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EP. REVIEW: Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War Season 2

Whether you care or not is immaterial. Bleach is and always has been a multimedia project consisting of more than just the manga. The novels and anime are just as canon as the manga.

I brought up Mayuri slaughtering 30,000 innocent people in one day because it's a direct comparison to Aizen slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people over the course of centuries.

Mayuri is an irredeemable monster who should never have been allowed to roam free and any competent organization wouldn't have signed off on Urahara's request to pull him out of prison and offer him a job. Hell, the guy who vouched for him was accused of treason and had to flee to the living room to escape execution, and they promoted his pet murder clown once he left!

My dude, I don't care about the spinoffs that somebody else wrote to fill in the missing gaps. I shouldn't have to do homework to learn the basic plot points that Kubo couldn't be assed to include in his own story. Like, you don't have to sit through Yashahime just to figure out if half the characters from Inuyasha survived the final battle.

why should Bleach be held to a different standard compared to all other shonen? Plenty of other shonen mangaka have managed to write solid, competent and compelling stories within the confines of the source material itself. No one should have to consult extra material to make sense of a manga.

Any decent shonen doesn't need any extra information from extra, dubiously canon material.

You're totally on the right track about Mayuri being a crazy psycho, but y'know, if you want to censure Mayuri, better to bring up his actions against the Quincies rather than that incident, since if he hadn't everyone in existence would have died.

Whether you care or not is immaterial. Bleach is and always has been a multimedia project consisting of more than just the manga. The novels and anime are just as canon as the manga.

CelestialEmpress wrote:

I brought up Mayuri slaughtering 30,000 innocent people in one day because it's a direct comparison to Aizen slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people over the course of centuries.

The context isn't really the same since Mayuri killing those people was the only way to save everyone else in existence from death while Aizen killed those other people just for his ego trip.

So the English dub recast Yoruichi with Anairis Quinones taking over for Wendee Lee.

I can't say I'm completely surprised, and I have no complaints about Anairis' talent, but it just felt kind of an unnecessary recasting for a role Wendee Lee is really passionate about and could still pull off.

That doesn't do much for me, because Kubo's whole "soul cycle" concept made very little sense from the get-go, and then he never went back to properly develop it afterwards.

(For instance: how the hell can souls have babies?)

I remember a big deal being made when Ishida was introduced, because "zomg Quincies completely destroy souls and that upset the balance!", but then after he becomes friends with Ichigo he keeps killing Hollows and no one ever bats an eye over it again.

If Kubo showed he cared about that bit of world-building, then I would too. As it stands, all I see is Kubo making a baffling choice to make one of the "good" characters casually commit genocide.

That's...never been the case, either for Bleach or any other big Jump property. They may occasionally get spinoff novels during their run or after the fact that tell side stories or fill in some gaps, but they're intended as supplemental to the original manga canon, not an integral part of it. And Jump anime adaptations have never been viewed as canon, even when they're adapting pure manga content. Hell, Bleach's anime adaptation in particular has entire filler arcs that aren't even canon to the anime itself. There was more than one occasion when the anime ran up against the current manga content right in the middle of an arc, and there was no good way to insert filler content seamlessly, so it just cut away to some random "what-if" story about a random Soul Society princess or whatever. As bad as some Jump filler gets, I've never seen another series have to resort to that nonsense.

But there's an entirely separate problem in that literally nobody gives a shit their monster clown just did a genocide. Yamamoto is only mildly annoyed that he didn't get permission first, and that's it. He's supposedly had a serious change of heart since Ichigo's arrival and has become a better person, yet he clearly does not give two whistling dicks about anyone. If not Yamamoto, you'd think somebody on the good side would have some kind of strong reaction to the fact that they were forced to commit an atrocity against their own citizens, but it's never brought up again.

Any competent author could have easily worked that into the heroes' motivations but instead Kubo just drops it like a bag of moldy cheese.

Now you're simply arguing semantics. You say that they are supplemental when most of these authors would in fact argue that it is all part of the overarching story that they are telling, divided into differing media as is appropriate.

Weekly mangas are a hellish schedule even in the best of times and it isn't possible to include everything an author would like to include in those pages, especially when you add outside influences into their workflow.