nanao-chan: Mayuri may turn out to be of unexpected assistance, simply by choosing to be indifferent to Central 46 orders and even helping get people and equipment out, just so he can take over the 12th.
Transfer: I'd love it if it emerged that this were true, and (assuming that the Mayuri as fourth man theory still holds water) better still, that Mayuri continued supplying Urahara contraband equipment after his exile, behind Aizen's back.
That's certainly my preferred reading. Despite my previous theorising that he's in with Aizen (largely because of the number of hints, possibly red herrings) that this is the case I remain firmly of the opinion that he's more interesting on the side of the 'good guys' (if Bleach can be said to have such a thing beyond the Karakura Scoobies).
Triplets: Interesting that Kaname is so eager to kill Urahara and the others, even after being told no, to the point that Aizen has to lay it out for him. We're told over and over that he's out for peace. Could he be more blood-thirsty than even Gin is being made out to be?
Tousen seems to me to be tied up in self-justification and self-deception to the point that he's become completely unhinged. He strongly reminds me of the kind of religious fanatic who has abandoned real reason for a dangerously simplistic worldview, rather like the orchestrators of the sarin gas attacks that Haruki Murakami describes in Underground (I know I've quoted this passage in its entirety elsewhere, but it's ace and deserves repeating):
"In his sermon Asahara spoke about the Sambhala Plan, which involved the construction of a Lotus Village. There would be an Astral hospital there, and a Shinri School that would provide a thorough-going education (. . .) Medical care would be so-called Astral Medicine, which would be based on Asahara's visions of another (astral) dimension and memories of past lives he would see during meditation. Astral medicine would examine the patients' karma and energy level, and take into consideration death and transmigration (. . .) I'd had a dream of a green, natural spot with buildings dotting the landscape, where truly caring medical care and education were carried out. My vision and the Lotus Village were one and the same."
Hayashi thus had a dream of devoting himself to a utopia, undergoing strenuous training unsullied by the secular world, putting into practice a kind of medical care he could give all his heart to, and making as many patients happy as he possibly could. These motives are indeed pure and the vision outlined here has its own beauty and splendor. Take a step back, however, and it's clear how completely these innocent remarks are cut off from reality. In our eyes this is like some strange landscape painting that lacks all sense of perspective. Still, if any one of us had been a friend of Dr Hayashi's at the time he was considering becoming an Aum renunciate and we tried to give him some convincing proof that his ideas were alienated from reality, it would have been very difficult.
But what we should say to Dr Hayashi is really quite simple, and it goes like this: "Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you're no longer talking about reality. You might think that, by following language and logic that appears consistent, you're able to exclude that aspect of reality, but it will always be lying in wait for you, ready to take its revenge."
I doubt Dr Hayashi would be convinced by this line of argument. Using technical terminology and a kind of static logic he would strenuously counter-argue, outlining how proper and beautiful the path is down which he plans to travel. So at a certain point we could do nothing but fall silent.
The sad fact is that language and logic cut off from reality have a far greater power than the language and logic of reality — with all that extraneous matter weighing down like a rock on any actions we take. In the end, unable to comprehend each other's words, we'd part, each going our separate ways.
Reading Ikuo Haysahi's notes, we are often forced to stop and think, and ask ourselves such simple questions as: "Why did he have to end up where he did?" At the same time, we're seized by a sense of impotence, knowing that there was nothing we could have done to stop him. You feel strangely sad.
So yeah, I think Tousen is a maniac and his sermonising about *justice* likely to be little more than the rantings of a madman. We didn't see the merest hint of his stated principles when he displayed how eager he was to kill Urahara and Tessai. I get the impression that when Komamura realises this about him it'll either give him the strength to kill his old friend or that the revelation that Kaname has been like that all along (along with the guilt about not seeing him for what he truly was) will throw him off balance sufficiently for the traitorous ex-9th Captain to beat him. The last canon scene in which we saw Komamura implied that he thought that Tousen could still be reached, and I seriously doubt that is the case, unless Tite Kubo pulls his usual trick of completely reframing him with further revelations.
Transfer: I'm guessing Byakuya learned Bakudo #81 either from Yoruichi, or more likely from Tessai at her direct request, prior to their exile - long before Byakuya became clan head, captain and the tightly reined-in soul he is today.
I'm not so sure... that could well be the case, but Kubo seems to enjoy using the kidou system to pull off subtle foreshadowing and reveals to the extent that I suspect there is more going on behind the scenes. Tessai refers to forbidden magic twice this issue, once in a full panel knitted-brow shot that seems deliberately intended for as-yet unexplained emphasis that it's a story point worth paying attention to, in much the same way as Kyoraku's dramatic crash-zoom panel in which he mentions Division Zero for the first time.
Kidou is another of Kubo's grid systems/character maps. You've got the different types of spells, the ranking of spells according to potency, the skipping of incantations, combinations of spells, and now forbidden spells... where a character stands regarding whether and how they use kidou says a lot about them. The names, numbers and incantations are particularly hard to remember (probably even in the original Japanese, it's a notoriously problematic written language), so he can pull off all kinds of shenanigans right under our noses. I'm therefore suspending any kind of easy reading regarding the Byakuya/forbidden magic reveal because my spidersense is tingling that there might be something big buried here (wording intentional, because even though it hasn't been mentioned here yet the classic number one reason for learning taboo spells in pretty much all fantasy fiction does rather seem apply directly to KB). |
