#shinigamiology
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Akonposting
[Bleach 69]
I thought it was interesting that Akon doesn't refer to Mayuri as his Captain here, but as the Chief/Bureau Director (of SRDI)--he uses 局長 (kyokuchou) instead of 隊長 (taichou). I guess it makes sense, given that he's speaking about Mayuri's scientific capacities rather than his military ones. (Specifically, he calls Rukia's gigai a 作品 (sakuhin), which usually refers to works of art, which gives us a sense of how gigai creation is regarded in Soul Society. I mean, it can get you promoted to Zero Division, after all, but I'm tickled by the artistry of it beside whatever tf is going on with the gikon variations lolol.)
Akon calls Mayuri "Captain" in most other contexts (e.g. when he's shocked about Mayuri making the Glow Suit in TYBW, and when he's looking for Mayuri in the epilogue), which makes me feel like he alternates titles depending on context, which I just think is neat!
Like, how often does he make the switch, and is other codeswitching also involved between Lab Akon and Division Akon? And where, exactly, does he delineate between Division business and SRDI business? Wow, I love it.
It also reminds me of this scene from TBTP, where Mayuri is reinforcing the distinction between the two, and the way the rank hierarchy shifts between contexts:
[Bleach -103]
#akon#kurotsuchi mayuri#bleach language#shinigamiology#bleach カラー#bleach manga#bleach reread 2021#no brain just bleach
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[Bleach 080]
I think about these panels literally ALL. THE. TIME. I have thought about these panels in a thousand ways. Still, they baffle me. And I still have basically nothing to say about them.
I steadfastly believe that Renji is the kind of guy who would know who all the Captains and VCs were, both because he's a people person and because he'd see knowing who holds these ranks and speaking/acting in accordance with these ranks as a professional requirement. And if Renji calling Aizen 'Aizen-san' isn't going to change this, nothing will--not even Renji not knowing who Matsumoto's entire captain is.
Even if the current state of the Gotei is such that the divisions are highly fractured and there is very little inter-squad cohesion or communication, which I absolutely believe, there are still only thirteen of them. They are numbered! And assuming every issue of the SC is fairly similar to the one we see in Colorful Bleach, at least one magazine is actively attempting to cultivate cults of personality around these dumb captains, so it's not as though they're commanding their divisions entirely from behind green curtains.
So anyway, I'm like, okay, how could I see this working? I've chosen two options to tl;dr about.
Option A: We get insane with grammar
Option B: We method act
Option A: We get insane with grammar
In Matsmoto's line, the person she can't find is ウチの隊長さん (uchi no taichou-san). "Uchi" is a pronoun that has a variety of usages. One is a feminized form of speech, and, well, Matsumoto is a woman. But うちの (uchi no) can also be used by anyone to refer to things that belong to "the house"--or the family, the company, the farm, etc. So if we get insane with grammar, maybe we could argue that the captain Matsumoto's referencing is non-specific, is the Gotei's captain, and is simply *a* captain in the Gotei she had business with. Why Renji wouldn't just assume it was hers, given that we just talked about the fractured nature of Gotei governance, idk, but I mean, it could be Kyouraku. They know each other. [In the anime] people seem to give a lot of reports to Mayuri, too, so I guess it could be him, too. Yes, I think this is nutballs. Yes, it makes 90x more sense that she'd be talking about her captain.
The question Renji asks Matsumoto is: 乱菊さんとこの隊長って誰でしたっけ?
Again, I think the Viz translation makes sense here: "Who's your captain again?" In the Japanese line, my understanding is that he's talking about Matsumoto and this captain in conjunction with each other, and is trying to remember who the captain is. But I guess there might be some room for ambiguity? Like, "You and this captain--remind me who you were talking about?" At least in Japanese for Illiterates 101 (my lifetime enrollment), there are other more elementary ways he could ask who Matsumoto's captain was. So maybe we could read this situationally and say, well, Renji doesn't know who Matsumoto's trying to work with right now. Could be any captain! Which one are you talking about, Rangiku-san? Again, I don't actually think that makes sense, but WE'LL THROW IT OUT THERE.
Did you say "give it up, B3?" Hmmm. After some consideration... Nah!
Option B: We method act this.
Renji is standing around with Iba, Hinamori, and Matsumoto. They're all VCs now, but he definitely knows them better/perhaps more immediately in contexts other than their being VCs. Iba was his superior in the 11th, and Hinamori is his bff/classmate. (Or his douki, as Hitsugaya would say, LOL.) I don't know that there's any reason Renji and Matsumoto would know each other particularly well at this point, except that they're both loosely affiliated with Hisagi (though this is more true for Matsumoto in the anime and in omake paratexts than in the straight manga) and, having served under Ichimaru, Renji probably has some very vague sense of there being some connection to Matsumoto there.
I do think Renji and Matsumoto know each other socially, as two of the few extroverts in all of Soul Society. (Sidebar: Renji speaks politely but still casually to Matsumoto.) But I would be willing to believe that if that's the context in which one knows Matsumoto, she probably doesn't spend a lot of her downtime talking about work. Matsumoto is the work/life balance advocate the Gotei needs! I say this with acknowledgement that we definitely do hear Matsumoto canonically talk a lot about Hitsugaya in social contexts, whether complaining or disseminating random private information/photos, but I still feel like that's probably the exception rather than the rule--the exception we get to see because as the audience we don't care about the other stuff. (Well, we care. Here on Tumblr, the normal people website, where we definitely think about this series in a normal way.)
