#bleach lore

[sashi-ya]

Katagiri didn't suffer the Auswählen, Uryu did. Katagiri had Antithesis? DID SHE EXCHANGE HER LIFE FOR URYU'S?

THAT'S WHY YHWACH TOLD URYU "WHY DO YOU THINK YOU SURVIVED THE AUSWAHLEN? BECAUSE HE KNEW, HE FUCKING KNEW. EITHER HE GAVE HIS MOTHER'S SCHRIFT BACK, OR he knew he inherited it, so in order to "avoid" the treason he knew it was going to happen he might have played the "oh boy here, have a new power" idk but either way fuck Yhwach.

This could also be the reason why Ryuken kinda resents Uryu in a way... since they are meant to be "opposite" to Ichigo and Isshin, while Isshin does not blame Ichigo for Masaki dying for his son, deep inside Ryuken probably does. And it's HELLA painful. Poor family, completely destroyed T-T

[fractoluminescence]

When I scrolled by a retweet of another Q&A translation mentioning an underwear question I'll admit this was not what I thought the post it was potentially talking about would be like

[writemessybleach]

I'm asking ChatGPT to explain Bleach lore to me and it's making more sense than watching the show.

[fractoluminescence]

So, I felt like I needed to add this to my reblog in case it didn't fit in the tags (bear with me, this is going to seem off-topic at first, but I'll get there. Also, I wrote this on my phone, so do point out any typos or repetitions, rereading myself is hard like this)

First off, my headcanon is that the places that are the densest in spirit energy in each dimension attract each other. Otherwise using portals to other dimensions could be used as fast travel. Think about it: if Soul Reapers could open Senkaimon to anywhere in the human world, that would be so OP. You could start in Karakura, open a Senkaimon, then open one back and end up in New York.

So my headcanon is that they can't. That they only reason they can just straight up open Senkaimon to Karakura is because it's so close. Like spheres with magnets stuck inside them that rotate so that the magnets are right up against each other.

This makes in-universe sense, too, because:

It's basically said that spirit energy affects other instances of spirit energy, more or less (with the powers of people waking up after hanging out with Ichigo or encountering Hollows)

It would explain why the "Wstern Branch of Soul Society" has little to no Hollows compared to Karakura. You'd think a place with so much magic would have Hollows - but no. Which means it's likely not spiritual energy at all over there. My hypothesis is that Hollows and dragons are mutually exclusive - that they kill each other when in the same area. So Hollows stick to the ones where they have good prey and no dragons, because Soul Reapers kill dragons as they see them as a threat (stated in BTW canon) and just don't want to be bothered with keeping such an ecosystem alive. As a result, people who can deal with Hollows pool where Hollows are, hence they go to Japan

Hence, Soul Reapers only really have to deal with Hollows in the area where the Juureichi is without needing to stray too far - which is convenient, because that's where their Senkaimon tend to lead.

Now. We don't know how big Hueco Mundo is, but the fact that the main cast still managed to reach Las Noches so quickly does indicate it wasn't that far (comparatively to the whole dimension - it was still some ways off of course). Imo, that's because, after Aizen settled there, way more strong Hollows pooled there than there used to be, especially after he made them stronger. So Las Noches was in the process of aligning itself with the other spiritually-dense areas of other dimensions - making it close, but not as close as Seireitei and Karakura were to each other already.

Now, what's the link with languages. The link, imo, is that the only reason the areas of Soul Society and Hueco Mundo that we know speak the same language as the main cast is because they do actually speak Japanese - and they do so because the general areas where their respective Juureichi are have been roughly aligned.

So. For Soul Society, it's simple - second headcanon, when Souls die they go to whatever oart of Soul Society or Hueco Mundo that is "closest" - so if the area with Karakura has had the Human Juureichi within it for a while, and Seireitei has been the Juureichi for Soul Society since its foundation, most of the Souls that arrive around Seireitei are from Japan, and over time that influenced the culture and language and made them line up.

For the Quincy, I think they started in Germany area-wise, but moved to Japan over time because they felt it was their mission to deal with the Hollows there - and since there were dragons in Western Europe, Hollows stopped showing up as much. They brought their language along with them, but it got lost along the generations and eventually only certain Quincy-specific terms remained in German in their vocabulary. And, when naming their techniques and the like, it just made sense to keep using German as a nod to tradition. The war with the Soul Reapers then started because their territories overlapped and because Quincy found a lot more Hollows to kill in Japan than they did back in Europe.

