#holy shoot i fixed a typo and tumblr changed where the cut in this post was! sorry about that. it's fixed now and much shorter b4 the cut

[bleachbleachbleach]

Hi! Love the blog, it’s great to revel in everything Bleach! I have two questions that have been plaguing me since I reread the manga in the past few months, and I was hoping you (or your followers) could help me. Spoilers for TYBW below!

What did Aizen (or his henchmen) take from Matsumoto for Gin to go to such lengths to avenge her?

And, spoiler:

What happened to Yachiru in the TYBW-arc? Was she the embodiment of Zaraki’s zanpakuto in the end?

Thank you!

We’re glad you’re enjoying the blog! <3

The Matsumoto question is so funny to me, because that’s a topic I’ve seen people discuss with absolute certitude what was taken and what the outcomes would be, and I have always confused because none of it was at all the impression I’d come away with. And I was like, damn, what did I miss??? How could I do you so wrong, Matsumoto, my baby girl, one of my very top blorbos??

The “funny” part comes from me immediately thinking “maybe we have fundamentally different assumptions about the nature of the soul” instead of thinking the MUCH MORE LIKELY, NORMAL, AND CORRECT thing, which is “oh, they read CFYOW and I haven’t.”

Because the version of this discussion I tend see is:

Aizen took a part of Matsumoto’s soul

—> which means she is missing part of her soul

—> which means she’ll probably never be able to achieve bankai

—> ultimate tragedy

I don’t get this train of logic. I don’t mean that as like, a “rawr they’re so wrong and I’m so right” thing. It’s just an interpretation so far beyond my ken my brain short circuits and I quietly let what meager thoughts I do have fall from my head, and then I forget about them.

Below the cut, 12 paragraphs of tangential talk of souls and bankai, and 4 paragraphs directly addressing the questions in the ask. Feel free to scroll to the bottom for those!

I BELIEVE the CFYOW connection here is Aizen explaining bits of Soul King (in Matsumoto’s case, a Nail) found their way into a bunch of people’s souls, and Aizen took it out of Matsumoto and fed it to his Hougyoku. Something something Fullbringers, too, but I’m not the person to ask about this because in addition to not having read CFYOW, I am also not personally interested in  the Soul King or the Hougyoku or the Fullbringers. But this CFYOW info does make other people’s discussions of this make a lot more sense to me!!

All the same, the reason my brain jumped to “different interpretations of the nature of the soul!” is because I don’t think I can personally conceptualize “missing” a *part* of a soul? In my mind, a soul is a soul or it’s not; there’s no decimals involved. Why I’d have this mentally locked in, of all things, I don’t know. I’m not a theist IRL, but apparently this is just How Fictional Souls work.

In my mind, a soul is like a worm, or a liver. Cut out a part of it, and it just keeps worming, or liver-ing, and its state of being and function are basically unchanged. You can’t have <I>part</I> of a soul; it’s either a soul or it’s not. The thing that got cut off is a shed item that has no definition. (Maybe what I actually have a strong opinion about is Matsumoto being a full, self-actualized, undiminished person, irrespective of her traumas.)

As far as Bleach goes, I don’t think we’ve had any canon mentions of souls that don’t exist as whole integrals (e.g. Pluses or Minuses). I mean, Fracciones, LOL, but that’s not really… those are not what I am talking about. XDD And the aforementioned Soul King body parts, but Soul King gonna Soul King. We’ve seen souls dissipate into motes, but I feel like that’s a transition from being a soul into being reishi motes that are Not Soul that will probably reconstitute into some other soul at some later point. The notion of giving someone your shinigami power and why that’s so illegal might factor in here, but those mechanics seem different, too.

