This is going to start as a vent and then transition into me being honestly a little nuts about Bleach filler, but man, this morning I received the FROSTIEST AO3 comment, which was a pretty atrocious way to start a Tuesday. Because I was like, well, I didn't actually need any help feeling bad about myself, I'm good at that on my own, but thanks I guess!! Tuesday morning is just. So early in the day and so early in the week for that.

My traditional response to this is to write more, and put more words between me and whatever thing I wrote before, but today I had meetings scheduled from 7-10:30PM, which meant I'd have to wait until after that to do any running away. But then the meetings ran over, and now I actually just have to write a bunch of meeting-related emails (and this very important post LOL), so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

BUT. Sometime after 9:30 I started to lose my damn mind and ensconced part of myself in one of B3's beloved pastimes, Boring Bleach LARP, and it was a very good time, all is resolved

Because we were talking about political capital and what factors can compel someone to expend it and the general tendency to safeguard it above all else, and I was like, man, considering Hitsugaya appears to have basically no strategy around his political capital, he's doing very well! Because while I think Hitsugaya is successfully strategic in a lot of different avenues, I'd be hard pressed to be convinced that the kind of political capital development/maintenance I'm talking about is on that list. He is constantly involved in random nonsense that almost certainly have more potential political consequences than gains (no one cares if you mount a *successful* defense against the Bount, but it does matter if it goes very poorly and then requires everyone else to also have to get involved. See also: those dinosaur clone arrancar in the Advance Team filler, the amount of meaningless commuting he and Matsumoto did in Movie 1; transporting the King's Seal in Movie 2 (and literally everything else about that movie); running around Rukongai with the 11th in Movie 3; Hell Gate shenanigans in Movie 4; taking care of the 11th during the Bount Arc, etc.) The Gotei seems to have generally pretty low standards as far as what you can get away with and what your reputation can weather (unless Hollowfication is involved), but that is a whole lot of nonsense with no inherent payoff. The most motley resume, the results of most of which were poor to middling! No political strategist in their right mind would advise any of this. (Luckily this is not a job that is appears anyone has ever heard of in the Gotei.)

But basically everyone respects and trusts him! Not just to put in the time and do the work off on his own where they don't have to deal with it. Other captains are out here regularly taking orders from Hitsugaya in Bleach filler. I don't actually think we as an audience have ever witnessed a reason why they should, but they don't seem to have any reservations about it. I'd say it's because none of them have any concept of political strategy either but I think half of them actually do?? And yet. I feel like this is like the one thing Hitsugaya puts zero thought into and ends up reaping huge dividends from, at the same time as a lot of the things he actually works for are doing their damndest to not pay off. Just to spite him, probably.