For the Arrancar, their personal powers are in Spanish, so it probably isn't passed down - then again, we don't really know how the names of personal powers get assigned, so. But still, I'd think if you didn't speak any Spanish at all, your powers wouldn't have a name in Spanish, and I doubt Arrancar are trying to give a nod to previous generations like Quincy - they're too individualist and isolated from each other for that.

Imo, what happened with the Hollows is that the Juureichi of Hueco Mundo didn't used to be Las Noches. It became Las Noches because Aizen made it Las Noches by gathering a bunch of strong Arrancar there, but the area where Las Noches was built used to be over Spain. The old Juureichi used to be over Japan, and had Japanese as a first language since the Souls that arrived in the area were Japanese. But most of the strong Hollows and natural Arrancars in Hueco Mundo were spread out so much that that Juureichi wasn't stable. So when Aizen picked Las Noches as his new base (because he wanted to take down the dimension's supposed king and thought it'd be fun to settle where he used to be), which was over Spain but wasn't the Juureichi because it wasn't that big a settlement despite housing a king, and made it into an outright forteress in which he managed to (more or less successfully) bring together very strong Arrancar, including multiple Vasto Lordes that he made even stronger, the Juureichi shifted.

The Hollows in the area, imo, probably originally had dialects similar to Spanish that had been brought in from the Human World - but as Aizen's influence grew, and he imo probably didn't bother making an effort in learning the local languages properly, they were partly forced, partly had to concead to using the language he himself used. It also allowed them to pretend like they weren't from different areas with different dialects, erasing what used to be their own culture in favor of sharing part of the Soul Reaper culture that Aizen had brought in. But he didn't care what their powers meant, because all he cared about was ordering them around, so he let them keep the names of their powers in the languages that sounded like home to them.

Imo, there's no way dimensions have official names, especially not Hueco Mundo. I think that was the local name of Barragan's area, not necessarily what the entire dimension calls it. As for Soul Society, I think that while Seireitei is the place with the most military power, the furthest out you go, the less reason people have to speak Japanese - because they don't care about Seireitei, and because the Souls that arrive there are from other parts of the Living World that aren't Japan.

Hell is a different matter. I do have headcanons for it, but they're not even fanwanking at this point, they're just plain me-making-shit-up. So I'll keep those to myself lol.

Anyway, that's my take. Hopefully this is readable. (Curious at to what @bleachbleachbleach think, in case you don't mind being tagged.)

EDIT: Spain or some Spanish-speaking place, at least. Same for German if there are other Germany-speaking places out there. Sorry about my I-live-in-Western-Europe bias coming through 😬

So, Bleach has an interesting language phenomenon that gets glossed over in favor of moving the plot along (a perfectly reasonable authorial decision), but I think has world building potential:

The Karakura kids and Shinigami all speak Japanese- they have Japanese names (even Chad), and call their Zanpakuto and flashy attacks Japanese names.

The arrancar have a variety of name origins, but all live in Las Noches, and call their special attacks and military rankings Spanish names, so it's reasonable to assume they're all speaking Spanish.

The Quincy again have a variety of names but are VERY German, with German weapons, ranks, techniques etc.

...but everyone can trash talk everyone else without a language barrier. How's that work?

[umbraria]

Ichiruki week 2025

[Japanese folklore & Star-crossed lovers of old]

[myloveonherknees]

tumblr asks related to ethel cain (the character) and the events of "preacher's daughter" – oct. 11, 2022 / nov. 11, 2022 / nov. 14, 2022 / oct. 30, 2022 / sept. 30, 2022 / sept. 7, 2022 / nov. 9, 2022 / nov. 15, 2022 / nov. 24, 2022 / jan. 12, 2023 / sept. 30, 2022 / feb. 3, 2023

[mybodywillrot]

yesterday I showed my momma, a 64 year old queer woman raised southern baptist with autism that only got diagnosed a year ago, sun bleached flies. she started crying and told me how she felt the music. how true it was to what she experienced being alienated by her family for being different. how the church was weaponized against her. how she reconciled with God after everything was said and done and decided to take her faith into her own hands. I think that's very special. thank you, @mothercain . your music touches the souls of everyone.