It's not like Renji doesn't know who Hitsugaya is, as a general person who exists in the world. Renji's friends with Hinamori, but Hinamori probably doesn't talk about him in a 10th-specific context, either. Renji's also not talking to Hinamori right at this moment, and I imagine it's hard to bring all these threads together on the fly when it's not something you really think about. Actually having out-of-context information about these people probably works against him for this, honestly.
Let's say we're Renji:
We're standing in a hallway with people we know in wildly different capacities. We're wearing our VC badge for the first time and it's all kind of official, but the information we've memorized about the Leadership Structure of the Gotei 13 is somewhat academic outside of divisions where we've had actual practical dealings, and isn't part of our fluent thought patterns and information recall.
Even as "which division are you!" is a normal thing to shout at some guy in the streets of the Living World, we haven't historically thought of Matsumoto as being attached to a division or a captain, because we've interacted with her superficially and socially far more often than the one or two times we have in a work context. If we gave ourselves enough time and were so inclined, sure, we could pull up our latent knowledge of the Leadership Structure of the Gotei 13 and superimpose that over Matsumoto and put together which division she was from and who her captain was.
Or we could just ask.
And once Iba answers, "Hitsugaya," we think, ohhhhhhh right right, of course.
Renji's line is あー例の天才児か.
例の (rei no) gives the phrase a sense of like, that thingy, the whatchacall. That 天才児 (tensaiji) one. (NB: 児 = child, which is information I would want to preserve in the line, since this detail will make it really obvious which captain we're talking about when they all show up in Chapter 81.) So I'd translate the line as, "Ahhhhh. That boy genius one."
Renji knows, he just doesn't necessarily actively know, if you know what I mean.
This matters and is interesting to me mostly for the mind mapping, and just thinking through what this world and information feels like to the characters themselves, rather than from our readerly POV. I THINK IT'S SO SEXY.
#bleach chapter 80 extended edition#matsumoto rangiku#abarai renji#bleach language#bleach headcanons#shinigamiology#bleach manga#bleach カラー#no brain just bleach
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[Bleach 083]
I am not really someone who wants to get really in the reeds about spiritual imagery and motifs and pinning those down--that is most certainly someone else's excellent project--but I wanted to take a moment here to look at all the elements that go into Kuukaku's cannon (not to be confused with Yamamoto's Kidou Cannon), because it provides an interesting template one might work from if you wanted to design some other high-level Soul Society ceremony or kidou practice.
Some observations/potentials/headcanons:
It's dawn, and this is important. Maybe the ceremony Kuukaku is drawing on relies on relationship to/power from the sun, or the sun serves as an anchor that taps into the heartbeat of this world in general. It is something that is tied, in some way, to a universe beyond oneself. (I was going to say 'maybe it needs to be dawn so the shinigami are looking into the sun and it takes longer for the Seireitei to realize a gigantic blue ball is careening toward them,' but assuming the sun rises in the east in Soul Society, that actually does not help this, haha.)
The cannon is adorned with shide, the white zigzag streamers we see associated with Shintou over here in our world. Suggestive of holy places, purification rituals.
Kuukaku is also drawing a circle around the cannon with a huge ink brush, which is reminiscent of the Buddhist ensou (圓相). Ensou "express a moment when the mind is free to let the body create" (Wiki). A circle can symbolize wholeness, perfection, emptiness, Enlightenment.
Similar to all of the kidou chants (as formalized in the Academy curriculum, whether Kuukaku considers herself a kidou practitioner or the keeper of an art that pre-exists shinigami calling it 'kidou'), lots of colors and animals involved here. (Worth noting that Kuukaku does actually mention a monkey grabbing a star with his right hand, for the Renjis in the house.) Also requires use of a sword. Zanpakutou?
But only for the first part. Kuukaku's final role in this ceremony makes use of her own arm, not a sword, in ways that require wrapped cloth and burning power and that her vassals do not seem to think was going to be an automatic/expected success--this ceremony is a BIG deal and no easy thing. (One wonders if this is what happened to Kuukaku's other arm.)
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[Bleach 083]
It's very important to me that everyone remembers that all of these captains' meetings happen in socks.
It's even more important to me that everyone know that when the ryoka alarm sounds and Zaraki immediately abandons the meeting and jets off to go fight the strongest ryoka he can find, he runs off in his socks.
It's even MORE important to me that everyone know that in between jetting out of the meeting and actually finding any ryoka, Zaraki has to stop at some point to find his shoes and put them on:
[Bleach 085]
It doesn't happen right outside the meeting room, because there's a fair amount of engawa out there, and it seems like you can clear a lot of real estate in the Seireitei without ending up on floor that you'd need shoes for (you can, if you wanted to, for instance, make it clear from the 10th to the 3rd in just socks), which makes me wonder where they put all of their shoes. Is there a cubby wall somewhere at the 1st? Did they all leave their shoes at home? Do they keep shoe bags in their shihakushou and just stuff 'em somewhere?
At what point in his zeal for imminent bloodshed did Zaraki stop and think, "shoot gotta put my Keds on"?
#zaraki kenpachi#shinigamiology#socktown#yes i know that tabi are more specific than 'socks' but to me that changes nothing here#bleach reread 2021#bleach manga#bleach カラー#no brain just bleach
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[Bleach 079]
I just think all of this is endlessly cool. The shadow of Renji contrasted against these weird cloaked guys and their reverse-IVs. This whole situation with the prison collar and the shroud but specifically the fact that the tubes are attached to the shroud and the shroud PULLS APART IN FOUR PIECES. I'm sure it's exactly as symbolic and arcane as the rest of the execution process (and the memorial process in the Hell chapter) but I'm just imagining these guys training at the Sarasota Clown College to make sure that they could get the showmanship of the four-way shroud tear just right; it has the feel of a handkerchief trick.