There are lots of different interpretations of the nature of the soul, of course, and entire theologies dedicated to these questions. But I think the soul interpretation I like the best and that I think tracks with what we know about zanapakutou is that a soul is not a rigid, singular thing. It’s more a fluid series of occurrences and experiences bound together relationally, which I feel like tracks with the development of a shinigami’s relationship to their zanapakutou; there’s some base that you need to hear the name of, or some extant entity you need to come to understand, but beyond that your bankai (and to be honest, probably the higher-level development of your shikai) is going to be created of your experiences and desires and values and all these things that area part of your wily and ever-shifting but irreducible soul fabric. 

Again, that’s just me and what I think is most interesting to think about. Of all the things that could have umpteen different interpretations, I think souls are high on the list!

But thinking about the whole bankai discussion I see sometimes, here’s why it’s just not something I think about in that way:

1) Everyone we know and their hamster has bankai, sure, but I think one of the big schisms between our perception of this world as readers and the lived experience of shinigami in this world is that bankai is incredibly rare, a largely unknown quantity, and probably not something the average denizen of Soul Society or even Joe Shinigami thinks a lot about in their day-to-day. Bankai is the exception, not the expectation. 

Most shinigami don’t even have *shikai* and even people like Iemura, who as afar as we’ve seen is basically useless, is a cream of the crop shinigami, skill-wise. Unless you’re Ichigo being bullied into achieving bankai in three days (or Hisagi also being bullied into bankai for some Kensei reason), I feel like shinigami don’t go around thinking “this is why you don’t have bankai” because no one really expects that’s something to expect to be able to achieve. It’d be like going around thinking, “What part of my soul is missing that I can’t win a Nobel Prize?”

2) Maybe I’m just a bad Bleach fan, but I don’t really see a lot of value in achieving bankai, anyway. I mean, for the self-actualization, absolutely! But there is more than one route to self-actualization and I don’t think that not having bankai bars you from other routes. Bankai is a perfect storm of aptitudes and training and self-sorting, not an end-all. If it’s not in your practice, it’s not in your practice. I don’t feel like it’s the Soul Society equivalent of becoming a Pokemon Master, where it’s every ten-year old’s dream, a thing that’s purportedly normal and reasonable to want and achieve.

That reality is important to me, because I feel like it marks the distance between what is highlighted in our experience of Bleach as a plot-driven narrative and the Joe Shinigami experience of mulling about in the background, and that kind of thing really tickles me. Love it.

Okay, Matsumoto’s definitely not a background character. But even for VCs! Most PhDs don’t strive for MacArthur Genius Awards, and the implication isn’t that you’re unambitious or a deficient scholar if you never earn one. I dunno. I understand the trauma/tragedy of having bankai stolen, as in TYBW. What a mindfuck! D: But I don’t respond to “never having achieved bankai” in the same way.

But that’s all a huge tangent! 

What did Aizen take from Matsumoto, for Gin to go to such lengths to avenge her?

For me, the question isn’t “what” did he take; what was this important thing. I think it’s the act of taking—the audacity of feeling justified and empowered to do so. To use the souls of Rukongai for one’s own end, as though they are a resource and not a people.

What happened to Yachiru in the TYBW-arc?

Lots of interpretations here, as well. I’ll share what has always been my perception. Yachiru has always seemed, to me, an entity unto herself. “Child-like,” to a degree, but also nothing like a child, and not treated as a child. But also not treated as other shinigami—there seems to be some understanding that she is an entity unto herself. Don’t question it, just work with it. Which, for all the Gotei’s failures, is something they’re actually pretty good at. They know Yachiru is not really the normative shinigami, but she’s Yachiru, and they’re rolling with it. The same goes for Nemu.

She’s probably one of those things that I mentioned above, for which there is no real definition or designation, because she exists outside of the matrix. She is not a soul; she is not a sword; yet she is also both of those things. Yeah, I think she’s part of Zaraki’s sword, but not in ways that are equivalent to the Zabimaru spirit Renji speaks to in the Soul Society arc; or to dragon-Hyourinmaru, or to the humanoid Zanpakutou spirits in the Zanpakutou Rebellion Arc.

She is Yachiru.