salvation to be found there to begin with.
Orihima, however, started out looking like an actual, normally-curved
human female. And somehow, ever so
slowly, her boobs have gotten bigger and bigger with each progressive arc, and
her bizarre clothes more and more revealing, and by now she might have the
biggest, most obvious set of knockers in the entire series. It’s happened so gradually I couldn’t even
begin to trace when it started, but the difference between the end of the Soul
Society arc and now is staggering, and especially offensive, since her
relevance in every other aspect of the story has been reduced to Absolute
Zero.
The
artwork is no longer that good, or even cohesive.
This
was one of the issues I had with Naruto,
and sadly, the exact same problem eventually started cropping up in Bleach- whereas the first few hundred
chapters had a rough-hewn quality to them that made the world feel real and the
action gritty, engaging, and pretty damn cool to look at, somewhere within the
Espada arc the style changed completely.
It’s all solid straight lines and big bubbles surrounding everything,
with none of the shading or rough edges that made the early arcs
distinctive. Like with Naruto, it’s a
change that has taken away the ability of the series to be both series and
comic when needed- everything looks so straight and serious that the few stabs
at whacky comedy that come in every now and then feel horrible out of
place. Worse than Naruto, Kubo’s waste
of precious page space has become nigh-on unbearable; I’ve lost count of the
number of chapters so filled with big, blank, black blocks that weeks would
often go by without the slightest advancement in the story.
The
fights are all about hopelessly bullshit powers that make no sense.
Continuing
the topic of issues in Naruto proving
presciently relevant to Bleach….
Much
like with the rules of chakra and eye- and bloodline-techniques in Naruto,
Bleach started out by hinting at a pretty interesting variety of powers and
possibilities for fights; the idea of each sword having its own soul and power
uniquely suited to the personality and style of the wielder was particularly
inspired. And because there were many
different ways to handle a fight, there was no need to automatically use the
great sword powers, especially for the higher level of fighters. This allowed there to be a sense of mystery
about the nature of many of the Ban Kais of the upper echelon of the Gotei 13,
which I always found particularly appealing.
And
like any respect left to the series’ women, all that has gone out the window,
with Kubo clearly having decided to reveal each and every remaining Ban Kai by
the end of the series, and in most cases, has gone to bizarrely twisted
storytelling lengths to do so. About 400
chapters ago, I would have been all for getting to see each of the Captain’s
full powers. Now, I just don’t care
enough, especially their use has replaced the use of any other strategy in a
fight. The Ban Kai has gone from a
carefully regulated last resort to the Super Saiyan transformation of DBZ- a
thing of legend and mythos reduced to an Insta-Cure for all your villainous
ills.
Kubo
has started to break his own in-world rules.
This
might be the greatest sin Kubo has committed over the course of writing
Bleach. Obviously, the creator of a
story has the Power of God when it comes to the worlds they create. We can whine all we like, but they are the
ultimate arbiters of the products of their imagination, and as such can ignore
or listen to others all they like.
However,
it is also a truth that, if a storyteller wants people other than him/herself
to like what they do, and if they want to be able to create something that will
have an enduring effect outside of themselves, this Power of God must be used
sparingly and responsibly. And one of
the cardinal rules of this is that, if you decide to create a world for your
story with specific guidelines for how it works, with explicit limitations and
conditions for things like superpowers, you need to stick with them. Otherwise, there are no consequences for what
happens to the heroes, and when there are no consequences, there aren’t any
stakes. And when there are no stakes or
no tangible risk at play, your story will have no tension and will be less
affecting and less memorable as a result.
