The next 3 arcs of Bleach (Arrancar, Hueco Mundo, and Fake Karakura Town) are essentially just one big arc which detail Ichigo and Soul Society’s struggles against Aizen and his Arrancar, Hollows which have managed to pull off part of their masks and gained Shinigami powers in the process. For the sake of this overview I’m treating them all as one big arc.
Though initially his exact plan is unclear, it is eventually revealed that Aizen wishes to sacrifice all of Karakura Town as part of a ritual that will allow him access into the Royal Palace of Soul Society and dethrone the Soul King. Central to his plans (though we never find out exactly why) is keeping an eye on Ichigo, which is why he sends two of his Espada, the top 10 most elite Arrancar in his army, to assess his strength. Through his battles with them and the subsequent attacks on Karakura Town Ichigo struggles with his inner Hollow and is afraid that he will be consumed by him. He is approached by a mysterious man called Shinji Hirako, who claims to be a part of a group called the Visored, who are outcast Shinigami who have attained Hollow powers, much like Ichigo himself. Shinji wants Ichigo to join them, and although he initially refuses, his helplessness and desire to obtain more power to protect his friends and loved ones eventually has him relent and seek out the Visored so as to better control his Hollow and gain more power.
The first arc ends when Aizen decides that Orihime’s powers will be useful to his plans, so he has Ulquiorra Cifer, the fourth Espada, give her an ultimatum: either she comes along to Hueco Mundo with him, or all her friends will be killed. Seeing no other choice, Orihime allows herself to be abducted. Once this is discovered, commander Yamamoto sees this as a betrayal and forbids anyone, even Ichigo, from going there to rescue her. Not dissuaded in the slightest, Ichigo, Chad, and Uryuu all go to Hueco Mundo to save Orihime, which is where I’d say the plot really kicks off.
I’d like to take this time to point out that it was towards the ending of this saga that Bleach started the decline in popularity and critical acclaim that I have mentioned previously. The volume sales in 2010 and 2011 went down by a million and sales have continued to decline since then.
While I do not think that popularity and quality are synonymous by any stretch of the imagination, I would not say it is a coincidence that sales started to go down at this particular point.
I’ll be blunt: while the Arrancar arc (which begins with Ulquiorra and Yammy’s arrival in Karakura Town and ends with Ichigo and co heading to Hueco Mundo) and the beginning of Hueco Mundo were not terribly bad, the latter half of Hueco Mundo and Fake Karakura Town in its entirety are some of the absolute worst shounen I have ever read, and just generally poorly written and executed as a manga and story.
To put that into perspective, I have never read an arc in any shounen, whether it be One Piece, Fullmetal Alchemist, Shaman King, Hunterx Hunter, Yu Yu Hakusho, Dragon Ball, etc that I think was as dragged out, annoying, disappointing and unsatisfying as this one. It’s like they took all the worst things about shounen stories (minus The Powerof Friendship) and put them into a blender. The result is just mind-bogglingly terrible.
What exactly is so bad about it?
Well the first main problem (which more or less ties into to all the others) is that Kubo apparently lost track of who the main characters were supposed to be.
Around the latter half of Hueco Mundo Ichigo, Uryuu and Chad are stuck in terrible situations and things seem hopeless for them. Ichigo is wounded from a fight with Grimmjow and outclassed by Nntoira. Uryuu and Renji are heavily wounded and faced with Szayelaporro’s powerful Ressurecion, and have little to no prospects of actually defeating him.
So what happens?
The Gotei 13 comes to bail them out.
From this point onwards, Ichigo and his friends largely take a backseat to the Gotei 13 as they essentially become the main characters for a while and pretty much defeat the rest of Aizen’s army excluding Ulquiorra (but his fight with Ichigo has its own problems, which I’ll get into in more detail later).
This was well, awful. And part of the reason why it’s so awful is symptomatic of a larger problem.
It’s very common for shounen series to have large casts. One Piece probably has an even larger cast of characters than Bleach does, and Naruto’s cast, though probably smaller, is still fairly large.