[fractoluminescence]

This is me nitpicking of course but pretty sure one of these is Tousen with his goggles on lol (image to illustrate the ressemblance)

That aside, thank you for all this. I always wanted to do something like this, but probably would've never taken the time to 🥺

well... after a lot of regret and having to resist the urge to course correct and turn this into a whole different project... I've compiled what is more or less all of the clear-ish-ly visible, unnamed background shinigami in Bleach, plus a few weird inbetween types who aren't unnamed and/or aren't "background" characters per say, but appear so infrequently that they might as well be.

I was going to try and track recurring characters but that quickly became untenable...

I was going to group them by similar looks in order to smooth over the ones that I couldn't be sure were recurring or just similar looking, but that was too much trouble...

I was going to separate out the named from the unnamed but got lazy...

I was going to include a bunch of others for technicality's sake but most of them were basically faceless stickmen in the background...

I was also going to include actual characters but then debated with myself over whether or not to include each of their unique outfits as a point of reference, but that's a whole massive thing all by itself --and I considered it because the idea behind this is sort of to be able to get a sense of what an "average" shinigami looks like, as far as face shapes, hair styles, accessories, etc... so to that end more costume details might have been nice

I know I threw the LN characters at the end but the forgot the other old zaraki, I'm probably not gonna bother fixing it

Other than a lot of generic anime shounen spikes and a few pompadours, and some predictably samurai-like topknots/ponytails, there are actually a surprising number of frizzy hair styles? It's hard to tell if some are more like punch perms or afros at times. Also a lot more glasses than I'd have expected?

And although I didn't expect my passing observation to actually hold true, there are in fact no random women in combat specifically throughout the whole manga. There are girls walking around the seireitei and the gotei facilities. There are specifically a few girls seen in groups of 4th division field medics. And there is just one nurse??? unless they've got a Nurse Joy thing happening. And the background girls are almost all black hair, twin tails, or a bun, and blunt bangs --I can't even tell if some of them might even be the same girl showing back up across different scenes, but i have no way of telling....

[starpawedart]

tfw your familiar/bodyguard/boyfriend inherits the coveted Recently Deceased Mother's Persian Recipe Book over his sisters and quickly discovers all of his childhood favourites will kill you

[sun-bl3ach3d-fly]

i’m so glad that i live in the same timeline as miss hayden anhedonia

[fractoluminescence]

So I think I found the answer to stuff I'd been wondering for a while, so putting it here to share and find later

[Source] (Klub Outside it seems)

[Source] (This particular screenshot is from Reddit but the original source is one of the databooks. Also found the same list formatted differently on other websites)

[gallusrostromegalus]

An AEIWAM Bit:

Kensei Muguruma has a weird phobia of Things That Flap.

He tries very hard to pretend he doesn't, but things flapping in his proximity are extremely startling and make him jittery at best, or hyperventilate and collapse. Something about the fluttering triggers a fear response, and his total inability to ask for help or admit weakness has caused this to balloon into a terrible reactivity to almost anything with flapping wings.

Kensei was was very excited to move back into his digs in the Ninth. So excited that to no longer be living in crummy living world apartments that he has all his stuff moved in an unpacked before Shuuhei and Mashiro had actually gotten out of the hospital after the battle of Fake Karakura. It was the middle of winter, so all the division windows were closed and he didn't really look around outside.

… but the first warm-ish day in February he opened up the windows for some fresh air and screamed when he was suddenly barraged by several dozen songbirds into swooping his office looking for snacks, then becomes howlingly enraged when he realized there's easily a hundred different types of birdfeeder on the wall outside his office that Shuuhei has been dutifully filling in Tousen's Absence.

---

Kaname, over in the 12th: "Why do I feel like I've forgotten something important?"

