Hello Everyone!
I’ve been meaning to start posting again for a while, but it looks like Bleach is about to start getting really interesting for me soon, so I decided that I should come back if only so I can spam you all with my theories and musing instead of just harassing nerdowl and spikykun! :D
I know I attempted to delurk the beginning of last semester and that lasted, like, two days, but to give myself some credit, last semester ended up being a hellish semester. This semester will not be. However, I don’t guarantee I won’t be sporadic with my posting. I’m planning on updating pretty frequently; we’ll see how that goes.
Now for Bleach talk! The plan was to type up all of my thoughts about all the information we learned from Kubo during the hiatus, but then I realized that it was incredibly hard to get all of my thoughts together, my brain is teeming with ideas, and that no one would read it because it'd be ten pages long. So I'll probably be posting chunks of rambling theories and speculation over the next couple days.
If you haven't seen the new information, you can find most of it on the first page of this thread. This page isn't up on the first page yet, and we're waiting for the "official" translation of one more page.
So the thing I think is confusing me the most at the moment is the Royal Guard. Kubo’s dropping all kinds of things about the Shinigami like “Rangiku’s past will be important! Shunsui’s haori and its history will be important! Mayuri’s research will be important! Kaien and Ichigo’s resemblance will be important!” and just the fact that he spent all three weeks giving us updates on all of the shinigami, and that the whole manga seems to come back to the shinigami. To me that says the Shinigami are going to be Very Important in this next arc.
But then Kubo more or less says that the Royal Guard wasn’t at all bothered by Aizen, and yet the Shinigami needed Ichigo to defeat Aizen. Kubo then says he needs a situation where Soul Society is basically in ruins for the Royal Guard to finally get concerned and enter the picture. Believe me, I’m really excited for this plotline, I’ve had many a Soul Society-is-in-rubble plotbunny, but…
The mystery surrounding Shunsui, Ukitake, and Unohana’s bankai- and other people, I suppose, like Urahara’s bankai… has been all hyped up, and then some enemy is going to come in and destroy Soul Society and the Captains like they’re all small fry and then the Royal Guard has to come in and be the main fighters? That just doesn’t seem to fit with how he’s hyped the importance of the Shinigami.
How is he going to reconcile the important of the Shinigami to the power level he’s implying the Royal Guard and this unknown enemy is going to have?
Does anyone have any ideas or a different perspective on this?
I have a feeling I might not me phrasing this well, so let’s rephrase the question: If the Royal Guard is so much more powerful than the current Shinigami, how are the Shinigami going to be still relevant to the plot once they enter the picture?
Or do you think Kubo is going to not make them relevant any more?
I only have some vague ideas. Like, maybe the Royal Guard is powerful, but isn’t necessarily more powerful than regular captains- maybe they have some sort of special ability. Or maybe some of the Captains are incapacitated in some tricky way while the enemy is destroying Soul Society and so the Royal Guard has to step in. Besides that… I got nothin’.
Anyone have some perspective?
Another thing that’s confusing me is who the enemy is going to be. It sounds like there’s a good chance that the enemy that’s about to appear in the manga is the Quincy. But from the fact that they were massacred by the Shinigami, even if some of them did get away, it seems to me that they shouldn’t be powerful enough to leave Soul Society in ruins. But some of Kubo’s comments make it seem like there’s only going to be one main enemy.
So I’m thinking that maybe the Quincy have, like, allied with Hell, or something? My other theory, that doesn’t really follow the only one enemy plotline, is that first we’re fighting the Quincy, but the Quincy have thrown off “the balance” and so that disrupts Hell and things from Hell escape.
Or there’s something totally different going on with the enemies!
Thoughts?
Edited to add: yeah, there was a mention of Aizen and Kubo wanting to draw him in chains. I knew that Aizen would enter the picture again somehow, but I'm not not sure what his role will be, or how significant a role he's have. Thoughts on that too?
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