The aesthetic of this is so strange and anachronistic and since it's part of this execution ceremony that's so rarely used I feel like these tubes have just existed like this in Soul Society long before the Living World dreamed up either IVs or air tools. And that's before we even consider the kidou-powered black-stuff shackles.
The last panel I just included because Rukia is pretty and I like the way the light against her hair contrasts with the shadow on Renji in the first panel. Also because Renji calls Ichigo a shinigami with orange-colored hair, which is ***clearly*** foreshadowing for his rebellion against Byakuya because Byakuya clearly described the color as "daylily." It's #FDA900, Renji, get it right!
#abarai renji#kuchiki rukia#shinigamiology#bleach manga#bleach カラー#bleach reread 2021#no brain just bleach
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[Bleach 080]
Things I Love Thinking in Circles About
How big, area-wise, the Seireitei is
What regular Gotei work looks like when we're not looking
What did the early bird VCs do the entire time they were sitting around in Conference Room 2 waiting for people to show up?
--
1. How big, area-wise, the Seireitei is
According to Yoruichi, walking from one gate to the next would take 10 days, which initially makes the Seireitei seem really damn big. The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan has a population of 120,000 people. If we're meant to believe that there are 6000 shinigami (citation: Ooetsu?), I find it difficult to believe that the Seireitei's population would be much larger than 120k, if that. (Personally, I proceed as though it's a lot less than that.) Like the Seireitei, Ann Arbor is also circular, ringed not by a Seireimon but a necklace of Interstates, but it's only like 10 miles across. It really wouldn't take that long to walk 1/4 of the way around its rim.
You'd have to walk around a quarter of the entire country of Spain for it to take 10 days:
Obviously Google is not taking into account tired feet or needing to like, sleep, with this estimate, but STILL. The Seireitei is not the size of SPAIN.
A) Let's say it would really take 10 days. This gate-to-gate trek might need to take terrain into account (which Google sometimes does and often doesn't lol). The area Ichigo et al ended up in seemed pretty civ where the gate matches up with Junrinan, but maybe a shade north and the terrain is much more difficult!
B) Let's say it really would not take 10 days. Yoruichi might have been exaggerating, because she doesn't want to walk to another damn gate and also it's not as though there aren't also shinigami waiting at...the other gates... So she nips that in the bud and directs her party's attentions elsewhere.
Or maybe she knows that even this close to the Seireitei, in Rukongai time gonna wime, and space-time are not going to exist in a constant relationship with each other.
C) Let's say Matsumoto's "half-day" comment probably isn't about geography, either. Half a day would make the Seireitei approximately the size of like, Indianapolis? (population 882k, area 368 sq. miles/950 sq. km) if we were basing it purely on area. But also, shunpou?? So I really feel like the "length of time it would take people to arrive"half day" comment is less a function of physical distance and more about the fact that they're all busy and have tasks they'd need to extricate themselves from before they started walking/running/sauntering/gamboling over.
Which leads me to--
2. What regular Gotei work looks like when we're not looking
I think we've seen enough evidence that the way the Gotei has built itself does not lend itself well to rapid response. Their response to the ryoka invasion was not particularly rapid, nor organized. Their response to AIZEN'S MURDER was nearly non-existent. Winter War prep was also kind of rough, and I guess TYBW 1 was kind of a surprise attack, but I think my point still stands that it's just not their forte. I think part of this is because the Gotei is legitimately just kind of bad at being functional; we all know this. They all know this. I think the other part is that rapid response is very, very hard.
Given that they are heavenly court guards, you'd think rapid response to potential threats would be more of a priority, but you could say that about a lot of real-life things that, in reality, do not work that way (and perhaps cannot, in the absence of radical reinvention). To use a near universal example, see Exhibit C: COVID responses lol. Even outside of that very particular example, I'm part of a direct action organization and even though it's relatively small and its politics are activist-minded, rapid response is still very, very hard.
I just love thinking about, okay, where are the Gotei bottlenecks, what's the red tape, where's the sludge in the workings, where to the capacities fall through, what jobs haven't been invented that they really need, what jobs exist that really shouldn't, how much is logistical, how much is political, how much is cultural, how much is personal? *this is my bulletproof kiiiiiiink*
If it's going to take 4-12 hours to get all the officers in one place, it makes me think that yes, the alarms are going off, but it's a rapid response priority only for those who were assigned to quadrant 6 or whatever. Yes, this meeting call went out, but the threat is not yet at a level where you need to drop everything and haul ass. It's serious, but not more serious than the rippling consequences of ignoring the essential tasks you were already engaged in that are really going to fuck things up in domino-like ways if you don't do them right now.
For Ichigo et al, rescuing Rukia is Priority #1. For the Gotei, the ryoka invasion is this major world event that slammed on top of their already-full calendars of other shit they're supposed to do today. Big meeting? That's great, but it's going to have to wait or else a whole deployment's going to ship out late, the payroll office is going to close before those forms get signed, and Z isn't going to have the Y report that's required in order to start the X project.
3. What did the early bird VCs do the entire time they were sitting around in Conference Room 2 waiting for people to show up?
The meeting was called to address Ichimaru's behavior in dealing (or not dealing) with the ryoka, so we can assume it was called relatively quickly after Yamamoto got wind of that. Renji just took Rukia to Fancy Prison, but it doesn't seem like there's yet been dissemination of an official report, because he doesn't actually know if Ichigo got killed by Ichimaru or not. But the meeting is still going on when the ryoka invade successfully via The Sky.
In the interim, Ichigo et al hung out with the denizens of Junrinan, met Ganju, walked out to bumfuck to find Kuukaku's house, got introduced to the cannon and the cannonballs, practiced with the cannonballs, ate dinner, gained proficiency with the cannonballs, and blasted themselves through the sky.
