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Hmmm. I’ve just gotten caught up after watching for a little over a month a think. Needless to say after averaging 2-4 episodes a day for some time, having to wait for new Bleach is putting a serious hurt on me. Here’s my thoughts on a selection of the episodes that had the most effect on me roughly reproduced from how they first appeared in my brain over the last month.
Ep 32: Hang on, now I suddenly like and care about that wanker Renji? How does that work? I’ve hated him for nearly twenty episodes now suddenly he’s kind of a decent guy? Weird.
Ep 34: I don’t think I trust that guy with the glasses. Sure he seems really nice compared to the other Captains. But that’s half the problem. I bet he’s actually worse than Ichimaru. A couple of minutes later – Oh well I guess he really was a good guy. Shows how much I know.
Ep 37: Oh god. Poor Chad. What a horrible painful defeat. I was conviced for a while here that Chad was going to die the most horrible emotionally intense death I’d seen Wesley from Angel.
Ep 43-44: Geez. Mayuri’s a bastard. And he’s not even a traitor as far as we know. Maybe if Soul Society allows a monster like him to operate it needs to be torn the fuck down.
Ep 46-48: But, but, but, if Gin was Aizen’s lieutenant who did he ever get powerful enough to murder him, apparently fairly easily? Does he have some sort of special powers of some kind? Or did someone else do it? Maybe Byakuya, since he seems to be evil. Whatever, something is definitely off about it. Also at this point Hitsugaya became one of my favourite characters. Nice to see someone who appears to be totally genuine, and fairly unambiguously heroic among the senior Shinigami – I didn’t consider for a moment that he might be guilty of being the big bad as the letter accused him of being, even though I’d previously mistrusted Aizen simply on the ground of seeming nice.
Ep 53: That fucker Gin. Maybe he is the big bad. How could anyone be more of an evil fucking fucker than him?
Ep 54: Yayness! Ichigo gets to be proper heroic, and two more captains (Ukitake and Kyoraku – or White hair and Pink Coat as I was calling them at the time) show themselves to apparently not be evil, insane or terribly stupid, and I was starting to wonder if Hitsugaya was the only one.
Ep 59: I haven’t enjoyed seeing anyone get beaten quite as much before or since in Bleach. And after his explanation for why he was up for murdering his sister I felt even happier he’d been beaten. Even if he isn’t in league with Ichimaru he’s a repulsive creep in my book.
Ep 60: Oh God! It’s Aizen or someone that looks like him. This is gonna be bad. This is gonna be soooo bad. Yes. It’s bad. Very bad. Here I think the show did something brilliant in the episodes between Aizen’s fake murder and this episode – since I’d completely forgotten how incredibly fucking suspicious I was of Aizen before his apparent death, since I think most of what we’d seen of him in the interim had been filter through Hinamori’s obviously dodgy perceptions of him. I’d totally come to believe he was this heroic figure who had worked out what was going on and had been murdered because of it by this point. Poor Hinamori, poor, poor Hinamori. Hating Aizen even more than I hate Byakuya, and almost much as I hate Mayori at this point.
Ep 62: Wow. So the recently revealed big bad, kinda won that one. Interesting. On another plot point, in some ways Byakuya’s explanation of his actions just made him seems even worse than when I assumed he was the big bad.
By episode 73: Shit. Is this even the same show anymore? This is so fucking boring now. If I hadn’t know it was filler, and would eventually end I think I’d have given up and permanently lost interest at this point.
Ep 91: Oh god is this crap finally coming to an end? Looks like it. Please let it end now. Please. Oh fuck. At this point I wanted to jump into by monitor and beat Ishida to fucking death for allowing the Bount to escape for frankly completely fucking moronic and insane reasons and thereby extending the arc for god knows how much longer.
Ep 98: So. Much. Better. Than pretty much any of the previous 30 episodes. Why couldn’t the whole arc have been at least getting on towards being this good?
Ep 100: Yay! The Bounts are starting to get wiped out by the Captains. This brings me happiness.
Ep 101: My. I don’t know who to side with. My natural sympathies would be with Sawatari, monstrous though he is, as he’s positively Mr Nice Guy compared to Mayuri. But on the other hand I wanted the Bounts all dead, to get the story finished, so for purely practical reasons I sided with Mayuri.
Ep 108-109: Not a bad ending to the story, with some decent stuff in there, especially in the epilogue. If it had ended like this after 15-20 less episodes it probably would have been quite acceptable. Still I was bloody glad it was over though.
Ep 110: Like sweet wine after the long period of mediocrity. Now just better story telling, but so much better animation as well. I’d been wondering when Grand Fisher would show up again for ages.
