#i hope the gotei space station library is anything like the library of the clayr from the old kingdom trilogy by garth nix

[bleachbleachbleach]

Once more in Library Mode--I appreciate your patience and answering all my questions very much--I am imagining how the awful mishmash of library items in the Library Space Station you mentioned works and it's a delight. The card catalog alone would be amazing, if perhaps something of a stream of consciousness after Aizen and Ukitake upended the place looking for clues. "Mission reports (Madarame and Ayasegawa)--cultivation of rice, pre-Gotei-13--soil analysis of Hueco Mundo--seed catalog (some seeds still in)." I bet they still have a card catalog. Also who do you suppose actually works in the library? Were they victims of Aizen? Is it a joint effort between Squads Nine and Twelve, and then the SRDI? Did Tousen and Aizen and Gin pretend to be librarians and give everyone the wrong answers to their reference questions on purpose? What a villainous act.

I would LOVE to watch a local news special spotlighting the stalwart work of the Gotei librarians! Like, can you imagine that interview. Can you imagine interviewing the head librarian as she explains the process of deciding what the taxonomies of knowledge are and what the map of subfields, overlapping categories, etc. are? And that's even before the interview with the head librarian emeritus, who was there when the deep magic was written?

It's not about librarians, but one of the anime series of all time is The Great Passage, which is based on a Shion Miura novel about a group of officeworkers and the ten years they spend developing a dictionary--THE dictionary. It's about the profound thoughtfulness required to ensure no word goes missing, even amidst employment changeover, the shifting needs of the publishing house, etc.--and to write definitions of things, concepts, ideas that speak to the true heart of what that thing really is. Imagine doing that for the ghost military. Imagine the kinds of things getting catalogued.

And YES to a seed catalogue with seed samples!!! A library of things!! The three- (or four, or five) dimensionality of the archive!

(lmao what if technically Muken is not a classified as a prison; it is part of the library system. It's a technicality, mostly--municipal infighting about property rights, the fact that the library and working at the library actually requires more training and expertise than working in a Gotei prison, etc., But after the Winter War, Aizen is not a prisoner; he is an archival object. And he has his own call number. There is a librarian whose entire job is to record, classify, and preserve, every memory and figment of thought they can squeeze out of him.)