Which makes it seem like the VCs who got there early literally did have to wait around for half a day before everyone showed up. Keep in mind THEIR MEETING DID NOT EVEN HAVE AN AGENDA. They were just supposed to stage in Conference Room 2!
So what did they do? Did they bring any work with them? Did they shoot the shit for six hours? Play games? Nap?
...Orgy?
(Orgy.)
#matsumoto rangiku#shinigamiology#bleach headcanons#bleach manga#bleach カラー#bleach reread 2021#no brain just bleach
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Ikkaku has a bigger vocabulary than me. ToT Why did I spend all that time in school!! I could just done 6 years at the academy and then... several decades... in the ghost army instead
[Bleach 087]
A "styptic"?! Granted, I have no medical training, but I've never used that word before. But I figure Ikkaku has a lot of practical experience with blood and has probably also spent a lot of time at the 4th over the decades.
What's funny is that I did not initially read Ikkaku's lines as needing the word "styptic", so it felt a lot less erudite:
His line here is 血止めをしねえなら / 拭く意味はねえよ, which I'd translated as, "If you can't stop the bleeding, there's no point in wiping it away."
血 means "blood" and 止め means "stop" and the rest of that first line is the act of not doing something. It's a versatile construction you can use to do/use/have/make a noun or turn a noun into a verb, so I was like sure, let's [not] do a "bleeding stop."
But it turns out that if you look up 血止め, you do get "styptic," which is a word the English language has. If you Google it, you mostly get chidome bands, which are used to restrict blood flow to your lower legs, like compression socks. But you also get chidomegusa (blood-stop grass), which is probably what Ikkaku is using. The more you know! 🌈
Anyway, "Wiping it away is a poor remedy. Better to apply a styptic" sounds so posh. "A poor remedy"? "Better to apply"? A STYPTIC? I mean, as posh as you can sound when talking about bleeding everywhere. I kind of love the idea that maybe he's paraphrasing someone at the 4th--someone who'd use the word "styptic" on the daily. Either someone who's attended him, or maybe even someone he sought out to supply him with his styptic. Like, I feel like Iemura would say some shit like that.
MAYBE IKKAKU AND IEMURA MET EACH OTHER AT THE THIRD-SEAT HOLIDAY MIXER. Iemura tried to get Ikkaku to join the Shinigami Men's Society, so the org would have some real street cred, but Ikkaku said he "didn't have time" (had to go do mani pedis with his boyfriend, Yumichika). Ikkaku still got a scrip for styptic out of the interaction, though.
(Option 2 is that Ikkaku learned about styptic from Zaraki, who learned about it from Unohana. You know, back in the day. Zaraki being all about the styptic and sharing this knowledge around to the whole division would track with his meticulousness about his hair products, honestly!)
#honestly so obsessed with the ikkaku iemura friendship now#ikkaku says they're 'friends with benefits' and no he does not know what that phrase usually entails#he also constantly says he 'has a guy' but it's literally just iemura#b3 why are you so obsessed with iemura idk why is he so obsessed with ME#madarame ikkaku#shinigamiology#bleach headcanons#bleach manga#bleach reread 2021#bleach カラー#no brain just bleach
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[Bleach 071]
IT'S BLORBO FROM MY SHOWS, IT'S BLORBO FROM MY SHOWS!!!! I shout, except it's a shot of a bunch of empty buildings. Rukongai my beloved. <3
This is a great environment shot, for anyone needing to describe Junrinan. You can see the mountains off in the distance, and, if you look in the opposite direction, you immediately see the Seireitei:
Which is pretty bananas in terms of the sharp architectural distinctions between the two. At least until you think about how sharp urban ecotones can be in real life, and then you're like, ah, that tracks.
Before Yoruichi tells us Rukongai's name, we hear it referred to as the "western slums" in the official Gotei warning order, a term Yoruichi then echoes (in the Viz). I think they chose "slum" because it makes the most sense in context; Yoruichi describes Rukongai as the poorest but most free place in Soul Society.
In the Japanese, the term both the Gotei alert and Yoruichi use is 郛外区 (fugaiku), which isn't explicitly a word for slum (and, briefly Googling around, seems to be mostly Bleach-specific). It uses the characters for what Jisho defines as "earthwork enclosure around a castle"* combined with "outside" + "district" which is, ignoring any connotations/context, just the place outside the castle/city. Again, for the purposes of emphasizing the message and specifying the vocabulary, "slum" is efficient and meaning-dense.
*"郛" is not part of the usual kanji one might learn; it's part of a family of kanji that in manga tends to be used for stylistic flare/to connote feelings of the ancient/the literary.
BUT, also consider: If you were an Academy student writing your final paper for Sociology 437: Urban Planning in the Spirit World and Environmental Justice, I feel like there's so much fodder here for fun worldbuilding/history-making:
Does the Gotei ALWAYS officially refer to Rukongai by its geographic designation (fugaiku) rather than by its population (Rukongai, home to wandering souls)? It's an interesting rhetorical choice, given that their job directly concerns those souls, but calling it "the place outside" in official documents/alerts explicitly privileges other information.
Yoruichi says it's "commonly known" as "Rukongai" and uses different quotation/name marks for fugaiku vs. Rukongai, so they're not seen as equivalent names, per se; one might argue that even though it's the Gotei-official term for RUkongai, in actuality it is a way of refusing to name Rukongai, except in terms of its geographic description relative to the Seireitei. It's not a Place, capital P, just something that exists relative to our Place.
