#Xcution

[distinguishedshoeduckdonut]

2004 vs 2024

[thebiggestwheel]

Bleach Chapter 53.5 - "Bad Blood Exhaust"

Jackie was always one of my favorite, underrated characters in Bleach and seeing how she is one of the few Fullbringers to never get a Volume Cover, I decided to make one myself. Nothing special here; just a simple edit with Manga panel, title and a volume name based on the chapter of the same name.

[blue-dream-rhapsody]

It occurs to me that when Kugo and Yukio have their confrontation

Yukio says that what he is trying to do will depend on what it is Kugo wants

At which point Aura appears and is all “You should join Lord Tokinada he’s looking to turn the world upside down too”

Kugo rejects this with really no waffling and of course prompts Tsukishima to try and take Yukio back with a bookmark, which seems like it would be the most predictable move he would make. And then we learn that quite literally the moment Aura approached Yukio it was with the explicit aim in mind of relaying what Tokinada and the Tsunayashiro family had done (in relation to Fullbringers) to Yukio in a way Tokinada couldn’t notice. Knowing, with Tsukishima as a conduit, it was very likely for that information to get passed to Kugo—and he would do only one fucking thing to Tokinada once he knew what he was responsible for.

I don’t know. Something about Aura naming the cult X-cution and while none of the members have any idea about this, there being this plan in mind that meant it would also be acting for Kugo in this way like an extension of Xcution. That it was with certainty named that with the express purpose of getting our Xcution’s attention. Aura’s primary goal is for sure to save Hikone by removing Tokinada, but even if Kugo on her side is just means to that end it’s still unquestionably in a way that saves him too.

[epraim1992]

Lille Barro's Godlike Power

In my opinion Lille Barro is the most interesting member of the Schutzstaffel.

He is the first Quincy that Yhwach granted a Schrift which makes him believe that he is Yhwach's greatest creation/masterpiece.

Despite not being part of the Soul King like the other members he had the powers of a god and led the Schutzstaffel or so it seems.

Lille Barro was quick to correct Oetsu when he stated that he gain an additional power when he was revived through Auswahlen but I think was a hint to why he is so powerful.

I have a theory that Lille Barro's original Schrift was A: The Axis. I think like Uryu he received the same letter as Yhwach.

While Uryu received it because he was Yhwach's successor, I think Lille Barro got it because Yhwach's Almighty was sealed by Ichibei so a replacement was needed.

I think Lille Barro's original power had to do with the optical axis. According to Wikipedia it's the "imaginary line that passes through the geometrical center of an optical system such as a camera lens, microscope or telescopic sight." Which fits with his sniper aesthetic. The emblem on his eye looks like a crosshair. His eyes and third eye lid in his second Vollständig form are reminiscent of camera lenses. I think it gave him a superior eyesight for sniping.

Letzt Stil has an ability similar to Sklaverei. I think similar to Quilge he used it to absorb a soul and that soul being a Fullbringer. I think when Lille Barro restored his powers his new power awakened changing his Schrift.

I don't know if X has any special mean to the Fullbringers but I think this a big clue to Lille Barro's connection to Fullbringers.

Fullbringers can manipulate the the soul in objects. It was explained all things in the world have souls.

I think this ability augmented Lille Barro's powers allowing him to penetrate all.

I think it explains why his Vollständig is so unique among the Sternritter and why he as a second form. Similar to Ichigo having two Zanpakuto Lille Barro has two sources of powers.

He had similar powers to Aizen and in Bleach one way to Godhood is the pouring of one soul into another to sublimate it.

[anime093se]

[aaamike]

Kinda happy to see Shukuro and Kugo again.

[loudestcloud]

Happy birthday, Riruka Dokugamine!

I don't usually like characters like her but she grew on me and is quite sweet!

[x-mensirens]

[xmencovered]

Uncanny X-Men #295 / Published: October 1992 / Artist: Brandon Peterson

[troius]

The Kids in the Room

The Fullbringer Arc is tighter and more coherent than anything in the manga so far, telling a very straightforward story about a young person’s alienation from the world he lives in. It has very specific things to say about the role of parents, mentors, and friends in the process of a kid becoming an adult and does a pretty decent job of looking at how different organizations (the state, gangs) can play into that young person’s life. And then, at the climax of the story, it very intentionally takes all that hard work, and for what I must assume were business reasons, tosses it all away.

The Arrancar Arc was a glorious, grandiose mess. It featured no fewer than three separate worlds, four distinct factions, and probably around twenty characters with active character arcs. Although it started off with the truly breathtaking ambition of weaving all of this together, by the end Kubo had cut a considerable amount of the subplots in favor of actually getting to the end of the story he was telling. And it still mostly worked! Ichigo’s character arc, at least, ended where I think it was always going to: sacrificing his nigh-unlimited power after understanding the price of that power.

