My love-hate relationship with Bleach

I tend to complain a lot about Tite Kubo's shounen series, Bleach. A lot of people complain about Bleach nowadays. Basically, I gave up on it when the Fake Karakura Town arc ended. And yet I'm still reading it every week because I want to see how this sucker ends.

But, see... I don't hate Bleach. I don't want to hate Bleach. I'm only frustrated with the many directions the mangaka has taken with Bleach.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS MAJOR SPOILERS FOR THE ANIME/MANGA BLEACH. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

Generally, the series feels like a lot of wasted potential.

Remember this?

Reviewer YRulerOfTime did an interesting synopsis on Bleach's decline and why the series lost a lot of fans. To summarize, he talks of how the series devolved after its initial reign among the most revered of shounen series. He makes some good points on how Kubo really built up and subsequently dashed expectations for the fans between the end of the popular Soul Society arc and the end of the Fake Karakura Town arc. The second arc in particular featured one of the best plot twists committed to any media, introducing a series antagonist that completely decimated the most powerful characters in the series and then escaped to the homeworld of the Hollows, the series' main villains. With so much anticipation built up, how would Kubo outdo himself next?

Pretty damn iconic

Well, he didn't.

I'm not saying that Bleach immediately started falling apart. I liked the Arrancar arc. It introduced a bunch of cool new allies and villains, built up the tension for future confrontations, and Kubo showed considerable improvements his drawing quality. Even the Hueco Mundo arc, while more or less a copy-paste of the Soul Society arc, had some really good moments. The fight between Rukia and Aaroniero brought some extra closure to Rukia's past demons, while the Ichigo and Grimmjow fight felt a lot like the Ichigo Vs. Byakuya fight at the end of Soul Society arc. The fights between Nnoitra and Zaraki Kenpachi as well as Mayuri and Szayel also had their highlights.

Right when you knew Nnoitra was doomed

Another reminder why you don't mess with Mayuri

And then the Fake Karakura Town arc happened. It was so wretchedly padded and anti-climactic that it completely undermined nearly all previously accrued goodwill toward Bleach. After being built up as the best of the best of the best for two entire arcs, every major antagonist was beaten quickly and with little effort.

Number 1, amirite?

On all levels, Kubo failed to offer a good conclusion. The follow-up, the Fullbring arc, even further isolated fans with how incredibly bad it was.

The sole reason for that arc to happen was this

Meanwhile, the anime suffered even further with Studio Pierrot eventually cancelling its run last year. This didn't affect me all that much since I stopped watching the anime roughly around the time it started following the final fight between Ichigo and Ulquiorra fight.

I didn't like the fight because of THIS.

This article from the Bleach wiki gives some interesting insight on how the anime adaptation rushed certain parts of the series, causing the studios to bog down the series with filler to give the manga time to create more material. I personally got fed up with all the padding and the filler. That combined with my anger at the arc's conclusion made me feel less than inclined to see it again animated.

Last thing I remember seeing before I blacked out

Here's the thing. I have trouble determining if Kubo Tite is a hack or a "troll" that's talented, but a jerk towards his fans. There's evidence that supports either conclusion. But I do know this: He is extremely inconsistent. And while this has worked in his favor in the past, it is not helping him now.

Compare how he handles characters between the first and current arc. Kubo can write good characters. The first arc developed the core characters. Ichigo started out fairly flat, but the reader could tell that his experiences were toughening up his resolve and enhancing his knowledge of shinigami matters. Orihime's always been Miss Big-Breasted Ditz and Chad Mr. Quiet Rock, but their interesting backstories and experiences in the first arc built them up as strong, determined, and likable characters. Hell, even Tatsuki had more character development than half of the cast.

Also, why's Kon the mascot? He barely appears in the series

The problem started in the second arc. We still got development for the core cast, especially from Rukia and Ichigo, but at the same time, Kubo introduced a lot of characters. 13 squads of shinigami. That's 26 characters including the Captains and Lieutenants alone. That's roughly double the number of characters featured in the first arc including minor classmates and Hollows!

This normally would not be a problem. Naruto has an enormous cast and has managed to still do well for itself. One Piece has an even bigger cast who are nearly all individually crafted and developed in their own ways.

This worked against Bleach. Not at first, mind you. The new shinigami captains and lieutenants were some of the most popular characters in the series. They had cool appearances, personalities, and abilities. Because the audience didn't know that much about them, they had that air of mystery about them that made them even more awesome.

The most popular character in Bleach: Not a main character.

The Arrancar Arc did the exact same thing, but this time, the new characters were two types of Hollow-Shinigami hybrids: The Arrancar and the Visored. And these characters also gained massive popularity when they were first introduced, especially Ulquiorra and Grimmjow.

What happened to Grimmjow, anyway?

So Kubo had all of these characters that all had their own traits and swords with personalized powers and abilities. There's nothing wrong with that. Again, Naruto has way more characters and they are barely developed too. But, Naruto has consistency.