Who came up with "Rukongai"? The answer can't just be "Rukongai did" because it's massive and splintered and doesn't appear to have a central governing body. Some ancient Rukongai scribe ghost? The nobles? I'm into both these options. Or maybe it was a mail-in poll.
Was there, historically, an "earthwork enclosure around the castle"? Obviously there's a gate that we're told mostly lives in the sky, but back in the day was there also originally a different, 24/7 wall?
#rukongai#bleach headcanons#bleach manga#bleach カラー#bleach reread 2021#shinigamiology#no brain just bleach
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i know we like to snatch bits from the omakes and pretend soul society is a big friendship circle but i think it's hilarious how much they all cannot stand each other. each squad probably has a burn book. i'm rewatching the soul society arc and when you strip it back the seireitei would be MISERABLE to live in - this is 2001 and they don't even have internet! and that's not to mention the slums DIRECTLY OUTSIDE. if i was a member of the main 4 i would have immediately collapsed upon entry due to how rotten the vibes are.
I love the omake and the fun, silly world it presents the Gotei 13 in. However, I do agree with you, in that I don’t think the majority of the Gotei 13 members actually get along. There’s plenty of evidence in the Soul Society arc that actually there’s a lot of animosity between squads.
It's funny--thinking about this ask, I feel like the Gotei captains live two lives amidst each other. On one hand, they don't know each other well; they don't see a lot of each other. No one likes the captain's meetings. Their teamwork was so bad Third Captain Amagai had to be the one to suggest "what if you guys practiced working together tho…" Everyone thought Aizen got straight-up murdered and had his corpse pinned to a building and all his colleagues barely batted an eye! The lack of concern was deafening! I love absolutely all of this. On the other hand, they often seem to respect each other as professionals, even if they have little personal regard for one another. No one likes Mayuri, but they all admit his talent; and at least after the Soul Society arc, in situations where they feel it's necessary, they *will* take orders from each other without expending undue energy getting into pissing matches. (This does not stop Byakuya and Zaraki from fighting *each other* in Hueco Mundo.) I'm really attached to the dichotomy of this; I feel like it gives their contempt for each other a little extra zest, in its specificity.
Right now I'm writing post-TYBW interactions within the Gotei with the addition of the Vizard captains, and it is SO much fun, because they don't hate each other; but at the same time, everyone's stressed out and deeply suspicious of and/or frustrated with each other, and the benefit of the doubt/presumption of respect is burning off like it's a fire sale, lololol.
The VCs seem to have it together a bit more as a collective, though obviously there are limits to this as well. I think it helps that all the women have banded together until the banner of the Shinigami Women's Association, and that on the men's side almost everyone is at least friends with Renji, even if they may not be friends with each other. I feel like Matsumoto/Nanao (Matsumoto with the power of her extraversion and Nanao with her intense investment in feminism vs. the brass ceiling) and Renji are really holding it down when it comes to inter-division VC relations. The VCs would win the trophy for "best friendships outside their own division" all day--though again, I think a lot of this is quite recent, given Renji being a relatively new VC, Kira and Hisagi only recently bonding more intensively post-Tousen/Ichimaru, and aside from Renji a lot of the VCs being pretty new to the job. I imagine after TBTP the collegiality even in the rosiest parts of the Gotei social scene took a giant nosedive!
We see a lot of Joe Shinigami hating on the 4th (and in the Third Captain Amagai arc, also the 3rd a bit), and we see the 11th being generally antagonistic, but I'd bet that most Joe Shinigami don't interact with people outside of their division all that often, and tend not to think about them at all. Part of me wonders if some of the antagonism against the 4th, aside from drawing on "lol those healer losers" brospeak, has to do with the fact that the 4th is the only division outside of this own that Joe Shinigami actually HAS had repeated interactions with (as a patient). Familiarity breeds contempt, gives the catty muscles something to latch onto, and it all escalates from there.
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Kubo has stated that there are tenure and merit increases to Gotei Captain salaries. So like, do you think Shinji, Kensei, and Rose got to come in at their old salary, or did Yamamoto make them take the pay cut and start at Captain Step 1 Base Salary all over again?
I don’t know why I’m asking this; it’s definitely Option 2!
#did Hinamori Kira and Hisagi get paid overload while their divisions didn't have captains? I BET NOT#the real question is where did the unused money from Tousen Aizen and Ichimaru's salaries end up? did the annual Seireitei budget#end up with a big surplus that went back to gen op?#they sure didn't set it aside in a fund for disaster-related mental health services did they!#shinigamiology#bleach headcanons#no brain just bleach#*where did the money go central 46*#WHO ARE WE? Joe Shinigami!#WHAT DO WE WANT? health benefits!
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IBA CLAN AIN'T NUTTIN TA FUCK WIT
[Bleach 080]
I've said it before and I'll say it again, but when I think about how the Gotei functions at least 50% of the time I am thinking of it functioning like the Girl Scouts does. This scene feels very validating in that regard. Boy Scouts will show up for anything, including internal meetings, in full uniform. In Girl Scouts, when are you supposed to be wearing your uniform? Unclear, no one knows, maybe just during important ceremonies and when selling cookies. The same rules appear to apply for the VC badges here!
It doesn't surprise me that Renji hasn't had occasion to wear his badge, since he's been VC since like yesterday. But how long has Iba been VC? It's likely pure ceremony that they're required to wear it now. It establishes a sense of gravity within the situation, even though their mandatory meeting doesn't even have an agenda. They're just supposed to hurry up and wait. It's not as though anyone thinks the ryoka are going to see the badge and be like, "Oh, word? You're a vice-captain in the Gotei? Well, I'll see myself out, then. My bad!"
