#i feel completely justified in blorbo from my shows-ing the blaschka flowers

[bleachbleachbleach]

💠華麗結晶💠

This feels like the kind of post that will languish in drafts for a year if I don’t write it right now, on a time limit, so here goes! This weekend involved a lot of Tourism and tams and my slow burn horror realization that all of the food was going to be held hostage by Socializing with the Regional Archetype Parents of my sister’s cohortmates. But before all that my family and I went to a museum and looked at glass flowers, so I spent a lot of time staring into the middle distance thinking about those. 

Specifically, these ones:

These are plum blossoms, and they are made out of glass. HOW. WHAT. And rest assured, this iPhone snapshot does not do their uncanny verisimilitude justice. In person, it’s completely unreal. They were made by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka in the late 19th century, and now I’m obsessed with them.

Even more specifically, I wanted to know: 

Can Hitsugaya make flowers like these out of ice? 

(For Hinamori, obviously. They are plum blossoms, after all.)

We know from the SC that Hitsugaya does ice sculpture--enough to have a semi-regular column about it. Personally, I headcanon that the majority of these sculptures are in the vein of Ruth Asawa’s work, abstract and interested in negative space and in thinking about qualities of space, weight, volume. This headcanon mostly comes from the ash net vacuum ice wall thing he does with Matsumoto in TYBW. But canonically, mostly we just know that he made that very ornate but also ridiculous chair: 

[Colorful Bleach]

I find the chair hilarious, because add a few gargoyles and this is also 100% an Edward Elric chair, and I guess I can’t imagine Hitsugaya naturally posing with something he made like that unless he were explicitly told to, because this is also 100% one of those awkward Early 00s Soccer Team Photos where you have to pose with a ball in the most ridiculous way possible. (As a survivor of this era of soccer photography, we’re talking like... posed lying on the ground propped up on elbows, legs crossed and the ball balanced between your ankles. Why?)  Hitsugaya probably hates that photo, LOL.  But I digress.

We also know he’s made this bad boy:

[Episode 316]

Though maybe that doesn’t count, since I headcanon that he does do the ice sculpting manually rather than magically, and is meticulous about it. This ice blorbo took like 2 seconds and was definitely magical. Talk about phoning it in for Sad Ghost Kid though, ahahaha. (I am joking. The kid loved it, and all he wanted was to see snow. He didn’t want or need some rando showing off his mad art skillz at him. Ice Blorbo is perfect and the best thing about the entire episode.)

But while we’re talking about magical ice... As far as his capacity for artistic verisimilitude goes, we also know he’s made this weird little guy:

(Bonus headcanon: I think he developed this technique after the fight with Luppi. I don’t know how much he was able to keep track of re: Urahara’s fight with Yammi and his use of his blowup doll gigai while he was running around setting up his own attack, but afterwards he was definitely interested in/wary of Urahara. There’s something about this move that doesn’t feel 100% his style, but I am very attracted to the idea that it was inspired by a combination of his encounter with Aizen in the Central 46 HQ + glancing knowledge of Urahara’s gigai.) 

Though, again, this seems less in the vein of hyperreal sculpture than it is some kind of atmospheric mirage that’s making use of water/light refraction to create a double. So maybe it’s not quite what we’re looking for:

[Chapter 357]

Verdict: Given the examples we have to work with, I kind of feel like Hitsugaya could not, at present, make ice flowers on the level of the Blaschka glass ones. He has the most experience working with ice at scale, and producing things very quickly under duress. Even though the ice sculpting seems to take a different tack--producing things slowly, with no time limit--the projects we’ve seen tend to be fairly large, rather than flower-sized. Credit where credit’s due, Hitsugaya would have to work for it to get on the Blaschkas’ level.

However, I absolutely think that given enough time to do that work, Hitsugaya absolutely could and would. He’s already done work with flower motifs:

[Chapter 359]

So really, it’s just a matter of taking the scale down, and focusing on a different element of craft, both of which seem entirely within Hitsugaya’s wheelhouse and within the realm of things he would be interested in.

He probably spent his entire 10-year timeskip making tiny hyperrealistic ice flowers and learning how to do ice enamel coloring. They all finally had the time.