Okay, so…. going back over the wolfmen stuff in the final arc, Kubo talks about “beasts”/“animals” depending on what english translation you’re looking at, but there’s some specific terminology that gets glossed over.
The phrase [復讐の獣]: “Beast of Revenge,” appears but only the once, and this uses the more conventional word for “Beast,” [獣] Kemono. (This is also the one he uses when talking about Hollows in slightly strange terms that one time.) But otherwise he actually uses a different word for it:
chikushou[畜生]
(oh boy this got stupid long after all… cutting preview here for space…)
Thinking about how all the nice and kind characters in Bleach seems to get punished only for being nice and kind. Not in the actual plot most of the times, but often just by being forgotten and sidelined. I was thinking about Jushiro in the last arc and it just popped into my head other characters who got sidelined in similar ways and honestly all the nice characters end up like that. [Spoilers ahead] Jushiro never gets a proper fight and he is the ONLY Captain (novels included) to never get a bankai. He never gets an actual resolution in the last arc and even his big moment gets brushed aside by Aizen. He gets forgotten and everyone moves on in literally two pages (Also, related to the fact that he doesn’t have a big fight ever, he is one of the only two captains to never be featured on a volume cover. Sad). And it got me thinking that Jushiro is the nicest (arguably the only nice) Captain in the divisions. Don’t get me wrong, I love Toshiro, Hirako, Byakuya and everyone but they all kinda have a bad personality compared to the nicest characters. I am not saying they are bad people or their spots in the plot aren’t deserved, only that actually nice and kind people never get the same treatment as rude, more “unpleasant” (personality-wise) characters.
Like, sure, maybe Jushiro had just rotten luck and he never got a time to shine, but it’s the same for all the nicer characters. Taking the main 6, arguably Chad and Orihime are far nicer than everyone else (ok I love Renji and Uryu but you get my point. Ichigo even makes it a whole point of having a ~cool and edgy~ persona and Rukia’s favourite word seems to be ‘fool’. They are all very good people but you get what I mean). Orihime and Chad are the only two of them that get cut from the final arc up to the very last possible moment. There is barely a mention of them in Heuco Mundo with Urahara and while Orihime at least lands (1) moment for herself fighting alongside Ichigo, Chad gets completely forgotten the moment they take their eyes off of him. Chad seems to get the shorter end of the stick every time since he’s also the first “goodie” to go down in Soul Society, he never gets to fight an Espada in Hueco Mundo and well he gets to do whatever he was doing in the last arc with Ganju. Orihime gets SOME time but at some point her whole character gets thrown away and all that’s left of her is Ichigo, so I don’t know how better it is. They get some vindication in the Fullbringer arc but as soon as the others arrive they get conveniently kicked out of the plot.
Honestly I could go on forever. My son Hanataro has a similar fate, but he (regrettably) was a very side character so yeah. It was to be expected. Isane as well. Even among the Vice Captains it’s kind of the same thing since Momo has maybe 2 spoken lines in the last arc.
I am not saying that only nice people get forgotten by Kubo since Shinji (my beloved) was sidelined just as badly in the last arc, and I am not saying that the characters that did get the spotlight didn’t deserve it, but I am saying that there is a pattern in my opinion for the nicer ones. Maybe Kubo thought they weren’t interesting enough, I don’t know, but I liked some of them and I got kind of annoyed thinking about it.
imma say it again, i truly do believe kubo made rangiku’s assault similar to sexual assault in order to highlight how toxic male pride can overshadow a woman’s pain. throughout gin’s entire crusade, never once did he think to take into consideration rangiku’s feelings on the whole kill-aizen plan when SHE was the one who got beat up by a sleaze and got a piece of her soul stolen, when SHE was the victim while gin was a witness, and yet gin let what little common sense he had go to waste and chose to follow his pride instead of stepping back. gin may not have had many options once he joined squad five, but he had an option to take rangiku WITH him when he joined the shinigami academy instead of leaving her behind. he had the choice to let HER choose how she wanted to deal with her grief instead of deciding for her that her tears would only go away if he killed aizen and changed the soul society. in the end, he accomplished nothing, and made the only girl who ever mattered to him cry over his dead body. all because he chose his pride over the woman who loved him more than anything else. all because his toxic male pride told him it was better dying alone and unloved rather than accepting tragedy and being a supportive man. gin’s sin wasn’t that he hated aizen and wanted vengeance (97% of the cast wanted that). gin’s sin was that he let his pride and his ego drive his decisions in the end, and that same pride and ego are what made him fail in the end and die a miserable sack of shit.
One of the letters we got asked for that Alphabet Ask Meme was about favorite relationships in Bleach, but after spending a full textbrick listing my top 90 favorite Bleach relationships it felt excessive to elaborate within the meme. But since one of my other ask meme answers was about wanting to see more Hitsugaya on my dash, lol, I should try to be the change I wish to see in the world. So…
Hinamori and Hitsugaya (Vol. 1)!