I'm not sure, really, what to make of this, but Iba's line--the first thing we ever hear a VC other than Renji say!--is:
こんとに強制されてハメる (hameru) んだワシ (washi) も初めてなんじゃけえの
ハメる (hameru): The verb 嵌める (hameru) is to slip something on/envelop something, like a ring; or gloves; or, in this case, the VC badge. But Iba chooses to use the katakana instead of the kanji here. When written in katakana, the innuendo can also be... to fuck? I don't know if that innuendo is his intention, or if he just wants to come across as very casual, but maybe Iba really hates the VC badge lol. I wouldn't blame him. In modern sports they have a similar thing for captains' bands, but they're elastic, and those are annoying. This big unwieldy piece is probably so much worse!
ワシ (washi): This is a masculine "I" pronoun with an old-school vibe that could be used when talking to subordinates or younger men (it's also a Hiroshima thing; see below), which suggests that although Renji and Iba are the same rank within the Gotei, Iba is older (and that this matters in some fashion). Hinamori reinforces this by calling him Iba-san, while Renji is Abarai-kun.
じゃけえ: This ending is another sign that Iba's speaking Hiroshima Japanese for some reason. That + his sunglasses + general tough guy aes = gangsta vibes.
With that set of justifications, I, personally, would translate Iba's line:
also this is why I don't get paid to translate things
👐
#iba tetsuzaemon#shinigamiology#bleach headcanons#bleach language#bleach manga#bleach reread 2021#bleach カラー#no brain just bleach
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[Bleach 072]
I <3 the version of the Gotei where the official, written into military record, carved into posterity, names for things are things like "Doom Blast" and "Evil Travelers." IT'S SO GOOD. I think it's amusing that the Viz chose to translate "ryoka" but not "seireimon," because both are Bleach-specific vocabulary, but idk, "gate" rolls off the tongue better than "evil travelers." My guess is that it wasn't clear that "ryoka" was a term that was going to get as much play as it ultimately does, and Yoruichi had just spent a page defining and naming the "Seireitei," so calling this wacky skyfall gate the "Seireimon" seemed appropriate.
Fun(?) Fact: 旅禍 (ryoka) is a combination of the kanji for "travel" + "misfortune" and what we'd probably colloquially call in English "the Pandemic" is written コロナ禍 (corona ka), using the same kanji as the "ka" in "ryoka."
But anyway, these guys are all at the gate because as we saw at the beginning of Chapter 71, an alert goes out with instructions to notify "regions 3-7" about the ryoka threat in West Rukongai. But they don't have... jurisdiction? to do anything unless the ryoka actually come inside the gates, so they're just here to Gotei and chill. It's funny that these boundary lines are drawn so strictly in this moment, given that once Yamamoto slaps down those Special Wartime Measures, tracking down the ryoka comes across like a scattered free for all. But maybe everyone who wasn't a captain/VC living out their best cowboy lives really did hew to the original regions/jurisdictions the whole time. But if they did, their grid search of the premises did not go particularly well.
Given how much of the Seireitei appears to already have been broken into the 13 Divisions, I wonder how these regions work. Maybe the Seireitei is additionally sectioned into regions to help mitigate the possibility of each Division cordoning off pieces of the city that become its "turf," minus their actual barracks/offices. Like, it's a concession, where the Gotei is like, "Okay, the Captains can have full autonomy over their units and get to be gang bosses in that way, but we can't be having turf wars in the city, so let's nationalize all of this and make little patrol regions that do not correspond to the layout of the Divisions in the city. So, this afternoon, Regions 3-7, which are on the west end of the Seireitei, will be staffed by Divisions 3 and 9's best and brightest!"
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You can't kill my vibe
Like many others, I have been both enchanted and intrigued by the new TYBW opening theme song, "Stars." It has everything! Modern living world fashion! Coffee shop AU! Karaoke sing off! But I think the thing that has really captured everyone’s attention is whatever the hell Ichigo is doing with that guitar.
[TYBW OP 2]
At first glance there’s some things we can infer. Ichigo’s zanpakutou has been reforged and now he’s a dual wielder. He absolutely has no idea what he’s doing and needs to relearn how to use his sword, so of course he’s going to be clumsy and awkward in the beginning. But if Ichigo has one thing going for him, it’s gonna be his ability to just Square Peg Round Hole his way through any situation. No technique needed, if you can blunt force trauma your way through.
Notably, there are very few characters in Bleach with multiple swords (Ukitake and Kyouraku) and both of them I think we can go so far as to say have achieved mastery, as they have bankai and are Old (TM). So that’s great! Ichigo has some role models to look up to and can be inducted into the dual-wielder Hall of Fame!
Taking a closer look at the guitar in the OP though, it’s not just any double-neck guitar. Ichigo appears to be holding a Gibson EDS-1275, which is the “coolest guitar in rock” according to the Wikipedia page. While never widely used, the guitar was played by a couple of famous musicians such as Elvis Presley, Steve Miller (Steve Miller Band), Don Felder (Eagles), and Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin). I’ll give it to the wiki page, that is pretty damn cool.
[And just for the sake of being thorough: Japanese guitar maker Ibanez produced a double-neck guitar that was based off the Gibson EDS-1275. It looks virtually identical to the Gibson (at least to my untrained eye).]
The Eagles are most famous for their song "Hotel California" and Don Felder famously used a white EDS-1275 for performances of that song. There are lots of various themes and interpretations of "Hotel California", many of which are fun to apply to Ichigo and Bleach. The Eagles vocalist said, “Lyrically, the song deals with traditional or classical themes of conflict: darkness and light, good and evil, youth and age, the spiritual versus the secular. I guess you could say it's a song about loss of innocence” which I think is some interesting fodder to mull on.