---

Eight minutes later in the public groupchat:

KMuguruma: @KTousen WHY DO YOU HAVE SO MANY DUCKING BIRD FEEDERS???? KMuguruma:*FUCKING NOT DUCKING GOD HELP ME IF A DUCK FLIES IN HERE KTousen: ah. KTousen: @JUkitake got me into birdwatching in your absence. KMuguruma: BIRDWATCHING??? KTousen: Well, more like bird listening in my case. KMuguruma: WHO NEEDS A HUNDRED BIRDFEEDERS FOR BIRDWATCHING I THOUGHT YOU DID THAT SHIT IN THE WOODS?? KTousen: @JUkitake then got me a new type of bird feeder, bath or house for every subsequent holiday gift exchange. KTousen: It was very generous of him! KMuguruma: IF HE WANTS TO BE GENEROUS HE CAN COME GET THIS GODDAMN EAGLE OR WHATEVER OUT OF MY OFFICE. SHisagi: It's a pigeon sir. KMuguruma: IT'S HUGE AND TRYING TO KILL ME. IMadarame: @KZaraki Boss you gotta see this shit. KMuguruma: IS HE GONNA COME STAB IT?? IMadarame: lol. lmao. KMuguruma: IT'S NOT FUNNY!!! SHisagi: It's also not going to kill you. It's a pigeon. SHisagi: The only reason I haven't caught it yet is you keep screaming and swinging the broom at it every time it lands so I can't grab it. KTousen: It's a surprisingly grounding pass time. It really helped build a connection with the natural world around me that was of great solace during The Fuckery. KTousen: Actually learning something about birds might help with your phobia. KMuguruma: I DO NOT HAVE A PHOBIA!! KMuguruma: BIRDS ARE FUCKED UP AND EVIL AND TRYING TO KILL ME. KZaraki: That's totally true actually. KMuguruma: THANK YOU. KZaraki: I'm coming to kill you specifically in my Capacity as Prince Of All Birds. KMuguruma: what KZaraki: Be there in 10. KMuguruma: no wait what do you mean "prince of all birds"? IMadarame: The Boss is the son of She Who Rules The Sky By The Mandate Of Heaven, AKA The Firebird. IMadarame: 🔥🐦‍🔥🔥 IMadarame: So he's Prince of All Birds. IMadarame: Also, technically an Eagle. KMuguruma: wtf SHisagi: Yeah actually you should get moving he's not kidding about kicking your ass. KMuguruma: WTF?? SHisagi: He takes slurs against his people very seriously. SHisagi: also, if you leave I actually have a shot of catching this pigeon. KTousen: I'll send @MKuna over tomorrow to collect everything. @SHisagi if you can help get them off the wall? SHisagi: Roger that, Captain. KMuguruma: HEY! DON'T CALL HIM CAPTAIN! I'M YOUR CAPTAIN. SHisagi: He's still *a* captain, sir. KTousen: also the bat houses on the water tower. KMuguruma: THE FUCKING WHAT HOUSES??? SHisagi:🫡 KMuguruma: WHAT DID I JUST TELL YOU?? SHisagi: With all due respect Sir, I can see @KZaraki's dust cloud approaching you really should leave before he puts a hole in the building and we have to delay publication while we fix it. KTousen: Bat houses! There's approximately 2,600 rabbit-eared bats living in the old water tower on the roof. RUnohana: They do an excellent job eating mosquitoes over the entire city! Not one case of malaria or dengue fever in decades! RUnohana:💖🦇💖 🚫🦟🚫 KMuguruma: WTF WTF WTF???? SHisagi: @NinthDivision: CODE ORANGE, EVACUATE THE BUILDING AND PREPARE FOR A ZARAKI EVENT. KMuguruma: WTF WHY DOES HE HAVE HIS OWN DISASTER CLASSIFICATION??? SHisagi: You are about to find out! Godspeed Captain, I am evacuating the building. GSYamamoto: 😎👍 RUnohana: Just like the Good Old Days, Sir? GSYamamoto: Just so! SHisagi: I have caught and safely evacuated the pigeon! IMadarame:🥳🙌🙌🙌🥳 KMuguruma: WHY DID I COME BACK HERE???

[fractoluminescence]

The bird's eye view of Seireitei is just that, while the map is, well, a map. According to Wikipedia, Japanese maps were for a long time drawn with their use in mind rather than accuracy, which included the orientation (a map made to be placed on the ground and viewed from above may hence not be drawn with a single orientation in mind, for instance).

I started looking into this after reading this post because I thought I remembered reading somewhere that East used to often be at the top, but I was unable to confirm that this time around, so. But yeah, apparently maps in Japan often pointed whichever way the user was expected to be turned towards for the journey or the like. Hence, actually very traditional of him for his map to not be at scale and have East at the top.