But of course, giving up all of your powers isn’t really a long-term solution for Ichigo, just like it isn’t for any of us in life. Ruling over three worlds might tend to corrupt a person, but we all want—and need—to feel like we have some power over our own lives. Ichigo, in his final year of high school, living on the precipice of adulthood, feels this in more than one way. He had this power. He sacrificed it. And yet now, he’d do anything to get it back. Anything except ask for help.

You see, asking for help is hard, but especially in the context of “seeking power”, which in this story is an even less veiled metaphor for “growing up” than it usually is in shonen manga. Asking for help means admitting both weakness (you don’t have the power to get what you want right now) and discontentment (there is something you want that you don’t have). For Ichigo, whose primary method of coping with his mother’s death was asserting a premature independence, this would be difficult even if the thing he was seeking wasn’t something he had very publicly given up in front of his friends and family. Yes, there are times when he doesn’t want to involve them to protect them, but a big part of his self-imposed isolation is his own ego, his unwillingness to reveal to people who love him just how miserable he is, out of fear that it will reveal him to be somebody they won’t love anymore.

And that’s where the Fullbringers come in. Ginjo puts in a tremendous amount of work into getting close to Ichigo—lying to him, giving him little bits of information piecemeal without telling him the whole thing, and of course, offering him power that Ichigo desperately wants. But none of it would be possible if Ichigo didn’t have this preexisting desire to do it all himself, or at least to appear to his friends and family like he’s doing it himself. Ginjo does what nobody else in Ichigo’s life does—offers him assistance without making him ask for it. Hook, line, sinker.

The body of the arc covers this masterclass in manipulation from Ginjo, and it’s a huge change from what has, up until this point, been a very standard shonen battle manga in terms of content, where the fights happen on a more or less weekly basis. Here, it takes over half the arc for Ichigo to fight anybody! It’s all character development, even for the side characters like Orihime and Chad, who don’t get fights of their own but do get to express themselves and show initiative in ways they were largely denied in the previous arc. It’s all a long, slow burn to the climax, where Tsukishima suddenly strips away the support system that Ichigo had so undervalued, leaving him defenseless against Ginjo’s theft of his power.

And that’s my big frustration with the climax. It’s not that I like the Karakura kids more than I like the Soul Reapers, although I very well might. It’s that so much work has been put into drawing out and developing these relationships, so much effort put into showing how this is affecting all of them. And it’s not just metatextual effort either—yes, we spend a lot of pagetime with Chad and Orihime and Uryu, but Xcution also targets them all because of their importance to Ichigo! The very story itself recognizes that they’re the support system that Ichigo needs to be an emotionally healthy adult! Any logical resolution must therefore involve them!

But it doesn’t. Instead, it’s the Soul Reapers, who have not been physically or even narratively present at all for four volumes, who come in and repower Ichigo. They’re the ones who pair up for the fights against Xcution, fights that are very light on the sort of character work that is so characteristic of Bleach fights because there just isn’t the grounding for it! Even the fights that show character are mostly showing development that seemingly occurred off-panel, leaving you wondering when exactly Toshiro and Ikkaku achieved their newfound maturity. But the supporting characters from the bulk of the arc are written out, and even the personal feelings of Shigekuni Genryusai Yamamoto wind up being more important to the narrative.

This isn’t just unsatisfactory on the level of the supporting characters, it also fatally undercuts Ichigo’s own development. We expect the story to end with him overcoming the challenge set in front of him, which at the beginning is clearly his alienation from the people he loves. But he doesn’t really do that—instead, the Soul Reapers showing up is what solves his problems, which suggests that the actual problem in his life is just “they weren’t around”. I don’t think that’s actually what we’re meant to take away here, and the narrative doesn’t seem to think so either, which is why we end with the character development being passed on to Soul Society instead. They learn something in this arc, which is to trust Ichigo. But he doesn’t seem to have learned a damn thing.

And that’s what frustrates me so much about this arc: the lost potential, the fact that there was a very obvious story being told that was abruptly discarded, right at the moment it mattered most. There was probably no way Kubo could have fulfilled all the potential of the Arrancar Arc: there were just to many characters, too many storylines. But here, he condensed his writing, narrowed his scope, and still told a compelling story up until he suddenly threw it all away. Whatever the reason for it-- and I have no insight into the editing or business pressures that might have motivated a climax so different from that the story was obviously building to-- it’s disappointing.

[marvelman901]

Generation X vol 1 16 (1996)

Out Of Sync!