BUT! Ichigo is holding a red guitar! And someone else famously had a custom-made, cherry-red EDS-1275. And that someone was Jimmy Page. Page was arguably the one who popularized the EDS-1275, as he famously played it during live performances of "Stairway to Heaven."
[Jimmy Page in 1973]
I don’t have much to say about "Stairway to Heaven" other than it also seems to be a song about death. However, on a very literal sense, the song is about, well, a stairway to heaven. And you know who is ascending into the heavenly skies in TYBW???
[TYBW ep14]
So. Many. Stairs.
#I've connected the dots#B3 you didn't connect shit#I've connected them#I originally thought I was going to go somewhere with this and then I absolutely did not#no brain just bleach#kurosaki ichigo#bleach tybw#bleach meta#bleach anime#shinigamiology#actually is this really shinigamiology? it's about ichigo who is sort of a shinigami#but it's really more about guitars
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tbt to that time someone in the Seireitei had a candlemaking side hustle
where the draw was that each candle was meant to evoke different types of reiatsu, as described by the traditionally florid prose of candle/perfume descriptions. There was some press around the candles' potentially homeopathic effects, and though the 12th put a stop to that pretty quickly, some shinigami had standing orders for the candles because some users swore that burning the candles could help augment one's own reiatsu. (One wing of the 3rd Division barracks did burn down, but that's neither here nor there.) You could commission custom blends if you paid for a reiryoku reading, which the candlemakers then used to whip up a candle specialized to you.
Where things got really tricky was when the founder of the Gotei Candle Co. tried to step it up and offer a limited edition Gotei Captain candle set, where each candle was meant to describe/evoke the reiatsu signatures of, well, the Gotei Captains. You can't normally brand things like that without express permission of the Council of 46 (though notably not the Captains' individual permissions, which don't factor into this at all, officially), but the Gotei Candle Co. knows that the SWA gets permission to run their calendars every year, and they thought if they did a Gotei Candle Co. x SWA collab, it would be a real knockout event.
BUT photo calendars are one thing and reiatsu signature candles are another, and when this went to the Council of 46 they found that they DID actually have to consult the Gotei, to determine whether or not the candles constituted a breach of military security. And this had to go to a Captains' Meeting vote. The voting was split across several positions:
captains who believed the candles constituted a breach of military security because anything COULD be a breach of military security
captains who realized that believing that would mean greenlighting the idea that the candles were accurate to their reiatsu in any way, which might tacitly confirm the notion that the candles had actual homeopathic validity, on which grounds they refused
captains who believed in the candles, actually
captains who were willing to say the candles were a breach of military security and all that other stuff just because they did not want the candles to exist
captains who had no real opinion on military security or science but disliked the candles, yet still refused to tarnish their principles by pretending the candles were legit even if it meant they had to be a candle
In any case, the Council of 46 refused to make a move without evidence-based deliberation from the Gotei, so they had to spend hours and hours sniffing candles as part of the process. And the 12th wanted to run a test so there'd be science-backed proof that the candles did/did not accurately type Captain reiatsu, because they did not believe captains sniffing things constituted actual evidence-based anything. There was some pushback against this, but ultimately the 12th prevailed and the REASON the 12th has all the captains' reiatsu typed--and having this done is now part of any captains onboarding, even post-candle debacle--is because OF THESE DANG CANDLES.
Eventually the Gotei decided, fuck it, these candles are a no-go, I don't care. But then Sasakibe brought up the fact that to deny them outright was technically a violation of the Commercial Clause of 1457, which states that when military procedure infringes on free trade within the Seireitei, it must offer an alternative enterprise as part of the sanction. After all the candle business, having to deal with this hangup was the closest the Gotei has ever come to executing mass ritual suicide in Yamamoto's office. Strange but true. The candles, man.
Anyway, at some point Byakuya leaks this to Shirogane, because He Cannot With This, and Shirogane suggests "okay no candles but what about eyewear tho" and Byakuya brings this to the next Captains' Meeting and Byakuya is, briefly, a HERO to his peers, and Shirogane is a HERO and that's why they let him leave the Gotei entirely and open up a glasses store.
#this is actually the story that's printed in really small print on the gift bags they give you at the silver dragonfly#where all of the seireitei's commercial history is written#bleach headcanons#no brain just bleach#shinigamiology#my favorite part of writing this was how naturally its connections to Actual Things in Canon emerged#despite it being about the Seireitei Candle Co.#i write--as ever--as a prophet of what is True#not as a spinner of falsehoods
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[Bleach 080]
I'll be honest, I forgot that the walls were made out of a special stone. I always get distracted by the part where the walls live in the sky and only slam down to ground-level sometimes. Though... post-ryoka invasion, do they ever go back up? I feel like they're down in all the bird's eye shots we get, but what do I know. They're down in all the diagrams various shinigami use to describe the Seireitei, but maybe that's more indicative of a shinigami worldview than the literal fact of the walls normally existing on the ground. I'm sure the Ruth Wilson Gilmore of the Seireitei is thrilled about every part of that sentence!
4 Questions I have:
1. Who mines the sekki-seki?
Similar to I guess... all mining... it seems like it would be deleterious to your health to be around sekki-seki, if you had any spiritual energy to speak of, given that touching it (bare-handed) would wither you and it also emits deleterious waves. When Kuukaku talks about "spiritual energy" she uses the term reiryoku. If reiatsu is the outward, exerted spiritual pressure, reiryoku is, like, the in you version--the you version, which makes it seem to me like it's not just, oh I can't attack this thing. I feel like the wall should have a Surgeon General warning sticker on it.
Option 1: Rukongai souls mine the sekki-seki. Imagine showing up in the afterlife and not even getting to die of boredom in some crappy village. You have to go TO THE MINES.