Rukia is in the WHERE now?

[Bleach 089]

If there's one thing I know for sure, it's that my mental map of the Seireitei is very wrong, and that there is really no helping this at this point. I also realized that when I think about Soul Society, invariably west is always down, east is up, north is left, and south is right--which like, whyyyy would THAT be the way I orient the map?!

Because of Hisagi's dumb bowl drawing in Colorful Bleach, that's why:

[Colorful Bleach]

Naturally, I was curious about the directions Ikkaku offers here! Rukia is where?

"the barracks of the Thirteen Court Guard companies"

My assumption has always been that each division's barracks are separate from one another, and exist within the rest of the division grounds. We all assume this. We know we are correct about this. Though it WOULD be hilarious is this massive tower prison was just like, the barrack penthouse and the entire Gotei lived in one very flammable tenement. Also, the Gotei version of Rear Window would be magnificent. But anyway. I guess I assumed the rest of Rukia's Tower Complex was also prison, or that it was part of some amalgamated center where the Central 46 and stuff was, rather than barrack.

So what is Ikkaku talking about here?

Specifically, he says, 各隊の詰所 (kakutai no tsumesho), which he then abbreviates to 各隊詰所, each division's station/post (same "station" as in Coordinated Relief Station). In the Edo period, a tsumesho was basically a rest stop for visiting government officials, or people who were traveling to shrines and the like--a place to overnight, or nap, or wait. In modern parlance, it's kind of like a hostel. So I don't think he means like, the barracks barracks, the primary sleeping locations barracks.

Gotei WeWork

The Wiki article on tsumesho also notes that tsumesho can refer to like, shared office space for factory guards, or people who are coming and going, which makes the most sense in our application. So rather than 'every barrack for every division' I feel like the intention here is "Rukia is in the tower part of the shared workspace/staging area, Gotei WeWork." It makes sense to have one, particularly if this is where the library and reports archives live!

Also obsessed with the idea that the The Tower is just like, next to some crappy portable with one table, a wastebasket, a copy machine with zero toner, a cabinet with a shitton of paper and brushes and ink so you can handwrite your own copies, and a mysterious stained futon that literally every shinigami in the entire Gotei has napped on at one point or another.

But also, I feel like Ikkaku could have been a little more descriptive. "That can't-miss imperious white tower by the giant butte smack in the middle of town," maybe? But I guess if that's not how they talk about that place in their working day, then it's not how they talk about that place in their working day!

I'll also note that in this view, north is actually at the top of the image, unlike in Hisagi's drawing:

[Bleach e384]

In fairness to Hisagi, his drawing was explaining the POV of Ichigo et al having started in West Rukongai. Because they walked up to the West Gate to try to enter the Seireitei, it makes sense that the vanishing point (that which lies beyond the gate; that is, east) would be at the top of the frame. But I prefer to think of Hisagi as someone who would just draw maps like that, because now he's got me doing it, too.

[pastelxapplecore]

TW: Implied s//cide themes

Death by Despair 🌙

Prologue art summary:

Basically this specific event occurred a couple weeks after Kenpachi was made the new captain of the Eleventh Division. His first assignment to the Living World was to search for any Pluses whose chains had been severed in order to cleanse them.

Regrettably the very first Plus he encountered was an unfortunate victim of s//icide. The chain was already severed from the body by the time he got there and it had already eaten itself too close to its end point.

The soul ended up turning into a hollow and despite it being his duty to eliminate any hollows in the Living World Kenpachi chose to spare it instead (the reason for doing so was never clarified by the captain).

[akashis-waifu]

This is exactly how I imagine touch-starved antagonists act when they're around that ONE special person

[fractoluminescence]

Yeah I just draw a jagged black shape djfbfkgng (only half joking, obviously it can be harder to tell where the legs are that way)

Why does everybody draw the hakamas they wear in Bleach as pants wbddvshdb like is that an actual thing??? I know Soi Fon wears hers like pants but I thought everyone else had regs hakama (yknow like how i draw them uhhh. like a long pleated skirt)

Then again, I've been known to be MASSIVELy wrong about Bleach lore and also super duper sure of myself. Like I stfg I was JUST reading the manga and I didn't see no goddamn pants but idfk now plz help