Forum - View topic

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

This adaption is really benefitting from all the material that was released in-between the ending of the original anime, and even the manga, that filled out the setting and characters and can now be used within this anime. Like Shinji's Bankai or the stuff with Ichigo.

Kubo being heavily involved helps a lot too.

Makes me wonder how different if would've been had they adapted the arc while the manga was still running.

A bit confused with the comparison to Aizen here and the whole "part of my plan" thing. I don't really feel as though what Yhwach is doing here is that unexpected. We already knew Vollstandig was a thing in cour 1, so should we not be expecting the Sternritter to use it in these battles? Like yeah, I think 4 in total were somewhat hindered because they had a stolen Bankai, but that still leaves a dozen or so other Sternritter that are freely able to use it should they choose to as we already saw Quilge do against Ichigo.

The problem is the Soul Society characters became incredibly popular, and by and large were more popular than the actual main cast on personality and character design alone. This means that Kubo needed to inject them into the story at all times or else he'd lose readers because outside of the Shinigami cast, the series didn't have much going for it due to Kubo's constant and repeated abandonment of any and all themes or substance. Eventually what ended up happening is these characters are just always around because fans love them, so we need stuff for them to busy themselves doing, like fighting a random war against a gaggle of even more simplistic characters who only exist so we can see our favorite characters bust out new moves. The narrative justification for this war's existence is so horribly underdeveloped I can only see it as an excuse for more shallow fights. The poor excuse for a narrative stalls until these battles can conclude so we can get into the next batch. That's all Bleach really is.

I do think Shinji's Bankai scene from the novel was better (I still hold mild hope that Pierrot adapts the novel eventually) but I think the anime's was fine for what it was. I would've had the scene last a bit longer, but I guess they are pressed for time.

Though, nobody will convince me that all of Bleach's final's woes don't come from how the previous arc was cut short because everybody hated it and Kubo was probably depressed.

As for Ichigo, I think his main problem is that he doesn't have any true motivations of his own; in other words, he's very much a reactive character instead of a proactive one. Think of almost any protagonist of a popular battle shonen, and they have some basic drive or desire writ large on their entire character. Luffy wants to find the One Piece and become King of the Pirates. Naruto wants to become Hokage and earn his village's respect. Deku wants to become a great pro hero and live up to his idol All Might. Edward Elric wants to gain enough knowledge to get back what was taken from him and his brother. Gon wants to become a professional Hunter so that he can eventually track down his dad. Kenshin wants to use his blade to save people to make up for his murderous past. You can go on and on with this. But what does Ichigo want? Sure, to protect his friends and family, but any good shonen protagonist does that by default. What else is there to him? Unfortunately, not much; he mostly just gets dragged into events by external forces and then reacts to them. It's a hard ask to write a good shonen protagonist like that.

It's really not fine for what it was. It was a roughly 20 second scene thrown unceremoniously into the middle of an episode with no fanfare and a combination of bad CG and bad stills, for a bankai reveal.

It also narratively undercut the bankai itself, by horribly downplaying how dangerous it is supposed to be through minimizing the amount of damage it does, among other things. Please note Pierrot, there's a reason why Narita concocted the scenario of CFYOW such that Shinji has to shoo everyone away before using it - it's as though he knows how to write, and how to build suspense and establish something is powerful.

The episode would have been better if they had just not included Shinji using bankai at all. Maybe give that time to actually having BG9 say his schrift, the softest softball they possibly could have had to hit for this series.

Ichigo's role is catalytic. His actions, which are totally unbound by Soul Society's 10,000 year old conservatism and authoritarianism serve to inspire change in the ranks of the Soul Reapers and get them to see the flaws and rot in their own society.

and the Soul Society remains a horrific place to live for anyone who isn't a Soul Reaper. Seriously, if the "good" part of the afterlife consists of living in dirt-poor feudal Japan for millennia, completely separated from my family and friends, then I'm taking my chances with hell.

Amazing that it's 2023 and people are still spouting this nonsense. Super Eyepatch Wolf's bullshit just won't wash off.

No one cares about BG9's schrift though, while everyone wants to see Shinji's Bankai. It's also pretty unfair to say the scene undercut how dangerous the Bankai was, even if I do agree it wasn't quite as well built up as it was in the novel. This scene had it's own gravitas to it.