There
are a lot of examples to pick from here, from minor characters clearly dying
yet somehow reappearing a short while later with no explanation, to the awful
retconning of why some characters are still alive, to the nonsensical laws of
how the Shinigami world regulates souls changing seemingly at random, to
previously established limits on certain powers suddenly not being relevant
anymore, but one of the worst ones is probably the convoluted twists and turns
Kubo has taken to literally redefine and re-explain the sources and natures of
Ichigo’s powers, changing its form and nature seemingly anew with each new arc
(for a comprehensive look at this particular bit of bullshit, I highly
recommend this episode of Weekly Manga Recap- skip just after the 30-minute
mark). It’s stupid, it’s exhausting, and
more than anything else it shows us that Kubo just doesn’t care enough about
the internal integrity of his own story world to make sure it holds up from
start to finish.
SO
MUCH time has been wasted on unimportant side characters.
Good
Lord, am I sick of how interminably long this last arc has been. And what’s been the biggest culprit of
this? All the time we’ve seen wasted on
the Goddamn Sternritter battles, half of which have involved some sort of
wholly unneeded backstory or flashback of said Sternritter, even though it’s
been long-established that exactly zero of them will have any relevance
whatsoever to the outcome of the war and the resolution of the story. None of them are interesting (and some of
them are direct rip-offs of previous, equally uninteresting characters from
earlier arcs), the fights have served no purpose other than to reveal the few
unknown Ban Kais remaining in the series, and above all else, they take SO
LONG. Some of them, including the awful
Luchadore fight, took several months alone to resolve, during which advancement
of every others part of the story, including the more important bits, were
halted entirely (or even worse, were resolved off-screen).
There’s
now so much artificial construction and coincidence in each fight and story
twist that it’s no longer possible to stay emotionally invested.
All
of the above has now combined to form a perfect storm of shitty idiocy, and the
upshot of all this is that, even with the stakes in the final coming
confrontation encompassing all of existence, the end of years of storytelling
in the Shinigami world, there is so much blatant artificial construction in
everything that happens that it’s no longer possible to stay emotionally
invested in the outcome. I don’t feel
anxious, or worried, or excited about what’s going to happen. The anticipation is gone.
And
how can it not be, when Bleach has started to follow the exact same formula for
every single final battle? Each chapter
is the same- one character pulls out a new power and gets the upper hand, only
to be immediately countered at the start of the next chapter with the other
character revealing another new power that, amazingly, is the exact perfect counterpart to the other
dude’s newly revealed power, and thus this matchup was the best one that could
have happened, BUT WAIT, the other guy has ANOTHER power-up that counters the
counter to their first power, but thankfully in the chapter after that we learn
the good guy has ANOTHER counter to the counter to the first counter to the
first power, and on and on and on over several months until Kubo finally gets
bored and ends it with the bad guy dying, because of course. And ever since the Shinigami-Quincy war got
underway, Kubo has followed this exact pattern for every. Single.
Fight.
The
only variations to this are when a handful of the fights have come with further
“plot twists” and “character reveals,” but most of these either come out of the
blue with zero build-up or previous foreshadowing (and thus carry no emotional
weight), or (see above) directly contradict previous twists or story
developments, or just make them wholly irrelevant from that point on. They are twists for twists’ sake, or
flashbacks because, hell, One Piece
does it, so I will to!
The
result is that, much like with Naruto,
so much of what I once loved about Bleach
has disappeared, or has been drowned out by an endless deluge of Stupid, and
the result is that I view the coming end of something that has been a part of
me for years not with sadness, or with excitement, but rather with exhausted
resignation.
I
will keep reading to the end- I’ve stuck around this long and might as well,
since I am nothing if not a stubborn ass (plus, keeping up with Bleach just to be able to fully enjoy
the Weekly Manga Recap gang tear it to pieces every week is its own reward),
but the downfall of a once-promising story is always something to be
lamented. We can never have enough good
stories in the world, but unfortunately most of Bleach will fall by the wayside
once it’s finally been laid to rest. Oh
well. We’ll always have the Soul Society
arc at least.
Unless
Kubo retcons it and bans further printings of the original tankobons. Oh God, I’ve just given him an idea, haven’t
I????
-Noah Franc