Oh,
Lord.
So.
Bleach
ended. About 3 years (3 endless years)
after telegraphing that this final arc would be the last of Kubo’s massive,
sprawling action series, Bleach has
achieved the strange and dubious distinction of having an ending both interminably
long and shockingly brief, and I’m honestly not sure which is worse.
I
confess that I know very little about why it was decided to end Bleach so suddenly this year, but what I
think is clear is that the choice was not entirely Kubo’s (if he even had a
choice at all). The clearest victim of
this choice ended up being the simple fact that what Kubo clearly intended to
be a sprawling epic of a last story, involving returns of nearly every major
character from the course of the entire series, was chopped down to a rapid and
hazy resolution of only the most pressing issues of the story.
Retracing
and recreating the vast, endless maze of plot threads, character arcs, and
battles that, despite Kubo’s earlier hinting, never actually happened or were
clearly abridged is something I will not even begin to attempt here, because it
would be a guaranteed, one-way ticket to a fate worse that Jack’s in The Shining. Suffice it to say that the way the finale of
the series actually went down is mind-boggling.
These last few chapters were easily the worst of the entire series, a
statement that I do not make lightly.
I
mean, Naruto had issues. It had some REALLY big issues. But at least it stuck to enough of its core
storylines, adequately fulfilling and resolving them in the final chapter, to
make it worth seeing through to the end, and to give its last moments a fitting
sense of finality and emotional weight.
For a series so big and long-running, it’s stupendously hard, and I once
would have said near-impossible, to create an ending with absolutely no sense
of importance to it, or at least a bit of nostalgic sadness.
Yet,
somehow, Bleach pulled it off. There’s just no way to put it nicely- this
ending was an absolute dumpster-fire, in every sense of the word. Of all the long-running issues with the
franchise I flagged earlier, none of them changed or were improved upon
down the stretch in the slightest. This
is a series that decided to end with the literal death of God and the possible
annihilation of all matter and being in the universe, which even Naruto didn’t try to do. And yet, we somehow managed to reach the
absolute nadir of the series by resolving this stupendously ambitious plot
concept with a “fight” that barely qualified as such, with everything boiling
down to a handful of hastily-explained plot twists with no buildup or
forshadowing. Every bit of it felt
perfunctory, as if Kubo simply decided to passively dot the I’s and cross the T’s
he had to, but had resolved to do no more than that, so that he could just get
this mess over with. And nothing is more
devastating to the resolution of a story than when it’s pervaded by the sense
that even the story’s creator doesn’t give a damn.
Perhaps
this ending could have been salvaged if Ichigo had at least gotten some strong
moments as a character, to reflect on where he was at the beginning of the
series and how much he’d gone through and changed over the years. But nope.
Perhaps
if Chad and Orihime had gotten some form of redemption for being shat on in
earlier arcs by being part of the fight to defeat Juha Bach, with maybe Rukia and
Renji thrown in, Bleach could have
recaptured some of the team camaraderie that made the early chapters such a
joy. But nope.
Perhaps
if (and I know this one is a shocker) Uryu had actually had something to do in
a years-long arc about effing QUINCIES, and the apparent subplot about his
playing the part of a double-agent had actually gone anywhere, the story would
have not felt like a massive bubble of empty air meant merely to justify Kubo
drawing out his penchant for ethnically stereotypical battle fetishes. But nope.
But
if I’m honest, even if any of the above had happened, I doubt it would have
been enough. This series was already way
too far gone by the end. Long before
this arc was even announced, the rift between the first 170-180 chapters of the
series and what it later became had widened into a chasm that no amount of
decent writing could bridge. I tried to
think of ways I could sum up just how much about this series has changed
(beyond what I’ve written already), and just couldn’t come up with anything,
because it really is beyond words at this point. I don’t know if I can say that Bleach necessarily betrayed its origins
(I think there’s a better argument to made that Naruto did that), but it certainly became much more unrecognizable,
and the writing substantially more lazy, especially where the fights were
concerned.
It
didn’t help that none of the conclusions or fates given to the remaining
characters felt in any way important or fitting. Really, none of them. Chad didn’t even get facetime outside of a
shot of a TV, for Christ’s sake. The
possible exception was Rukia achieving the rank of Captain, which was
definitely a good ending as far as she was concerned, but even that was robbed
of a sense of triumph because everything around it felt so empty, like the dead
vacuum of outer space.
Ugh. This is all just really, really
depressing. I stand by my past assertion
that, in the early days, Bleach was
solid enough and had enough potential to surpass both Naruto and One Piece and
have the grandest, most interesting story out of all the Shonen Big 3. And here it is, ending suddenly, in dishonor,
at a level of quality lower than anything I had imagined possible. Like with all cases of a good or even great
story idea going sour, the most fitting word I can find is sad, because if
there’s one thing we can never have enough of in the world, it’s good stories.
So
ends the tale of Ichigo and co., I suppose.
But thankfully, hope in the world of manga is not gone. After this ending I need to detox for a bit,
and once that’s over with I will have the time expound on one of my favorite
topics- why One Piece has not only
avoided the decline suffered by Naruto
and Bleach, but has even managed to
get better over the past decade. Stay
tuned.
-Noah Franc
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