If you're into anime and manga, you've probably heard by now that Bleach is going to reach its climax soon. If you're not following the manga anymore--not many are--you're probably thinking to yourself "okay, so, probably by the end of the year." And, nope. You'd be wrong. Bleach is ending in just TWO chapters! Many fans are upset, and, yeah, it is an incredibly jarring thing.
After all, it feels as if this final battle hasn't been as long or as focused-on as the other big battles throughout the end of this "Thousand-Year Blood War" Arc have been. Mayuri, Urahara, and Shinsui had fights that felt like there was far more importance on them. Even Hitsugaya's battle against the Miracle felt like it had a lot of weight to it, and in that fight we got to see Zenpachi's bankai almost at full strength.
Yeah, it wasn't even at full power! And it's fairly clear that Byakuya is still hiding some secret power and then you've of course got Aizen who hasn't shown off the extent of his bankai, plus Orihime has been teased as a huge turning point in this fight and then you have to have an epic moment where Uryu and Ichigo team up to defeat Yhwach using the extent of their powers...
Except we haven't seen, really, any of that. Okay, SPOILERS, but we sort of have.
Again, SPOILERS for the most recent events of Bleach, and possibly even the ending.
So...
Aizen's dead. Yhwach is dead. Uryu is just kinda there, and Ichigo killed him in his base form. All without anyone using super abilities in the final confrontation (except for Renji, but to be honest he was about as useful as a sack of potatoes during that fight).
I think that the final fight was intended to be one, huge fight against Yhwach where we would see all of the big guns throw as much as they could at him before it finally comes down to the team up between Ichigo and Aizen. They were certainly setting this up. After all, it'd been awhile since most of their fights, barring Hitsugaya and Byakuya but they were holding up fine against the Miracle. Kenpachi could have been healed and everyone else was doing fine.
The moment where I knew things were going to be paced in such a bad way was the minute Ichigo jumped through the portal to fight Yhwach one last time. Normally we would've been hanging out in the Soul Palace for a few more chapters for reflection, speeches about friendship and never giving up, and then some fun character beats. But nope. Ichigo and Renji just take off.
It's a shame, too. I mean how much can Tite Kubo really do in two chapters? Everything from before just seems so incosequential now. There's so much riding on this one fight that the manga seems like it's going to just wrap after the fight with little reflection on anything else. Like Ichigo's friendship with Rukia, or his relationship with Orihime, or his standing with the Soul Society, or the reconstruction of the Sereitei, or freaking Aizen being tossed aside like a minor character, or really anything at this point. There are just so many questions that it's going to be impossible to justify this being a good ending.
I can't really say, so far, it's good for what it is. Kubo has to get this last fight in but it doesn't feel like the big final battle so much as it is just another fight. There's no big "holy crap" moment. You know what the biggest hair-raiser in Bleach has been?
Ichigo's fight with Aizen over Fake Karakura Town. The Final Getsuga Tenshou after thousands of years of training? That had it all. It had our leads dealing with the fallout of Ichigo's complete Hollow-fication, it had some of the strongest characters fighting, arguably, one of the strongest villains they've faced thus far. And it brought in the typical Bleach "pulled-it-out-of-out-butt" ending with Kisuke Urahara's tricks. It all came together so well and the ending with Ichigo losing his powers was great!
So what has been the point of this final arc? I don't know. It revealed a few more things that, honestly, I don't think we really needed to know. It made Ichigo's character seem even more overpowered, and it split Uryu from the group for a good amount of time only for him to obviously go back in a fight that was padded out to the max.
That's another thing. Many of these fights were cool, but lasted way past the point of anyone really caring. Yeah it was great to see Mayuri fight the Soul King's Left Hand, but I mean...a whole volume dedicated to that? Really? He and some of the other fights would have been fine as four chapters tops. This would give way more room for this final battle and an epilogue to at least time some things together.
I really hope that Shonen Jump didn't just inform Tite Kubo out of the blue about this. Sure those fights were long, but most of those comments are also in hindsight. At the time they were annoying but you come to expect that from Bleach. Again, it wasn't until Ichigo arrived to fight Yhwach that I realized we might be in trouble, and I worry that that was when the editors at Jump told him that he was getting the plug pulled. Because it's clear that was not intended to be the final fight, that the fight would go on longer. Plus the way that Haschwalt and the Miracle go out? Too easy. Too dumb, even for Bleach's standards.
If you're reading Bleach, you already know the feeling: this is all too rushed. Nothing feels earned, and it feels just like a clip-show. A fortnight from now, once the finale is out, I'll give my full thoughts on the ending, but for right now I just have to wonder: why? Why would Shonen Jump pull the plug on this series? If anything--sure it's not too popular--it at least has some longtime readers to stick around that might hop off the magazine when Bleach ends. And it's not like that new Boruto series is making anyone happy right now. The ending should come much later, around Christmas, to feel justified. This is just sad.
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