Bleach started falling apart when the characters started to lose their identities. Kubo started to undermine their development and the audience's expectations for them. Orihime becoming a useless damsel happened solely to help Ichigo to beat Ulquiorra even though he should not have been able to do so. Ichigo going all emo and then recovering in a Hyperbolic Time Chamber-esque plot device that makes him reach the next level of power just looks lazy, making Ichigo look incompetent. Not to mention the main antagonist, built up as an all-powerful master of manipulation in hundreds of chapters, ended up losing interest and not giving a crap anymore just so he could have a weakness.

"Who needs plans? They never helped anyone out."

Furthermore, Kubo's sense of timing is really inconsistent. During the Fake Karakura Town arc, he probably underestimated how long the viewers would wait for the captains and lieutenants to take on the main antagonist. The fights between the Fracciones and the lieutenants felt padded, taking far too long to end. In comparison, the fights between the top 3 Espada and the top-tier Captains and Visoreds were much shorter. And when the fight between the Captains and the main antagonist finally arrived, it barely lasted for a minute.

Kubo failed to give some of the most interesting and built up characters in his arsenal the chance to shine. Starrk and Barragan went down like weaklings, while Harribel was literally beaten BY HER OWN BOSS FOR THE LULZ.

This part made me angry

Nobody cared about the characters in the Fullbring arc or the current Valdenreich arc because of this. What's the point of caring if the characters are not written with care?

It just blows my mind that Kubo's editors thought this was a good idea. Seriously. How did they not catch this? I read Bakuman. I know that the mangakas have legitimate input from their editors!

This leads me to think that Kubo has trouble dealing with a story's scope. The first arc was contained into a small city/town. The readers got a good sense of the characters, the monsters Ichigo fought had straightforward explanations for their malignant behavior, and the audience got glimpses of a bigger overall universe with the introduction of Grand Fisher and the Menos Grande.

Remember when they used to be threatening?

The second arc introduced Soul Society, which is itself a much bigger world with multiple levels of society. Kubo started small with this arc, introducing two top tier shinigami enemies and starting the entry into Soul Society with it's poorest district, Rukongai. We only get introduced to several more characters, mainly the Shibas.

When Ichigo actually enters the main court, the Seireitei, Kubo started to get carried away with the amount of characters he introduced. But this, along with the plot twist at the end of the arc, made Bleach a smash hit. In the ensuing arcs, Kubo repeated a lot of elements from this arc albeit on a larger scale, probably with the hopes of winning the same kind of success.

Here's the problem, though: We still knew little to nothing about all those characters introduced in the Soul Society arc. And on top of that, we had all these new good guys and bad guys who we were now supposed to care about, too. Kubo went overboard on introducing new characters to make the scope more grandiose. It backfired on him.

Those classmates from the first arc? With the exception of Chad, Orihime, and Uryuu, they only show up at the bookends of the Soul Society arc. They barely show up at the beginning and end of the Arrancar Arc-Fake Karakura arc saga as well.

"Hey look! It's Keigo and what's-his-name!"

All those shinigami from the second arc? Some of them show up during the arrancar arc. Sure. Some of them show up when Ichigo invades Hueco Mundo. And then almost all of them show up in the Fake Karakura Town arc. And then since Kubo had to give them all something to do, the end result was the arc taking too long. All these characters were thrown together into a chaotic soup of small-bit fights that result in them all being defeated anyway, clearing the field for Ichigo fighting the antagonist 1 on 1.

Pretty weak

Kubo played all his cards way too quickly, introducing too many important characters to enhance the scale of his creation. As a result, Bleach just got out of control.

In the anime, the fillers often tried to expand on a lot of the characters that were left out. And while it's nice they tried, the production company did this entirely within filler episodes. The problem with filler is that they must return to square one in the end or they could possibly ruin the story in the future. While Bleach attempted to change this up by keeping some filler characters around, these were still filler characters that were not in the original story and therefore, would have no significance to the plot besides just being there.

You pretend they aren't there either way...

Bleach is really inconsistent. It's saturated with an overabundance of characters that Kubo attempted to give equal attention to, ultimately killing the pacing of the series.

And while my rant would suggest I have little hope for its future, I will say that Bleach's inconsistency does indicate that there's a chance Kubo could end it on a positive note. He probably won't tie every loose plot thread out there, but he could at least give Bleach a proper ending.

I will say that it's an interesting change of pace to see an unreversible death for once...

My biggest regret is that Bleach missed out on a lot of its potential. Where could Ichigo and Rukia's relationship have gone if Kubo actually made us care about it? What about Ichigo and Orihime's relationship? Of all Ichigo's classmates, why does Tatsuki get left out when she was childhood friends with Ichigo? Who the hell are half the people in charge of Soul Society?

WHERE DID THIS COME FROM???

Just saying, Kubo, if you want to introduce new characters, please try to better develop the ones you already have. They are cool enough without 20 more characters hogging the spotlight.

I think I may try my hand at reviewing each weekly chapter of Bleach, One Piece, and Naruto, so maybe I'll post something like that next week. Either way, here's hoping Bleach gets better!