Having Loadsand Loadsof Characters is not necessarily a bad thing: when done properly, it can make your world feel massive and alive, and with more characters comes more personal stories and drama for you to enjoy. The key, however, is splitting your focus onto characters properly. This is something that Kubo is…not very good at in the slightest.
I’ve read before that Kubo’s main method of dealing with writers’ block is to create more new characters to advance the plot further. It certainly seems that way; every new arc without fail has dozens of new characters introduced. This is a pretty terrible way of dealing with writers’ block because it shows that Kubo apparently has such a poor understanding of his characters (or his characters are so vapid, shallow and one-note) that he can’t come up with interesting drama or situations to arise from his 50+ cast of previously established characters, but more than that, he doesn’t understand how to balance this cast properly at all.
To begin with, the focus of the story was on Ichigo and his friends as they developed their powers and faced personal issues, such as Ichigo’s struggle to gain power to protect the people important to him and Orihime’s desire to stop being a burden. Ichigo’s emotional bond with Rukia was the core of the series early on, and together with Chad, Orihime, and Inoue they formed a Five-Man Band of sorts.
This has since been unceremoniously swept aside as more and more time has been devoted towards the Gotei 13 and Soul Society in general, and the results, especially in this arc In particular, are far from stellar.
This is because instead of choosing a few characters to add to the main cast and developing that main cast, he just shuffles around his characters and spreads the focus so thinly around everyone that you have a bunch of small side-stories all happening at once, but none of them are given the time and proper execution to be truly memorable or emotionally resonant, so each and every single one falls flat.
The culmination of this is the aforementioned latter half of Hueco Mundo and the entirety of Fake Karakura Town. While some of the battles were enjoyable (chiefly Nntoira vs Kenpachi), the vast majority of the battles are between members of the Gotei 13 we know very little about…and Arrancar from Aizen’s army who we’re seeing for the first time and know even less about. The result is unengaging, boring, and just baffling. Kubo is treating these people as if they were main characters and like we’re supposed to care and be invested despite the fact that he’s given us little to no reason to do so.
This is already bad, but some of the battles just take this even further by completely failing to deliver any sort of significant payoff.
To elaborate: near the beginning of the Arrancar arc Hitsugaya explains the different types of Hollows that can arise as a result of Hollows consuming other Hollows. There’s the Gillian, which are basically foot soldiers, the Adjuchas, who are supposed to be around the level of a Gotei 13 captain, and the Vasto Lordes, who are supposed to be well-above captain level. Hitsugaya speculates that if Aizen were to have a mere 10 Vasto Lordes under his command, it would the end for Soul Society.
Harribel is confirmed to have been a Vasto Lorde, so logically it would follow that Baragan and Starrk, who are above her in rank, would be as well. And what happens in the end? Hitsugaya fights completely even with Harribel, Baragan gets offed by Sui Feng and Hachi, and Starrk is completely outclassed by Shunsui who doesn’t even have to use his bankai. Talk about a horrible payoff for characters whose power was built up for literally hundreds of chapters.
I’ve heard people say that these defeats and/or battles make sense (Shunsui being one of the oldest people in Soul Society is well above captain level, did you honestly expect a bunch of humans to be able to match the Gotei 13, etc), but the thing is, that doesn’t really matter. It was boring, underwhelming, and a complete let-down.
Can you honestly think of another battle shounen where the main cast was just completely brushed aside for side characters to fight the top villains, both of which we know nothing about anyway?
Compare this to say, One Piece. In most arcs the villains are given significant build-up across the arc, with a lot of screen time, and then eventually the Straw Hats all get cool and memorable fights against the main villains. While you could argue that this is in some ways predictable, it’s usually done incredibly well and is very satisfying and emotionally engaging because we are seeing the hero fight against a villain who we probably think is a complete and total douche by this point, so we are invested in seeing him succeed and completely mollywhop him. Deviating from this formula isn’t a bad thing: One Piece itself did this already, with the Marineford arc, where the Straw Hats minus Luffy were barely a thing. Hunterx Hunter has a very non-traditional structure where it’s very difficult to predict what’s going to happen. But the way Bleach does it is just all wrong.
