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Revisiting the First Time Bleach Ended


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Ultimate N



Joined: 13 Mar 2018
Posts: 130
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 9:06 am Reply with quote
So there actually is a reason as to why the Bleach anime ended. YouTuber Clyde posted a video a year or two ago citing an interview with the director Noriyuki Abe who said that as they were animating Fullering they had to ask Kubo what was going to happen next because they were getting way too close and with there being I think only 3 Blood War chapters released the staff decided it would be best to stop the anime rather than do potentially the longest stretch of filler they'd have to do
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nobahn
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Joined: 14 Dec 2006
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PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 9:13 am Reply with quote
Ultimate N wrote:


the staff decided it would be best to stop the anime rather than do potentially the longest stretch of filler they'd have to do

That's really saying something! Shocked
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Greed1914



Joined: 28 Oct 2007
Posts: 4404
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 9:27 am Reply with quote
I managed to watch all of it on TV back then, and it could get kind of hard sometimes with the filler. I didn't necessarily mind the season-long fillers since they could tell their own littler stories and give the wider cast something to do, but things like a fight stopping dead for a couple of weeks for filler pulled a lot of the hype out of it towards the end.

If the decision was made to stop and come back to it later, I can't say it was a wrong call. I think the prospect of going straight through with no filler episodes is responsible for at least some of why people seem to be genuinely excited to see this comeback.

I have to think one of the ways Bleach ended up being unintentionally influential is that the decision makers came around to the idea that it was ok to take the seasonal approach or take breaks with some of its properties. I think that Black Clover is following suit here, for example. It had lots of episodes and right around where it was at a point of catching up and having to resort to filler, which it largely avoided, to keep going, it simply stopped.
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Lord Geo



Joined: 18 Sep 2005
Posts: 2518
Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 9:59 am Reply with quote
Ultimate N wrote:
So there actually is a reason as to why the Bleach anime ended. YouTuber Clyde posted a video a year or two ago citing an interview with the director Noriyuki Abe who said that as they were animating Fullering they had to ask Kubo what was going to happen next because they were getting way too close and with there being I think only 3 Blood War chapters released the staff decided it would be best to stop the anime rather than do potentially the longest stretch of filler they'd have to do


Honestly, it would have been interesting if Kubo just gave the staff a basic outline of concepts & moments he had planned for the Blood War & just let the anime have its own take on the story arc. Sure, that would result in said reinterpretation being made moot by this new anime, if all things stayed the same, but I do find it interesting when anime staff are allowed to interpret manga stories in their own way.

Both Saiyuki Reload Gunlock's Hazel Arc & B't X Neo's finale are notably different than how their manga original's eventually handled their respective parts, but they both still wound up featuring a good number of plot points that their respective manga would also go with, making them neat "What if" stories.
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meruru



Joined: 16 Jun 2009
Posts: 469
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 10:23 am Reply with quote
Honestly, I don't get how people stick with these long running shounen so long. To me, nearly all of them reach this point where it feels like they lose sight of any real forward progress on the plot, and it's just challenging and fighting over and over. When the enemies start getting numbers, I personally take it as a sign it's probably going that way. Bleach already had numbers by the soul society arc, which is only like 20ish episodes in. Also, I hated that all of a sudden Rukia became a sad damsel in distress, when up until that point she was one of the coolest characters. People who are more shounen fans than me might have thought it was a high point, but for me I stopped watching because of that arc.
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MFrontier



Joined: 13 Apr 2014
Posts: 10784
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 10:55 am Reply with quote
Greed1914 wrote:
I managed to watch all of it on TV back then, and it could get kind of hard sometimes with the filler. I didn't necessarily mind the season-long fillers since they could tell their own littler stories and give the wider cast something to do, but things like a fight stopping dead for a couple of weeks for filler pulled a lot of the hype out of it towards the end.

If the decision was made to stop and come back to it later, I can't say it was a wrong call. I think the prospect of going straight through with no filler episodes is responsible for at least some of why people seem to be genuinely excited to see this comeback.

I have to think one of the ways Bleach ended up being unintentionally influential is that the decision makers came around to the idea that it was ok to take the seasonal approach or take breaks with some of its properties. I think that Black Clover is following suit here, for example. It had lots of episodes and right around where it was at a point of catching up and having to resort to filler, which it largely avoided, to keep going, it simply stopped.

Yeah, I'm assuming once Black Clover comes back after the movie that they'll go for a more season approach. Like Bleach is going to be a 4-cour split cour, so I can see them doing something similar with Black Clover.

