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How would you write Bleach filler?
Madfigs has already clued us in here so I'll enlarge on this point: Bleach's writers are in the habit, in the aftermath of a titanic battle, of slamming on the brakes for an episode showing us how the antagonist got where he is today and what makes him tick. I'm thinking of the Renji and Kenpachi battles in particular as this device got used a great deal during the Soul Society arc, although we've had a late entry recently filling in more on Ikkaku Madarame. Which is by way of saying that filler-esque material is already present and correct in the manga-derived material - it's just that the non-manga stories, being all of a piece and severely hampered by having to avoid disrupting continuity, get less kudos.
What would you want to see? - Which characters would you use, and which stories would you tell? - What would you want the filler to achieve? - How can you contribute to the canon of an extremely complex world without contradicting something that might be to come?*
I always sucked at separating out my ideas in essay form so bear with me here while I ball my thoughts into a Play-Doh-like lump and throw them at the wall. (*The last question is known to academicians as the 'Transformers UK problem' and has never yet been solved, so I'll probably not manage it here.)
Carrying on with the business of flashbacks, some of my favourite stories from the Soul Society run were the 'school days' episodes with Renji, Rukia, Hinamori and co. in the earliest days of their Shinigami training. The fact that so many major and minor characters from the present-day cast came up together might seem like laziness and/or excessive neatness on the part of Kube and staff, but conversely it offers ample opportunities for flashback-based storytelling and fleshing out of established characters without the need to devise filler characters a la Maki Ichinose. (A poor example since his story was one of the best-made things to come out of the Bount arc, but I hope my point stands.)
The class of contemporaries from Shinigami academy include some of my favourite undeveloped characters, of whom I'd love to see more. Remember Hinamori's recollection of the ill-fated training mission to the human world and Aizen saving her life? There could be more material like that, perhaps telling of the same or similar occasions from the other participants' perspectives, and linking it to Gotei 13's contemporary concerns. How are Kira Izuru and Shuuhei Hisagi, both lieutenants as loyal in their own ways as was Hinamori, coping with being betrayed? Is Yamamoto really able to run everything on his own now that Central Room 46 has been wiped out? These are questions that could be delved into without necessarily impacting the main arc overmuch since these characters don't form part of the circle of principal or secondary players, and can thus have the odd bit of development of their own without the writers having to feel they need to balance every single narrative debt before the eventual end of the series. Hell, we could even do something similar with the back-formation Vizards - let them carry an origin-story flashback or shopping-expedition episode between them and see how we warm to them. I think it'd go over pretty well.
Or to take another tack, let's bring out Bleach's other major strength, ridiculous comedy. Some people really hate this so I'll keep it brief. The Urahara shop crew (with or without mod souls according to taste), Don Kanonji, at home with the Asanos, high school goofing off (some of us like Chizuru, ya know) - hey, after this week I've got the germ of an idea for Isshin telling his kids more unbelievable and semi-perverted yet somehow heartwarming stories of his crazy youth (strictly untrue since we [think we] know what he *really* is now, but that's beside the point). Shows like Urusei Yatsura used to run for years on this kind of material. Why should we pass it up today?
You know, considering all these matters has reminded me once more how much I love this show. It really is a wonderfully multi-dimensional pop-culture mythos easily able to stand alongside Harry Potter or the X-Men. It runs the gamut of character development from throwaway to epic and can seemingly absorb whatever storytelling requirements we demand of it; its weaknesses where they occur are more than forgiveable. There's an incredible sense of lightness and fluorescence that pervades the whole show even in its darker moments. And I wish I was cool as Uryuu Ishida. |
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