Finally, the small character arcs we DO get are either complete trainwrecks, make no sense, and/or are just underwhelming.
To begin with, Ichigo’s power levels once we get to Hueco Mundo really don’t make that much sense. He initially has an 11 second time limit on how long he can keep the Hollow mask on, but this limit increases exponentially as the fight goes on. You could argue it’s just him learning how to control them properly or whatever, but the whole 11 second time limit just feels pointless at this juncture.
More importantly though, the end of Ichigo’s fight with Ulquiorra, which was initially one of the better fights in this arc, was complete bullshit, for reasons that stretch even beyond Ichigo himself.
Basically, Ulquiorra activates his second form and completely curbstomps Ichigo, putting a giant hole in his chest. Things seem pretty hopeless, but as Orihime cries for Ichigo to get up and help in the middle of a breakdown, Ichigo changes into a completely new hollow form OUT OF NOWHERE and proceeds to completely trash him.
I’m sorry what?
We never get any real explanation as to what that transformation is or what triggered it. You could reasonably assume it’s Hollow Ichigo saving him again (and a later encounter in his inner self basically confirms it), but what it feels like in-story is Ichigo getting a bullshit Deus Ex Machina powerup because Kubo could not think of a reasonable way to have Ichigo come back and win the fight. I’m not ENTIRELY comfortable calling it an ass pull but it was never adequately explained and felt really cheap and anticlimactic.
Getting bullshit Deus Ex Machina powerups is basically all Ichigo does towards the end of this arc. Aizen becomes so stupidly broken and overpowered that it doesn’t really feel plausible that Ichigo could beat him, and by that point nobody really cared anymore anyway.
But Ichigo isn’t the only mishandled character. What’s possibly even more egregious and frustrating is what happens to Orihime.
Orihime had an enormous amount of build-up and rising character development in this arc. The entire reason that Hueco Mundo kicks off is because Ichigo and co. are determined to save her. She learns more about the nature of her powers and begins to learn and mature, becoming more determined and even scheming to foil Aizen’s plans by using her powers to eliminate the Hogyoku from existence. At one point she even brings an Arrancar BACK FROM THE DEAD. We had every reason to believe that she would ultimately play a decisive role in the battle against Aizen; hell Aizen and Soul Society themselves believed as much.
But what comes of it? Absolutely nothing.
In the end, she doesn't play any significant role and her character is left in the worst note possible. When it came down to the most critical moment, she broke down and begged the wounded, presumably almost dead Ichigo to help her. Maybe you could argue that it was a reasonable reaction but the entire thing is still essentially Kubo making her go BACKWARDS in her development. If this was a good manga, this might have been well-executed and acceptable, but Kubo is simply not a writer of that caliber.
Any other character with any sort of character arc is barely even worth talking about. For one thing, Tousen’s motivation for defecting to Aizen just felt weak and unsatisfying and given that it was barely given any time or fleshing out proper I’m wondering at what point I was supposed to care. Baragan and Starrk are given like what, 5 pages of backstory to compensate for the fact that until that point we knew jackshit about them, but it feels clumsy and wasted. Harribel is basically a bland fanservice character throughout.
Overall, this was the absolute low point of Bleach for me. It went from a decent shounen with promise and good art to an awfully paced slog with a bloated cast, terrible character arcs, thin characterization, asspulls, anticlimactic resolutions, wasted build-up, and was just generally not fun to read.
With that said I have heard that many of these problems were due to Executive Meddling. The Arrancar proved so popular that Kubo was instructed to prolong the arc longer than he originally intended, and if that is true then I'm wagering the fact that the Gotei 13 were so prominent was also due to this interference, since many of them were fan-favorites. I don't have a source for this, but assuming it's true, the editor's advice backfired spectacularly. Bleach has never been the same since.
Join me next time as we go into what many consider the low point of Bleach (though I’d beg to differ), the Fullbring arc.
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