Almost like how Bones handles MHA.
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tintor2



Joined: 11 Aug 2010
Posts: 1789
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 10:55 am Reply with quote
Already from reading the Arrancar arc it's obvious why they had to cancel it. The pacing is horrible. It felt like a video game like Kingdom Hearts II where you have to face around 6 bosses in the final stage but that takes a lot of time to make. The filler arcs were so forced that the cast often broke the fourth wall. Reminds me to why D.Gray-man and Reborn had to end with the Order's destruction and Future arcs though the former might have to do more with the writer's poor health. The filler of Reborn kinda improved the Future arc by expanding the Primo group although every episode still felt forced like Bleach's fillers.
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flamemasterelan



Joined: 17 Apr 2022
Posts: 447
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 11:54 am Reply with quote
meruru wrote:
Honestly, I don't get how people stick with these long running shounen so long. To me, nearly all of them reach this point where it feels like they lose sight of any real forward progress on the plot, and it's just challenging and fighting over and over.

I don't see this problem. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of fighting, that's the point of a battle shonen, it's the draw. But I've seen very few series which have actually stalled its forward progress outside of, like...Bleach. Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Fairy Tail are all more or less set up to be a continuing series of adventures rather than one continuing story, and there's something nice and comforting about watching your favorite characters going out on new adventures. Sure, there's a (usually distant) goal out there, but the draw is the journey, not the ending.
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TheSleepyMonkey



Joined: 11 Jul 2022
Posts: 881
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 12:12 pm Reply with quote
MFrontier wrote:
Greed1914 wrote:
I managed to watch all of it on TV back then, and it could get kind of hard sometimes with the filler. I didn't necessarily mind the season-long fillers since they could tell their own littler stories and give the wider cast something to do, but things like a fight stopping dead for a couple of weeks for filler pulled a lot of the hype out of it towards the end.

If the decision was made to stop and come back to it later, I can't say it was a wrong call. I think the prospect of going straight through with no filler episodes is responsible for at least some of why people seem to be genuinely excited to see this comeback.

I have to think one of the ways Bleach ended up being unintentionally influential is that the decision makers came around to the idea that it was ok to take the seasonal approach or take breaks with some of its properties. I think that Black Clover is following suit here, for example. It had lots of episodes and right around where it was at a point of catching up and having to resort to filler, which it largely avoided, to keep going, it simply stopped.

Yeah, I'm assuming once Black Clover comes back after the movie that they'll go for a more season approach. Like Bleach is going to be a 4-cour split cour, so I can see them doing something similar with Black Clover.

Almost like how Bones handles MHA.


I would just like to correct you for a moment and say that the way in which the MHA anime is handled when it comes to seasons/releases is not exactly a decision from Bones. It's more so from TOHO and TV Tokyo.
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Unculturedman



Joined: 01 Apr 2022
Posts: 57
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 1:22 pm Reply with quote
flamemasterelan wrote:
meruru wrote:
Honestly, I don't get how people stick with these long running shounen so long. To me, nearly all of them reach this point where it feels like they lose sight of any real forward progress on the plot, and it's just challenging and fighting over and over.

I don't see this problem. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of fighting, that's the point of a battle shonen, it's the draw. But I've seen very few series which have actually stalled its forward progress outside of, like...Bleach. Dragon Ball, One Piece, and Fairy Tail are all more or less set up to be a continuing series of adventures rather than one continuing story, and there's something nice and comforting about watching your favorite characters going out on new adventures. Sure, there's a (usually distant) goal out there, but the draw is the journey, not the ending.


I think the problem is with Bleach, specifically. The series had an interesting hook, sense of style and cool factor, but it lacks any kind of identity, purpose or general intent behind the story itself. Unlike many other battle shonen, Bleach quickly becomes exclusively about tons of characters engaging in fights repeatedly with not much else going on. After a while it becomes tiresome for some people who aren’t interested in the power system and character abilities or aren’t invested in much of the massive cast. This is probably the main reason for declining popularity and why the series is so divisive.
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flamemasterelan



Joined: 17 Apr 2022
Posts: 447
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 1:37 pm Reply with quote
Unculturedman wrote:
I think the problem is with Bleach, specifically. The series had an interesting hook, sense of style and cool factor, but it lacks any kind of identity, purpose or general intent behind the story itself. Unlike many other battle shonen, Bleach quickly becomes exclusively about tons of characters engaging in fights repeatedly with not much else going on. After a while it becomes tiresome for some people who aren’t interested in the power system and character abilities or aren’t invested in much of the massive cast. This is probably the main reason for declining popularity and why the series is so divisive.

This touches on my issues with Bleach specifically, actually. I thought the first season was cool, I liked the unique world building with the shinigami, the afterlife, etc.. And then the Soul Society arc happened, and I was still into it, but it very quickly transitioned from facing off against lost spirits that were twisted into monsters or guiding the spirits of the dead and turned into...two humans fighting for 3-5 episode stints.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4558
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 3:41 pm Reply with quote
Unculturedman wrote:

I think the problem is with Bleach, specifically. The series had an interesting hook, sense of style and cool factor, but it lacks any kind of identity, purpose or general intent behind the story itself. Unlike many other battle shonen, Bleach quickly becomes exclusively about tons of characters engaging in fights repeatedly with not much else going on. After a while it becomes tiresome for some people who aren’t interested in the power system and character abilities or aren’t invested in much of the massive cast. This is probably the main reason for declining popularity and why the series is so divisive.

