Kubo is like that kid which started of with a small box of legos that he could play with. Then he built something really good out of them and got rich so he stopped playing with them and decided to buy new toys.
He was a bad writer overall. No amount of retcons he pull(he didn't even try to explicitly pull any by the way) can change that.
Bankai and Shikai was cool. Admit it, you are here still reading this post because of them.
While Naruto had rasengan and bigger rasengan and nuke sized rasengans, Bleach had this amazing concept where people can release their swords up to 2 forms and the 2 forms range from something being devastating in power or something like a curse.
It's like this dude is a swordsman but he could transfer into a white mage or assassin the next moment.
It was hyped.
You have to admit that even the concept of souls and hollows drew people in. The various stages of hollows and the iconic masks was an interesting concept. Shinigamis wearing Masks? Some thought it was lame but majority liked the idea of hollowfication.
Was probably a reason why Turn Back the Pendulum (The negative chapters) were so well received.
At this point it is fair to jump on me and say that I'm shallow because if you deconstruct everything it's really just aesthetics.
Except that not really because while Bleach generally sucked, there were creative bankai and shikais.
Even Squad Zero which was wrecked in less than two volumes generally had something that was not just "another power-up" as their powers.
That ink guy was a hella cool dude.
Kyoraku might have got destroyed but his Bankai actually made sense while going out of the norm.
Kubo could have easily written him having a larger shadow blade or Shikamaru powers or whatever to do with shadows, but the theatre going thing was pretty nice to see.
If we trace back to Shikai, we have Yumichika and Hisagi which was pretty exciting to read about.
It's a stretch but to an extend even Orihime and Chad had some pretty cool powers going for them. But even then he never did really stop and settled with just "another power up" for his characters. At least until the end of Arrancar Arc.
I'm not defending Kubo stupid decisions, I'm just against anyone that says that this guy doesn't try anymore. Yes, maybe sticking to a more convention and generally better accepted power-up/powers make more sense and won't get him a thousand flaming on the internet. I mean, look at Naruto. The entire damn war was one Magic spell bigger than another. I almost fell asleep when it was time for the 98th nuke. But hey, it was popular.
Boy do people love Naruto 13th Nine tails formed or Sasuke Susanno where the only difference is an extra helmet.
It was popular but I hated it. Like the same moments when I hated Kubo for pulling crap like another Ichigo transformationa and Aizenfly. But you can't deny that this guy doesn't just give another "10x mutiplier powerup" to his character, he also does out of the box things with his power-ups, eg: Unohana going batshit insane, Yoruichi going full dazed, Yachiru being a sword, Yamato condensing all his flame into a single sword. It's true that some of them fail and fall short of decency but he tried.
More than once Kubo kept trying new things and kept introducing new stuff into his slow as hell story. Think back to Aizen, Barragan, Nel, Vizards. Even the latest quincy arc, as much of a shitty Writer he was, he actually gave Urahara something creative.
If you actually think about it, the most boring attack in Bleach is Ichigo's only attack and that is one giant sword slash. Bleach would have been so much more enjoyable if he wrote towards something like HxH. People bitch about Hado not being utilized well and while I agree Kubo wrote himself into a corner there without using it, it would suck if it were to be abused. It was too difficult of a wild card for him to utilise it well or any writer to write himself out of that.
The Fullbring arc is a perfect example of why it is not good to almost completely deviant from your story and try too hard to stir up something new. He's the guy that throws shit and see which one sticks and we all suffer as readers. Some of it does stick and we loved some of his ideas. The concept stuck for a while, people thought it was cool, only to have him completely fuck it up with another one of his new ideas/wannabe plot twist. Fullbring was not one of them, it sucked from the start.
There was so much more he could do with his old small box of toys, ideas he could play around with using Ban/Shi Kais and Hollows only. Even when it came to Arrancars, I thought Sentinel Hollows were cool. Even then some of his ideas were great but the execution in the long run was shit. He seriously need someone to co-write the story for him.
People say he can only do art but I disagree, this guy have ideas that are good but he doesn't know how to put them to good use or when to shut the fuck up about plot twists that are shit.
I get my laughs from haters who said that Kubo sucks at drawing. No he doesn't he's just lazy. There's a difference.
He's pretty good at what he draw and no they are not your anime characters standard design.
Your anime character designs don't need to fly in the sky and do swordplay, you actually need a good character design to execute good action scenes in a relevant story. Ulquiorra's second release, Ikkaku's bankai, Grimmjow release, they won't work if Kubo didn't think on how to work about them with the current design he have. You can't have all of the characters he introduced be cool as hell, even Dragon Ball with his aliens universe have some pretty shit designs. But you can tell that he could do it if he really wanted to. But I guess he stopped wanting to 5 years ago.
TLDR: Bleach has good ideas, bad execution in long term, fights could have been ten times better. Basically: a co-writer. I'm not defending his ability as a writer because we all know why. I'm saying that Bleach had so many original ideas that Kubo had written and could have been big. You can't deny the good things he did which was pretty impressive.
That was way longer than I wanted it to be and felt like a rant. But Bleach was part of my childhood and I respect a lot of things Kubo tried to do even if they were bad choices.
@Razh:
World Trigger is awesome once you get into it a little. Don't listen to anyone who says otherwise. :ninja:
Good for you.
For me I decided to drop the series for over a year or two now.
I think I ended when the arc after the invasion started.
Don't get me wrong, I like World Trigger and what it is trying to do.
But as mentioned, I can't help but not give a shit about the wide range of characters being introduced because it felt like copy and paste.
Even the main characters is getting hard to remember, I don't mean the original 4, I mean their mentors/seniors or whatever that seem relevant too.
That and they don't really have much of a characterisation to keep my interest.
Which is kind of a shame when you look at the amount of chapters it already has.
Re-reading the chapters also made me feel that there is no real sense of threat in the story and that some of the battles may seem intelligent but when you break it down…it's kind of really silly.
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By the way, I took it from r/bleach