#On the other hand Kalpas has a concept I don't like at all but ironically I find him more interesting in how he's written

[fragmentedblade]

I think taking the kids to a park or something could make Kalpas a little better. Violent-playing with them may make him laugh. There's no cure for whatever Aponia, Vill-V, Elysia, Kevin and Fu Hua have going on. Su is on very thin ice and needs to chill. Pardofelis is kind of there. Mobius can stay I guess. Sakura is so bland she too can stay but for literally the opposite reason. Eden is on the same page as Kalpas imo

I can't believe Kalpas is literally the most normal and bearable person among the Flame Chasers

[littleeyesofpallas]

So, poking around those new BBS banners I realized there are a handful of BBS original characters that have some fun attack names. Some of them are actually pretty cleverly kept in line with both the themes of the characters as well as Kubo's general style of naming things. And more over, the English just romanized the attack names rather than translate them. So, here's a random assortment of those...

Mugen Houka[夢幻崩華]

[夢幻]: Dream/Vision/Fantasy

[崩]: Ruin/Crumble

[華]: Flowers/Brilliance/Splendor

The implicit meaning here being,

"The Falling Apart of a Splendid Dream" or "A Vision of Crumbling Brilliance"

...with the -ka[華]:"Flowers" double meaning tying back to the -ka[花]:"Flower" in Kyouka Suigetsu[鏡花水月]:"Flower Mirror, Water Moon" referring specifically to the imagery of "Flowers (reflected on a) Mirror (and the) Moon (reflected on the surface of the) Water," and that itself referring to the idea of...

"something that is visible but having no substance; the subtle and profound beauty of poems that cannot be described in words"

Youkou no Soukotsu[溶劫の双骨]

[溶]: Melt/Dissolve/Thaw

[劫]: Kalpa*/Aeon

[の]:

[双]: Pair/Twin

[骨]: Bone(s)

*Kalpa[कल्प] is a Buddhist concept adopted from Hindu cosmology, in which a Yuga[युग](EN:"Epoch"(?)) is an irregular span of time used to denote the phases of the universe in a cycle of four Chatur-Yuga, collectively making one Mahayuga. Anyway, point being that a Kalpa is supposed to measure 1,000 Mahayuga, amounting to something like 4.3 billion years.

So all together here, the attack reads something like...

"Twin Bones of the 4 Billion Year Melting"

Kagome Kagome[囲召籠目]

[囲召]: "to surround/encircle"

[籠目]: "Basket + eye," the name of a specific kind of woven bamboo pattern

The whole name is actually just taken from the children's game and association song, Kagome Kagome[籠目籠目], sometimes called "Bird-in-the-Cage" in English.

In the game one child is the Oni(children's games pretty commonly use oni:ogre/demon in the same way English uses "It.") and sits inside the circle of other children with their eyes covered. The other children join hands and sing the game's song while dancing in a circle. When the song ends, the oni has to name who is standing behind them.

In any event this is to match his shikai's children's game abilities and also accounts for the lattice motif used in this unique form. Ironically however the design opts for a much easier to draw kind of tight weave instead of the actual pattern it's referencing, which is a more open hexagonal weave, hence the "eyes" in the name.

Soukoku-no-Awase[双黒戮]

[双]: "Twin/Pair"

[黒]: "Black"

(の): (implied)

[戮]: "Slaughter/Execution"

I'll be honest I don't quite get this one...

"The Execution of a Pair of Black(Fish)"

...? It's pretty straight forward, but I don't get where the name came from or what it's supposed to be alluding to... I mean, clearly the format of the name is made to mirror the shikai, Sougyo-no-Kotowari. "Sou__-no-___", but I don't get to what effect... I guess "Justice" replaced with "Execution," has a sinister tone to the switch up, and "Fish" with "Black" sort of echoes that?? sort of????

The Black things in question are clearly the shadow/ink fish in the design itself though, which clearly ties into the core imagery of the shikai, but it's also not entirely clear if this means, "two black(fish) are slaughtered" like they're being prepared as food, or "an execution (carried out by) two black(fish)" as the fish are still technically his sword spirit, so they're sentencing someone to death. (with a kind of implicit legal authority; not just like random murder.)

And as far as the design goes, it incorporates that specific style of folded letter you always see in period dramas... (I wish I knew the name for it...) But it is kind of notably old fashioned, and I feel like it's always used in things like big imperial or otherwise official letters or decrees. Sometimes you'll see it in modern settings for, like, a super formal calling someone out for a duel; and typically someone will point out how laughably old fashioned and melodramatic it is.

I just remembered that the zanpakutou arc design for Sougyo-no-kotowari used it as well. Which ties into the official courtly document vibe that goes with their onmyoji design, which is itself a riff off the implicit daoist, yin & yang, themes of Ukitake's zanpakutou.

Otherwise it changes Sougyo no Kotowari's red cord and metal(?) talismans into a specific kind of rope called shimenawa[標縄], which I think I've mentioned before in relation to Bleach, made and used in shinto rituals to delineate sacred spaces. It's probably most familiar as a fixture of shinto shrines and ancient trees, champion sumo wrestlers, and sometimes used as a ward across thresholds. As well as the distinctive zigzag paper talismans, shide[紙垂]. Both are tied to purification rituals.

It does strike me as a little bit weird that they switched from his daoist yin-yang thing to shinto purification, but it's not as if Japan's religions haven't always rubbed up against and blurred the lines between one another, so i guess it's not that odd.

Oh... is "the killing of two black things" referring to the black of yin with yin and yang? The fish should be one black, one white, if they're in balance, so two black is an imbalance that needs to be rectified? So, the theme of purification ties into the name as getting-rid-of/executing the presence of an imbalance of darkness? Is that it?? That feels like a stretch... Like, even if some of those leaps do hold up on their own, it took too many of them to get there...

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