One of the several excellent long-form video pieces out there on Bleach's downfall made the point that a lot of the problem is Ichigo as a character and his motivations. Namely...he doesn't have any. Just look at the other two members of the old Big Three. As we've heard literally tens of thousands of times, Luffy wants to find the One Piece and be the Pirate King, because to him it represents absolute freedom. Naruto wanted to become Hokage to earn the respect of the village that had been so cruelly denied to him as a child. Meanwhile Ichigo wants...what, exactly? Sure, he wants to protect his friends, but that's a given; literally every shonen protagonist worth their salt wants that. He doesn't have any sort of driving ambition, no core desire, so as a result he almost drifts through his own story, merely reacting to external events instead of creating his own. And that was fine enough for the Soul Society arc, since that arc was great enough to carry the story, but once you get past it and Ichigo still doesn't do much of anything, the series starts to feel very flat very quickly.

The other major issue is that Kubo clearly blew his narrative load with the Soul Society arc, which is an all-time shonen classic, and then followed it up with an arc that was ostensibly the same basic structure, only not nearly as good. Said arc winds up being a pointless wild goose chase in the end, too, which still leaves a sour taste in my mouth. Then after that it devolves into one long sequence of fights with new enemies that almost no one cared about, and by that point I was thoroughly checked out.

What really frustrates me is how so much of the fanbase seems to rag on the Fullbringer arc, when for my money it was the freshest the series had felt in a long time. It was a nice callback to the mood at the very beginning of the series, which had a very Yu Yu Hakusho vibe to it (okay, let's be real, Kubo cribbed pretty hard from Yu Yu at the start). Granted, it had a profoundly dumb ending, which was almost a given, but for a little while it almost felt like old times.
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consignia



Joined: 06 Jul 2011
Posts: 391
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 4:09 pm Reply with quote
Top Gun wrote:


What really frustrates me is how so much of the fanbase seems to rag on the Fullbringer arc, when for my money it was the freshest the series had felt in a long time. It was a nice callback to the mood at the very beginning of the series, which had a very Yu Yu Hakusho vibe to it (okay, let's be real, Kubo cribbed pretty hard from Yu Yu at the start). Granted, it had a profoundly dumb ending, which was almost a given, but for a little while it almost felt like old times.


I totally agree, I find the fandom distate for the FullBringer really odd. It was like answering all the problems of the Arrancar arcs (well paced, shorter and more focused, more focused cast, clearly planned out rather than written from week to week). If the ending hadn't have been the typical meleé, it would have been great.

I guess it's got a bit of the stench of anime filler arcs, a bunch of original characters competely outside the main series thread, that people couldn't hold their noses over it.
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AksaraKishou



Joined: 16 May 2015
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Location: End of the World
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 4:31 pm Reply with quote
consignia wrote:
Top Gun wrote:


What really frustrates me is how so much of the fanbase seems to rag on the Fullbringer arc, when for my money it was the freshest the series had felt in a long time. It was a nice callback to the mood at the very beginning of the series, which had a very Yu Yu Hakusho vibe to it (okay, let's be real, Kubo cribbed pretty hard from Yu Yu at the start). Granted, it had a profoundly dumb ending, which was almost a given, but for a little while it almost felt like old times.


I totally agree, I find the fandom distate for the FullBringer really odd. It was like answering all the problems of the Arrancar arcs (well paced, shorter and more focused, more focused cast, clearly planned out rather than written from week to week). If the ending hadn't have been the typical meleé, it would have been great.

I guess it's got a bit of the stench of anime filler arcs, a bunch of original characters competely outside the main series thread, that people couldn't hold their noses over it.
~

The Lost Agent gets bad rep because it came out on the heels of a LOT of filler episodes AND right after one of the best arcs in Shounen aka the 2nd half of the Arrancar Arc. going from Mugetsu to "time to fight humans" was a bit iffy.
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lossthief
ANN Reviewer


Joined: 14 Dec 2012
Posts: 1379
PostPosted: Wed Oct 05, 2022 5:24 pm Reply with quote
Eh, my beef with the Fullbringer storyline has nothing to do with it being associated with filler - it's that it started off with a lot of promising ideas, then just sort of abandoned those ideas to bring back the Soul Reaper characters. The back half of the arc just turns into the most popular characters from past arcs fighting a slew of characters we only barely got to know (or didn't know at all, in some cases). There's all this buildup about whether or not Ichigo can really trust the Soul Society or if he might have reason to rebel against them like Ginjo, only for him to just shrug off the question and never bring it up again. Chad is teased to be an important character since it's revealed his powers are that of a Fullbringer, and then he plays no role in the later fights and has to be rescued from Tsukishima's brainwashing.

And that's basically my problem with post-Soul Society Bleach at large. It'll start off great, have a bunch of new ideas and characters that you think will get a chance to be explored, and then everything devolves back to one-on-one fights between the Soul Reaper cast and whoever the new enemy is. And once those fights stop being entertaining, there's not left to really care about.
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