So back in 2006 a young Wren, freshly at college and VERY depressed and lonely, decided to solve this problem the one way she knew: ANIME. I started watching BLEACH, a very by-the-book shonen anime about a lot of people with really cool swords. I watched what was out of it at the time and then stopped and never really kept up with it.
UNTIL NOW.
It's all on the Shonen Jump app, you see, so I was able to shotgun a truly horrifying number of chapters of it in the last few weeks and get some closure on the story that's been sort of rolling idly around in my head for 15 years. Now I'm passing on the results of that journey to you, the Co-nsumer!
Bleach is the middest mid that was ever mid. Seriously. It's fuckin' potato chips. We love the salt and the crunch, but there's just nothing there, man. It is all style and no substance, but the style is pretty goddamn stylish. I had a thread on my locked Twitter account that was just nothing but the chapter title pages, because they're always an image of some unbelievably sick shit happening with stylized text under it saying some shit like IF YOU CALL ME A BEAST, I'LL KILL YOU LIKE A TEMPEST written under it. It's awesome. The fights are all pretty much awesome. The character designs are awesome. I hope I can someday love anything as much as Tite Kubo enjoys creating a gang of 6-13 Cool Dudes and then making the gangs crash into each other.
Seriously, every arc in this is the same: A new threat emerges with a powerful leader who has under their command an Elite Squadron of Cool Guys who all of Unique, Interesting Powers. And you know what? This works alright, if what you're here for is battle manga. Because, again, that truly is all there is here. The chapter titles do not meaningfully correlate to anything. Ichigo Kurosaki is broadly textureless even as shonen protagonists go. NO ONE'S motivations make sense for anything. Arcs go on way too long without resolution because everything has to go through one on one fights between every member of the Gotei 13 and every member of the Arrancar/Quncies/etc. The fights are cool as hell but if you think about any of it for longer than fifteen seconds you will lose yourself.
All told, it was a fun time to read it all. It being just unbearably mid meant I could just absolutely inhale chapters at a downright freakish pace, which is great for something that's like 700 chapters long anyway. That's a lot of cool swords and cool powers and hot ladies with big bazoonkers.
One last thing, though: Kubo, we GOTTA talk about your Nazi problem. There's swastikas all over this goddamn thing for no fucking reason and I don't THINK Tite Kubo is a Nazi but he is at the very least VERY flippant with his use of the aesthetic. Don't even get me started on the Thousand Year Blood War arc and the uniforms the Quincies all have. YEESH. Also there's a bit of out of nowhere transphobia in that last arc, but what else is new with manga, am I right.
Okay. Thanks for reading my novel. If you want a hose to blast you with a lot of Bleach imagery, go watch this fun AMV credits sequence they made for the new anime to catch people up. The song in it is a banger and it makes things look cooler than they probably actually are. Good talk!