Bleach (Official Colored) - Vol. 74 Ch. 686 - Death And Strawberry

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@frjoethesecond Sure, and thanks for replying.

I am not arguing about the definition of omnipotence, nor am I interested in doing so. Obviously the Soul King is not actually omnipotent, or at the very least his omnipotence is not transferable, because Yhwach lost: we cannot assume anything about the Soul King's desires or motivations, because they were never explained to us. Aizen and Urahara had a (VERY) brief conversation about the Soul King, when Aizen was being sealed, and all we got from it is that Aizen holds the Soul King in utter contempt and does not even consider him to be human (referring to the King as an 'it'), while Urahara defends the status quo in spite of being an exile. That conversation is all the information we ever got about the King or the nature of his existence. Whether the Soul King was actually omnipotent while he was still alive is irrelevant, because with his retrocausal abilities and own brute strength, Yhwach was already literally in a league of his own, and with the power boost he got from absorbing the Soul King, he should have become utterly untouchable.

I have seven primary gripes with the ending of Bleach. You could sum them all up as "the story contradicted itself," but these are specific points in which the story contradicted itself, in rapid succession.

1.) Reality cannot exist without the Soul King. We are told this repeatedly by multiple reliable sources, and the plot revolved around this truth. The ending contradicts this with no explanation.

2.) Yhwach's own raw power made him someone who could not be beaten by the people who fought him. Neither Ichigo, nor Aizen, nor anyone else who went to the Soul palace, was Yhwach's equal in strength, and that was before he consumed the Soul King. And yet even after massively increasing his power by absorbing the Soul King, he still somehow lost anyway. (This could be handwaved as shonen, but it's still grossly ignoring their own power scaling, and would be the equivalent of Episode 1 Dragon Ball Z Goku pre-Raditz somehow pulling a win against Freiza out of his ass.)

3.) Yhwach's unique Ability, Almighty, allows him to ignore cause and effect, and even retroactively edit events to bring himself back to life if he were to ever die, or to give himself the upper hand in a fight if he were to ever begin to lose. Somehow, Ichigo, Aizen, Tsukushima, Ryuken, and Isshin were able to overcome this, when they had no abilities at their disposal that could, and land a fatal blow. The only person who could have possibly fought Yhwach was Tsukishima, but even then, I am certain he would eventually lose, because they would just get into an endless edit war with reality, which Yhwach will win because he has far more raw power than Tsukishima and would simply outlast him.

4.) Somehow, the fatal blow they landed stuck, when Yhwach should have been perfectly capable of just shrugging it off and editing events so he was never struck down. He can retroactively bring HIMSELF back to LIFE when he's killed, and can invent traps that never existed by changing cause an effect to make it as though he did. The blow that 'weakened' him should have never been able to land.

5.) Somehow, the fatal blow was actually able to kill him, when he is totally immune to everything he understands, and as the progenitor of the Quincy, he understood the Quincy trick that was used against him.

6.) Somehow, the fatal blow even hit at all, when his precognition should have shown it coming and given him plenty of time to simply step out of the way; Yhwach is not an enemy that ambushes or surprise attacks can possibly work on.

7.) Even if there is a valid explanation for all of this, and it can all be explained away, the manga completely failed to do this, which means even if sense could be made of the nonsensical, it is still fundamentally a colossal failure from a writing standpoint.

The biggest problem I have with all of this are 1, 3, and 7. Yhwach should never have been defeatable once he boosted his power, and even if there's an explanation for all of this, it sure as hell wasn't provided in the manga, so it's still a failure. Likewise, the nature of the Soul King was absolutely pivotal to the end of the series and, ultimately, the entire plot of the whole story, and yet we NEVER got any explanation for how it worked. It feels as though Ichigo and Soul Society fell ass-backwards into some sort of loophole in a set of rules that we never had explained to us.
 
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@Lord-Raine Soul reaper Tatsuki has been a thing since early Bleach. There's a Kubo-drawn full page image of her with a zanpakuto that's a bit like Renji's true bankai (animal skin into weapon) but with a fox instead of a baboon. It was in one of the volumes or the first character book (volume 20 or older).

For everyone:

As much as I like Bleach (I write fanfiction for it), there is absolutely no doubt the series emphasized the "rule of cool" so much it sacrificed consistency and characterization, and ended up running on plot holes starting with the fullbring arc, which not only violated the spiritual power laws established by the Ichigo/Kenpachi fight, it didn't even work within its own explanation.

Go ahead, look at the description of what fullbring is. Now, somehow that managed to steal some of Ichigo's real soul reaper powers when he didn't even have them.

Or, remember when Ichigo first returned to Soul Society from the Royal dimension?  Remember how fast he was and how his movement couldn't be seen by Candace and the other two sternritter? Remember when Ichigo needed to get away so he could stop Yhwach/Juha Bach before he even got into the dimension? How Ichigo could have killed him before he became omniscient and omnipotent?

And then he gets stopped by the three who couldn't even see him move 3 chapters earlier.

I really like Bleach, and I liked some of the awesome reveals like the true Zangetsu and how Masaki was a quincy. There are some genuinely brilliant things that happened, some of which were planned right from the start.

But the plot has been fundamentally broken since the fullbring arc, and to pretend otherwise is nonsense.

Even the 20th anniversary chapter was fundamentally broken. Yamamoto and Aizen die and suddenly hell is going to crash into the living world? Since when was Aizen (who's still alive, mind you) so fundamental to keeping hell back that he wasn't already replaced and someone else taking his place? It's not a spiritual pressure thing because Ichigo and Kenpachi Zaraki both have more than Yamamoto.

And how was Ichigo able to stay in the world of the living? And since Ichigo is a soul (Tessai cut his chain of fate, Ichigo is not alive, Kisuke probably modified Ichigo's body not to rot while growing at a human rate) and Orihime's human, does that mean she ages and dies an old woman while Ichigo stays young?

(Okay, I 100% mentioned that last part just to mess with people's heads - you're welcome).

But, in all fairness, because Bleach is so broken, fanfiction authors have so much more freedom to make stuff up. It's a double edged sword.
 
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honestly, i didnt hate it but i do really wish this wasn't as rushed as it clearly was. i dont know if that was a boruto-esque setup at the end there, but considering there hasnt been any bleach continuations outside of the LNs i assume that hasn't happened. yet. lol.
orihime and ichigo + rukia and renji ending up together was also cute. honestly, i could go for another 100 chapters of just SOL with the four of them having to take care of their kids
 

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