The first time we see them together, Hitsugaya is the third captain to mysteriously appear and comment on Renji’s state of dishabille post-Ichigo. Because like, at this point we know two things about Hinamori:
very fond of her captain
willing to start a shouting match with Byakuya to defend her friend Renji’s honor
We don’t really know that much about Hitsugaya. Mostly, that Renji thinks it would be a pain to serve under him. (Bear in mind Renji’s own captain, the one that he agreed to serve under, showed up to this scene purely to insinuate that Renji was honorless dirt and deserved prison, and like, I can’t imagine Renji would have expected Byakuya to respond differently.)
But in contrast to Byakuya, the first sustained Hitsugaya appearance we get is actually Casual Friday Hitsugaya:
Not that the way Hitsugaya regularly talks tends to be hyperformal, especially since he’s usually interacting with subordinates. Most of the time, he talks like any shounen anime boy. But to me this first intro feels like, REAL casual lol. The guy is elongating vowels and dropping syllables and casual katakana-ing all over the place. This is “Ichigo and Rukia have a rambunctious comedic aside” casual.
I love Casual Friday Hitsugaya deeply, as a general entity. But the reason I bring him up here is because this is the first time we see Hitsugaya and Hinamori interacting, and to me, it instantly lets us know that they have a very close relationship. They’re not just some rubbernecking captain and someone else’s friend. There’s more here.
Tragically, I have not documented every time Hitsugaya has ever said anything (…yet), but Casual Friday Hitsugaya seems pretty rare. We see him here, when he’s talking to Hinamori in confidence. The other two times that come to mind are when he’s talking to Matsumoto in confidence and intentionally trying to keep things light (after Ichimaru and Hinamori cross blades), and also once when he’s alone and just talking to himself (about Matsumoto). The Advance Team arc was basically Aloha Shirt Week for the Gotei 13, but even then Hitsugaya did not call on Casual Friday Hitsugaya. Three months of hell adjacent and the whole time his register of language pretty much stayed between “typical shounen anime boy informal” and “slightly more distant/authoritative.”
Casual Friday Hitsugaya is private, and he really only belongs to two people—Hinamori and Matsumoto. An entire register of language preserved for special occasions–that just warms me. It’s not Hitsugaya’s the only one who ever gets that casual, or that it’s like,innatelya big deal—but the facts that 1) this is how we MEET him, almost in diametric contrast to how we more regularly see him, and 2) he seems to have a really clear, regimented idea of how he’s going to be, in what register he is going to exist, with no mixed-use middles, is something I get a lot of mileage out of.
Something else that stands out to me about that first convo between the two of them is that Hitsugaya calls Aizen “Aizen no yatsu,” to Hinamori’s face, which LOL. HITSUGAYA. Rude??
The Reconciliation of Hitsugaya and Hinamori: Headcanons
Okay, it’s time. I decided to finally sit down and write all the headcanons and ideas I have around how Toshiro and Momo reconciled after Aizen’s defeat. I’ve scattered a lot of these ideas across my fanfics, with some having come up more than once in different or similar forms.
You can read this as either as platonic Hitsuhina or a shipping post, I really don’t mind either way. There’s also some brotp moments here (Momo and Shinji, Rangiku and Toshiro, and a smattering of others).
However, what started as wanting to make a simple list of headcanons quickly turned into a mega post. Firstly, it turns out I had a lot more headcanons then I thought, and I think it’s becomes more of an outline of the events that I headcanon took place in between the end of Fake Karakura Town arc and the Full Bringer arc.
And second, while this post is specifically for headcanons and my ideas based on my interpretation of the source material (mainly the manga), I’ve also done some analysis over in this post (I couldn’t help myself!). The analysis was originally going to be part of this post before it got too long. You don’t have to go read that post to know what’s going on with the headcanons, but if you’re interested and have some time, I would appreciate it if you could check it out!
these were fantastic Rays! I greatly enjoyed reading all of them :) It really shows the care and appreciation you have for these two characters, and like always, it enrichens the existing canon material! I feel like you’ve outlined and filled in the gaps so well from when we last saw the two at the end of the Fake Karakura Town Arc to the beginning of the Full Bringers Arc & Thousand Year Blood War Arc :) Kubo couldn’t not have done a better job than you for these two :))
I would love to see your ideas of Shinji and Momo’s meeting each other for the first time and working together and the Hitsuhina Reconcilliation in story! Also, Toushiro having to fight Hyorinmaru is such an interesting concept (and really calls back to the Zanpaktou Filler Arch!) I totally think this is a plausible take on Toushiro developing his bankai and would love to see your take on writing it :)
This feels like the kind of post that will languish in drafts for a year if I don’t write it right now, on a time limit, so here goes! This weekend involved a lot of Tourism and tams and my slow burn horror realization that all of the food was going to be held hostage by Socializing with the Regional Archetype Parents of my sister’s cohortmates. But before all that my family and I went to a museum and looked at glass flowers, so I spent a lot of time staring into the middle distance thinking about those.
Specifically, these ones:
These are plum blossoms, and they are made out of glass. HOW. WHAT. And rest assured, this iPhone snapshot does not do their uncanny verisimilitude justice. In person, it’s completely unreal. They were made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka in the late 19th century, and now I’m obsessed with them.
Even more specifically, I wanted to know:
Can Hitsugaya make flowers like these out of ice?
(For Hinamori, obviously. They are plum blossoms, after all.)