Option 2: Maggot's Nest folks mine the sekki-seki. If they get weird and warped due to exposure (despite their protective gear, which I assume the Seireitei surely invested R&D into at some point), or explode, well... Did it really happen if no one saw it? Maybe sekki-seki exposure gives you cute horns.
2. Where is the mine?
Certainly, wherever they mine this stuff would have to be an incredibly controlled area, given that in the right hands (the wrong hands?) it would be a potent weapon. Luckily not one either Quincy or Hollows would be able to use easily, but 1) if you don't mind also dying I'm sure it would become very usable, and 2) I'm sure there's other beings out there.
I assume this stuff is also used in the Aizen Prison, and perhaps the Aizen Prison is just part of the mine, which would make it nice and easy, logistically.
3. Is there...radiation protection?
So... the walls... emit reiryoku-dissolving waves... That descend into the ground and dome over the city. Is there a reason the waves don't also just radiate through the middle of the whole city? I assume there's probably some additional spellwork that bounces those waves in some other pattern, or I perhaps some fancy doodad that lives in the middle of the Seireitei and emanates different, cancelling waves that extend exactly to the limits of the walls. But this all seems very tenuous and quite dangerous.
If you live near the places where this wall comes down, is there risk of residual sekki-seki radiation?
Is there an Erin Brockovich of the Seireitei?
How robust are these mirrors or anti-waves or whatever they're using to keep the center sfw? Like we're sure this works, and a natural disaster or a thousand-year blood war or something wouldn't compromise this?
Is the thousand-year blood war actually reiryoku leukemia =_=
Or does sekki-seki have...poles? Does only one side of the rock have wave emitting properties, and you just have to point that side outward? But then the dome thing would be hard, I guess... Actually, I guess if it's a dome over the city, the central point from which these waves are radiating is not the middle of each slab of rock. So the rocks, arranged in a ring around the city, are "speaking" to each other somehow via these waves, and the path of least resistance is in a dome shape over and under the city. I feel like I could buy that; like, cryptogeologically, why not?
Do I trust that enough to want to LIVE there lol, is a different question.
Boy, this just all seems wildly dangerous!!! Surely I can't be alone in this? And it amazes me daily that the Seireitei hasn't wiped itself off the face of the afterlife. But I also feel like this tracks, and is very true to life, and I wonder this about the human species all the time, too.
Last question:
4. How much does it cost to take a tour of the mine
#i am now very invested in this shitty mine and the potential environmental fallouts of tybw#which isn't to say i wasn't already i just had not considered this version and i'm here for it#bleach worldbuilding#shinigamiology#bleach manga#bleach reread 2021#bleach カラー#no brain just bleach
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"Hello, you've reached 🏯🎸. Please leave a message after the beep!"
[Bleach TYBW e18]
This is the phone tree Mayuri set up so Kyouraku could call the entire Gotei--or the 30% still online, as Mayuri notes. (Sidenote: Impressive! Even Zoom Enterprise only allows for 500 participants, and that assumes nothing's exploded or been inverted into a shadow realm.)
The caller ID node in the center is the character for the 'Kyou' in Kyouraku, which makes sense, but it makes me wonder how they decide who gets what username?
If people have the same name (Kuchiki and Kuchiki and Kuchiki and Kuchiki and Kuchiki) do they just figure, well, we'll assume people can guess which one is most likely to be calling them and leave it at that? Maybe if you stare at it long enough it displays the rest of the name, (but it didn't really seem like it, purely based on how much flashing the other nodes did without the middle one changing. Also: booooring! Not arcane enough!).
Or you could be like Akon and Abarai Renji, and share the same leading 'a' kanji, even though you're not related. How do you distinguish yourselves in the caller ID? It's probably a fairly common problem in the Gotei. I mean, how are you supposed to know whether you're getting a call from YAMAda Hanatarou or YAMAmoto Genryuusai? They probably sound exactly the same on the phone!
NB: I'm pretty sure Akon and Renji don't actually have this problem, because when Byakuya set up Renji's phone privileges he entered him in as "Renji," because calling your new vice captain by his given name is a very normal thing to do, why would he have typed in anything else.
If these phones have color displays, they could color code the caller IDs and reduce some ambiguity that way (provided people actually remember division colors, though given that cross-division communication probably isn't that common under normal circumstances, perhaps this solves nothing)
This doesn't solve the 6th's Kuchiki problem, regardless
Maybe they do it like train schedules, where like, Haneda Airport (羽田空港) gets abbreviated to 羽空, the first two kanji of each word. Like, for Byakuya and Rukia, maybe they shove two characters into the circle, with a big one for KUCHI and then a small one for 'Byaku' or 'Ru' Maybe they use the furigana setting to type the second one in lol.
Either way, unless you're very good with names, the caller ID might leave something to be desired in the Gotei. Rich potential for hijinks. Not knowing who's calling until you pick up the phone? Please. Unheard of. Unacceptable. Perhaps this is why Hell Butterfly culture and "some guy from the Onmitsukidou" culture remain such strong presences in the Gotei information network! Passenger pigeon or LCD flip phone, THERE IS NO MIDDLE GROUND
There's probably a campaign to introduce emojis into the called ID library to give people some additional ID options. Kyouraku is vaguely considering it as a fundraising opportunity, like a vanity plate.
Anyway, no, it doesn't matter; I just find it charming in the way of like, super old school text abbreviations or generally needing to find efficient ways of displaying libraries of unique information. There's only so many pixels!
#someone in the 12th is like “UI design is my passion :3”#and they're having the BEST time with this#shinigamiology#bleach headcanons#no brain just bleach
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