Roughly ten years ago,Tite Kubo's Bleach was among the most popular manga franchises in the world. Online debates raged constantly, with Bleach, Naruto, and One Piece fans all arguing in favor of their own series being the best or most popular shonen mega-hit. Things are much different now. Naruto maintained a fervent fanbase up to its conclusion and beyond, while One Piece is more popular than ever and could easily go on for another decade. Bleach, on the other hand, is a full-blown has-been, a shell of its former self that subsists on the memory of its glory days. It is well past its expiration date, yet it continues to grind on, sluggishly approaching its conclusion on a seemingly parabolic trajectory. The manga's volume sales have dwindled, the anime was cancelled several years ago, and many former fans have just flat-out given up on it. How did things come to this?
So Bleach continued on with a new long-term antagonist and a new determined direction. In an echo of the previous story arc, Aizen abducted Ichigo's friend and love interest Orihime Inoue this time. To save her, Ichigo and his friends traveled to Hueco Mundo, the world inhabited by Aizen's followers, the Hollows. The main strength of this story arc was the long-term build-up of its villains, producing two of the most popular characters in the series: Grimmjow and Ulquiorra. However, Bleach started to suffer from pacing problems around this time. Once the heroes entered Aizen's stronghold, the series became a long, unbroken string of fight sequences. These fights were so protracted that when it came time for the anime to run filler episodes, there was no appropriate place to fit them in naturally. Instead, the characters would simply break the fourth wall mid-battle to acknowledge that the main plot was taking a break while an unrelated story ran in its place.
The arc's final stretch consisted of even more ceaseless fighting, but this time it was mostly between characters who had only rarely appeared in the series before. Over fifty characters got involved in the final confrontation with Aizen. Some of these characters were just now appearing for the first time, simply written in to provide the tenth- through fifteenth-most important Soul Reapers with individual opponents. Kubo's efforts to make the battle a grand spectacle backfired by favoring quantity over quality. By the end of things, I was feeling very sore about Bleach, because it seemed to be putting off the final Ichigo vs. Aizen fight for as long as possible while offering nothing decent in the meantime. On top of that, after being built up for years as tremendous threats, the three highest-ranking members of Aizen's army were defeated in a remarkably anticlimactic way. Aizen even dispatched one himself just to pull off the cliché evil overlord stunt of showing how ruthless he was.
Unfortunately, this was just the first example of Aizen losing his luster. As he grew more powerful through the use of the Hougyoku, he stopped bothering to devise clever schemes and instead relied purely on his own immense strength to get the job done. In other words, Aizen lost all the qualities that captivated fans when he first revealed himself as the villain. Over the course of several years, Bleach had stopped focusing on its most popular heroes and ruined its most popular villain.
To its credit, the Lost Substitute Shinigami arc did finally let up on the relentless pace that had defined Bleach for the past several years. Characters would occasionally sit down and talk about things, instead of being limited to explaining how their powers worked in the middle of a fight. However, the arc introduced even more bland and uninteresting characters, while relegating every established character barring Ichigo to the sidelines. Somehow even Chad, who was actually part of Ginjou's organization, became practically forgotten and a complete non-factor in the climax. On top of that, Ginjou's heel turn "twist" seemed obvious from the beginning, making it a less effective retread of the Aizen reveal from years before.
His complex schemes were a pale shade of his predecessor's too. Ginjou's plan made no sense whatsoever. To earn Ichigo's trust, he had to pretend that one of his allies, Tsukishima, was actually his enemy, so that Ichigo would be convinced to unite with him against a common foe. To pull this off, Ginjou had Tsukishima use his ability to alter memories on him, causing Ginjou to temporarily believe that they were enemies. Putting aside the gamble he made in hoping that he would act as predicted once his mind had been altered, he ignored the painfully obvious option of altering Ichigo's mind instead. The only explanation Ginjou offered for not using Tsukishima's powers in the simplest way was: "The game won't be any fun if it's fixed so we can't lose." His rationale for not choosing the best plan available was that he didn't want to definitely succeed.
Of course, it would be completely unfair to decry Ginjou's nonsensical plan without talking about Soul Society's bizarre behavior. Why in the world had they waited so long to give Ichigo's powers back if they could just do it whenever they wanted? Apparently, Soul Society had known about Ginjou's plan for a long time because he used to be a Substitute Soul Reaper, just like Ichigo. Believing that Ginjou would seek out Ichigo eventually because of this shared connection, the Soul Reaper captains planned to use the powerless Ichigo as bait to lure Ginjou out of hiding. (But for some reason, nobody stuck around to actually check on their bait, so somebody in the human world had to go to Soul Society and tell them about it after the fact.) So on top of proving so unpopular with fans that the anime adaptation was cancelled as soon as it was finished, the Lost Substitute Shinigami arc made the members of Soul Society out to be tremendous jerks who manipulated Ichigo to achieve their own ends. This was an especially big problem because the plot was clearly meant to demonstrate a strengthening of bonds between Ichigo and Soul Society, so that readers would feel more sympathy when Soul Society was invaded in the final major story arc. After this pointless new adventure was over, many fans who had given Bleach one final chance to prove itself finally quit.
While its uninteresting heroes crippled the arc, it truly suffered most from a lack of compelling villains. Some of the Quincies had outlandish designs even by Bleach standards: a cyborg, a Thor lookalike, a guy with two tongues, a mustachioed wrestler in a pink luchador mask, a hairy man in a diaper, a giant sentient hand, and a literal brain in a jar. Despite this, hardly any of the more than thirty villains introduced were very interesting, and for the first time, none of the villains were framed as an important rival of Ichigo's or anyone else's for that matter. Most baddies were defeated within their first major battle, with no chance to establish themselves as a threat or garner interest in their personalities. Even Uryuu Ishida, a Quincy and longtime main cast member who betrayed Ichigo's group to ally himself with his own people, has failed to garner intrigue. You'd think that would be impossible given his dramatic potential, but Ishida has done absolutely nothing significant for the entire 3.5 span of the arc after changing sides. The manga is now overcrowded with characters who have no chance to stand out as any more important than the rest.
What did you think of Bleach's evolution (or devolution)? Let us know how you felt about Bleach's development in the forums!
No comments:
Post a Comment