Ep 111: Isshin’s a Shinigami? Seriously? And not just a Shinigami, but a ridiculously hardcore one of at least Captain level. This is extremely odd. I mean It’s been quite clear since the first Grand Fisher story that the hyperactive imbecile act wasn’t all there was to Isshin – but I figured it was just covering up normal human pain and suffering, not anything more arcane.
Eps 113-121: Fuck nobody’s going to be able to fight the Espada without a serious power-up, are they? Poor Chad. All he’s really about is protecting people, chiefly protecting Ichigo, and he’s so far behind in the power stakes that he just isn’t relevant as a protector anymore. Of course that’s basically been the case since his fight with Kyoraku, but it’s still absolutely horrible to see him realize it.
Eps 122-127: Okay power-up are starting to arrive, and the use of Kariya in the internal battle was so superb it almost redeemed the entire Bount arc for me. Also I’m absolutely loving Hitsugaya even more than before in these episodes – it’s his reactions to the fact most of his team insist on acting like imbeciles or lunatics any time they aren’t in combat – it’s in the animation mostly – those absolutely withering looks of patient exasperation he shoots directly at the audience every now and then whenever he isn’t in combat. I’m reminded a lot of J’onn J’onz in the old Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League. Also again, poor, poor Hinamori, and Bastard, Bastard Aizen. And I wonder if Hachi is as much of a moron as he wants Orihime to think, or is he’s deliberately trying to manipulate her onto sticking with the Vizard by driving a wedge between her and the rest of the gang, with his repetition of his incorrect assumption that her friends are ignoring her because she’s lost her powers.
Eps 128-137: Mostly disappointing, but not nearly as bad as most of the Bount arc. Especially disappointing for me, since in theory Hitsugaya is my favourite character, even before any of our main characters – so it’s sad to see a block of stories which feature him so prominently be basically a little bit poo. On the other hand there’s Ep 132 – which given how I feel about Hitsugaya is quite possibly my favourite episode of the entire series, despite being filler. If all the filler was that superb I’d never want to go back to the main plot.
Eps 138-129. God. All that training and it still wasn’t quite enough for Ichigo to take someone who isn’t even and Espada anymore. Things look darker than they’ve ever looked right now. Especially for Orihime. Still I wonder if Aizen might be about to fuck himself over really, really badly for the first time with his long foreshadowed kidnap of Orihime. Firstly of course it provides motivation for Ichigo to defeat him – and motivation usually powers Ichigo up way more than training, but perhaps even more importantly Orihime is perhaps the first element he’s bought into his complex plans that he doesn’t really understand. She might just be the most ridiculously powerful one of crew, and if Aizen’s research ends up unlocking her potential I can see that going extremely badly for him.
Beyond the thoughts on individual episodes I have a few things I’m currently wondering about. Firstly – Ichimaru; I’ve hated him for a good long while, and I suppose I still do, but since I found out what Aizen could do I’ve had my doubts – is he really evil, or is he Aizen’s slave? I mean he’s been Aizen’s subordinate even longer than Hinamori was, so it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that all that’s really left of his original personality is what Aizen wanted him to keep. I wonder if more of this might be explored via giving us some more information on his mysterious long ago friendship with Matsumoto, which is one of the things I’d like to know more about ASAP.
Secondly is it me or do the Vizard actually seem a good deal less shady than the Shinigami themselves? I mean there’s the potential Orihime manipulation, and Shinji’s level of clued-uppedness (which we don’t know for sure if the others share), which set of fairly obvious alarm bells and Hiyori is perhaps something of a psychopath, but in general the Vizard don’t seem to have anyone on their team half as bad as Mayuri, and even Kenpatchi, and they have not as far as we’re aware involved themselves in genocide or any of the other dodgy things the Shinigami have gotten up to throughout the years. I’m interested to see if this will continue to be the case.
Also Uryu’s dad. What’s his stake in things, and how much does he know? I mean he might just be a bit of a dick, much as Uryu himself was when we first met him, or really I wouldn’t even say he was a dick really, if he’s acting the way he is, in the knowledge that Shinigami kidnapped his father and tortured him to death. If anything I think Uryu himself has been shockingly forgiving of the society which still counts the monster responsible for the murder and torture of his grandfather as a senior member in good standing. So if his dab knows about that then his actions make a lot of sense. Ominously, possibly even enough sense for him to be conceivably able to work with Aizen without actually being evil per se.
Anyway I seem to have spent far longer than intended working on this, so I think that’s it for my thoughts for now. |
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