Written by Scott Lobdell and Todd DeZago

Penciled by Tom Grummett

Inked by Al Milgrom

Colors by Steve Buccellato

Lettered by Richard Starkings and Comicraft

Edited by Bob Harras

Cover by Joe Madureira

Synch had been corrupted by Emplate and it was up to Generation X to help him...

[distinguishedshoeduckdonut]

◤￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣￣◥

　 𝟐𝟎𝐭𝐡 𝐊𝐄𝐘 𝐕𝐈𝐒𝐔𝐀𝐋

◣＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿＿◢

歴代の強敵たちと一護の戦いの

軌跡を描いた、アニメ20周年を

飾るスペシャルビジュアル──

✦20th公式サイトリニューアル

[unohanadaydreams]

Wait i havent read the novel what does it say for explaining about kugo in that scene?

Basically, he had a group of Fullbring friends before the story proper and they were all killed by a shinigami assassin after Ukitake gave him a substitute badge (that was spying him), so obviously he came to the conclusion that Ukitake killed his friends and tried to kill him.

Of course, as Seireitei does, they made him a wanted criminal for not presenting his neck and dying like a dog.

It wasn't Ukitake who ordered the hit, but the novel's villain. However, still a fucking shinigami! So it's not like he was super off! Like wow, I wonder who sent a SHINIGAMI assassin? A quincy?

I think if Ginjo had said 'I think they're going to do to you what they did to me, so watch out', there would have been a way better outcome for Ginjo and the entire Xcution group. But Ginjo is simply not able to do that. He is incapable of opening up to people. He is the cautionary tale for Ichigo.

So instead Ginjo says with his actions 'I think they're going to do to you what they did to me, so I'm going to steal the friends you can't protect & the powers you can't wield anymore & use them to kill Ukitake, which by the way you should also want to do you fucking moron piss baby idiot'.

And he takes that really good reason for not trusting the shinigami to the grave like. What a specimen. I love him tbh.

[edgelord-of-the-day]

Edgelord of the Day #56:

Shūkurō Tsukishima

Series: Bleach - Tale of the Lost Agent arc

[obsidiennes]

Okay, so when Rangiku shows up and steps in to save Don Kanonji and Tatsuki, Tatsuki finds her really remarkable. (The fact Tatsuki doesn't recognize her means she only turned up at Karakura High School the one day, and that was apparently during lunch or something as neither Tatsuki nor Orihime were in the room at the time, so Tatsuki just never saw Rangiku until this point.)

So as Aizen menaces Gin and Rangiku, Ichigo shows up.

Everyone is reacting to him in the first page, and it feels weird that Tatsuki and Keigo question if it's really him, but whatever. Tatsuki and Keigo look way more distressed than Don Kanonji, Chizuru, and Mizuiro, which reflects the fact they probably both knew they were gonna die at certain points versus Aizen, whereas Mizuiro and Chizuru didn't and Don Kanonji is crazy enough to shrug it off. But here's where things get really interesting.

In the Xcution arc, after Ichigo punches Tsukishima, Tatsuki and Keigo once again look far more distressed, though with Keigo it seems almost like shocked disappointment and with Tatsuki it's hot rage. Really look at her expression in the second panel. She wasn't even that angry by comparison when Ichigo told her to butt out when Orihime went missing:

Now we know that to Chad and Orihime, at least, Tsukishima defeated Aizen. Every altered history need not necessarily be the same, but it seems likely that feature is consistent, and from what we see there, Tsukishima appeared when Ichigo canonically did in actual history, meaning events otherwise proceeded as we saw (meaning Don Kanonji and Rangiku stepped in earlier on.)

This is supported by the fact that Tatsuki's incredible anger at Tsukishima being attacked doesn't seem to stem from personal familiarity, given she's still respectfully calling him "Mr. Tsukishima," the page before, which suggests their main interaction was him saving her (and everyone else) from Aizen, not anything longer. Now why does this register so strongly with her?

Probably because of this. Mind you, Tatsuki has already endured something similar:

But what happened with Aizen is far worse. So, the defeat of Aizen was such a big deal to Tatsuki because:

She definitely consciously faced down (a probably grisly) death, with to some degree far more awareness of it than the previous times with Numb Chandelier and Yammy

She had memories of being the sole survivor after Yammy's attack and so a repeat scenario but worse is basically a massive PTSD trigger

the people at risk due to Aizen were likely notably more important to her

her lady crush who'd just awakened something in her was in peril too

(Good time to recall that Tatsuki is incredibly durable, as I've said many times, and that this event also caused her to train incredibly hard afterward.)

[fostersffff]

The questions at the forefront of my mind as I finish out the Fullbringer Arc: which group will be the bigger jobbers, XCUTION or One Piece's New Fish-Man Pirates