Rae (
ravens_rising) wrote2012-02-02 10:00 pm
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Hello Everyone!
I’ve been meaning to start posting again for a while, but it looks like Bleach is about to start getting really interesting for me soon, so I decided that I should come back if only so I can spam you all with my theories and musing instead of just harassing nerdowl and spikykun! :D
I know I attempted to delurk the beginning of last semester and that lasted, like, two days, but to give myself some credit, last semester ended up being a hellish semester. This semester will not be. However, I don’t guarantee I won’t be sporadic with my posting. I’m planning on updating pretty frequently; we’ll see how that goes.
Now for Bleach talk! The plan was to type up all of my thoughts about all the information we learned from Kubo during the hiatus, but then I realized that it was incredibly hard to get all of my thoughts together, my brain is teeming with ideas, and that no one would read it because it'd be ten pages long. So I'll probably be posting chunks of rambling theories and speculation over the next couple days.
If you haven't seen the new information, you can find most of it on the first page of this thread. This page isn't up on the first page yet, and we're waiting for the "official" translation of one more page.
So the thing I think is confusing me the most at the moment is the Royal Guard. Kubo’s dropping all kinds of things about the Shinigami like “Rangiku’s past will be important! Shunsui’s haori and its history will be important! Mayuri’s research will be important! Kaien and Ichigo’s resemblance will be important!” and just the fact that he spent all three weeks giving us updates on all of the shinigami, and that the whole manga seems to come back to the shinigami. To me that says the Shinigami are going to be Very Important in this next arc.
But then Kubo more or less says that the Royal Guard wasn’t at all bothered by Aizen, and yet the Shinigami needed Ichigo to defeat Aizen. Kubo then says he needs a situation where Soul Society is basically in ruins for the Royal Guard to finally get concerned and enter the picture. Believe me, I’m really excited for this plotline, I’ve had many a Soul Society-is-in-rubble plotbunny, but…
The mystery surrounding Shunsui, Ukitake, and Unohana’s bankai- and other people, I suppose, like Urahara’s bankai… has been all hyped up, and then some enemy is going to come in and destroy Soul Society and the Captains like they’re all small fry and then the Royal Guard has to come in and be the main fighters? That just doesn’t seem to fit with how he’s hyped the importance of the Shinigami.
How is he going to reconcile the important of the Shinigami to the power level he’s implying the Royal Guard and this unknown enemy is going to have?
Does anyone have any ideas or a different perspective on this?
I have a feeling I might not me phrasing this well, so let’s rephrase the question: If the Royal Guard is so much more powerful than the current Shinigami, how are the Shinigami going to be still relevant to the plot once they enter the picture?
Or do you think Kubo is going to not make them relevant any more?
I only have some vague ideas. Like, maybe the Royal Guard is powerful, but isn’t necessarily more powerful than regular captains- maybe they have some sort of special ability. Or maybe some of the Captains are incapacitated in some tricky way while the enemy is destroying Soul Society and so the Royal Guard has to step in. Besides that… I got nothin’.
Anyone have some perspective?
Another thing that’s confusing me is who the enemy is going to be. It sounds like there’s a good chance that the enemy that’s about to appear in the manga is the Quincy. But from the fact that they were massacred by the Shinigami, even if some of them did get away, it seems to me that they shouldn’t be powerful enough to leave Soul Society in ruins. But some of Kubo’s comments make it seem like there’s only going to be one main enemy.
So I’m thinking that maybe the Quincy have, like, allied with Hell, or something? My other theory, that doesn’t really follow the only one enemy plotline, is that first we’re fighting the Quincy, but the Quincy have thrown off “the balance” and so that disrupts Hell and things from Hell escape.
Or there’s something totally different going on with the enemies!
Thoughts?
Edited to add: yeah, there was a mention of Aizen and Kubo wanting to draw him in chains. I knew that Aizen would enter the picture again somehow, but I'm not not sure what his role will be, or how significant a role he's have. Thoughts on that too?
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Until some of the shinigami re-entered a little while ago. There was some Zaraki fairly recently, which you probably saw. In Kubo's interview that I was talking about in this post he said that he's thinking about giving Yumi a bankai, so we'll probably see more of those three at some point. :) It SEEMS to be that this next arc is going to contain a lot of the Shinigami, but I'm determined not to get my hopes up too much, haha.
Well I tried to leave this on LJ but it ate my login cookie >> (I'm blue_eyesgirl on LJ)
I'm thinking with the Royal Guard.... maybe it'll be like when the vizard showed up? It's not so much that they're loads stronger but they certain helped speed up the Espada fights (thinking particularly of Barragan's defeat)
As far as the Quincy go, well they're definitely showing up and what you mention is a really good idea. I mean discounting the movie Kubo has never really done anything with hell. He showed us the big scary gate all the way back before SS and then... nothing. So unless he's satisfied with what he did for the movies then I reckon it could show up.
I would say fighting Hell would certainly be more troublesome than Aizen, if only because I think that Hell will outnumber the shinigami as opposed to Aizen and his Espada which they didn't so much in the end.
Re: Well I tried to leave this on LJ but it ate my login cookie >> (I'm blue_eyesgirl on LJ)
I'm HOPING that that's going to be the case with the Royal Guard showing up... but Kubo pretty much explicitly says Seireitei has to be in ruins before the Royal Guard is going to be concerned enough to show up. I'm hoping at least some people will still be holding on! That's a thought, though, maybe the significance is Seireitei itself. Maybe Yamamoto and Shunsui and Unohana and Ukitake and everybody are doing their thing but there's a lot of enemies (he said their number would grow!) and they destroy some kind of special artefact or something that causes the Royal Guard to be involved? Just a thought.
Well Hell is the only other thing that I can think of that could give "the enemy" the kind of numbers and power to level Seireitei. But obviously there could be some twist with the Quincy, just at this point with what we know of them I don't see them having the power OR numbers to be a HUGE threat to Seireitei.
But then I'm also just personally uncomfortable with the idea of the Quincy being the big enemy because its going to make the situation with Ishida very awkward and I don't really want to see SS turning against him. D: I'm hoping it'll turn out that they need to compromise to fight a bigger threat, but that's just a personal hope!
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Aizen wasn't important enough for the Royal Guard to get involved ... but it may have gotten to that point at any time during the conflict if Soul Society hadn't re-absorbed the Visors, or if the Captains of 11 and 6 hadn't followed Ichigo into Hueco Mundo, or the captains had not succeeded in evolving during their conflicts with the espada.
It sounds to me as though there were changes that needed to be made within Soul Society and that the situation needed to be forced into that degree of precariousness to push these things along.
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Thanks for the thoughts, this arc is going to be interesting! :)
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And what was it that happened to both of them that was so singular?
For Rangiku, it was the syphoning off of her reiastu by Aizen. For Hisagi, he remained hidden and unscathed by Hollowfication.
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So that, to me, implies that many/most of the Captains and Vice Captains were defeated and the Royal Guard has to take over their battles. So how is Kubo going to make them significant to the plot at that point if the Royal Guard is fighting all the battles?
Obviously there are ways to do that, but Bleach is kind of a fighting focused manga most of the time! I'm just curious to see how Kubo is going to handle that.
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I think you're right, and actually, I look forward to such an exciting story, although I'm worried about my favourite captains and vice-captains.
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Haha, yeah, that's my main motivation in pondering this haha. I don't want my favorites to lose! I especially don't want them to get killed, which I'm worried will happen with the way Kubo was talking about them crying out in their hearts...
But whatever happens I'm sure will be exciting! *crosses fingers*