#i love lunar and i love that he is going thru a villain arc

[mikansei]

i got tagged by @bleachbleachbleach! hello 👁️👁️

5 things you can talk about for hours without preparing any material:

well. obviously an awful lot of aspects of bleach qualify, lmao.

1:

i love digging into the underpinnings of systems like kidou (why do they call out the numbers? are the numbers part of the incantations? are they part of the actual spells themselves? who numbered them? who created them?), zanpakutou (what does it mean that so few shinigami have zanpakutou spirits whose gender is opposite their own? does it signify something in particular? does society in-universe believe it signifies something in particular?), the ins & outs of how Soul Society, the material world and Hueco Mundo connect to each other (is SS superimposed directly over the earth of the human world, like the Wandenreich was hidden "in" SS, or is it in a physically different place? what does it mean that HM is "between" the human world and soul society? why is HM's moon "in the opposite lunar phase" to the human world's??? WHY IS THE MOON BACKWARDS KUBO 😫)

2:

a particular subset of that is trying to figure out how soul biology works. reiryoku is energy that can be utilized by the soul; we know what produces and regulates the energy, the hakusui (soul sleep) and saketsu (chain binding), which exist at physical points in the body, if not as discrete organs. how does reiryoku circulate? is it analogous to Quincies' blut vene/arterie? are there spiritual blood vessels? nerves? meridians? what's with the "reiatsu vents" that were mentioned in relation to 1 (one) singular kidou spell and then never again??? (i'm imagining them like the pinhole punched thru thermos lids - they have a small but very important job, b/c if they're not there, Shit Don't Work Right)

3:

also obviously, my Blorbo Of All Time, Kisuke 💚🤍💚🤍💚 (the rest of this is under a cut b/c i am SUPER DUPER NOT KIDDING about being able to talk for hours lmao)

there are precious few lines in canon that address Kisuke's backstory pre-TBTP arc, and fleshing out how he and Tessai came to be at Shihouin manor is certainly not an unpopular theme in headcanon and fanworks, but i fear i may have taken it to a very OTT level...

like, ok, listen. listen. if he was from rukongai (a common HC), most people there aren't really from rukongai, they're from the human world, right? so where was he from that he was platinum blond in Ghost Japan? obviously the easy answer is that people from all over the world end up in rukongai indiscriminately - but that wasn't as fun as deciding he was the son of Portuguese traders in Nagasaki during the tail end of the Sengoku era, and during the lead-up to the Edo era's isolationist policies, he was killed and subsequently wound up in rukongai. is that extremely convoluted YES, did that deter me in any way NO. i could not, though, find much information on what the Nagasaki dialect may have sounded like in the late 1500s, which i looked into even tho the fic i'm writing will be in English, not Japanese, and CERTAINLY not late medieval Japanese.

(i also looked up what the imperial era names would've been then even tho they're not going to feature in the fic in any way, shape or form. Tenshou, Bunroku and Keichou, btw. this is taking up valuable space in my brain right next to the permanently-memorized-since-2002 lyrics to Hamasaki Ayumi's Dearest)

4:

FINALLY getting out of the worldbuilding and backstory morass into actual canon events(!!) - i could also talk for hours about Kisuke's motivation and reasoning behind early canon's Hougyoku Plot™ (keeping in mind that it's likely just an artifact of kubo's plot swerve at the end of the SS arc, where he'd probably started out intending Kisuke to be a villain in league with Aizen, and the late retcon meant Kisuke's actions no longer made any damn sense.)

anyway, my favorite element of canon here to play with is that most of what we know about it comes from Aizen's dialogue at the end of the SS arc. so what if Aizen wasn't being strictly truthful? even if he wasn't outright lying, he certainly could've spun things to sound much different, much worse, than they really were - and, of course, in ways that would make Kisuke sound terrible if he tried to explain himself and his actions. maybe stashing the hougyoku in Rukia's soul was never meant to be permanent (he invented the only non-fatal method of removing it himself, after all); it was just a way to keep it close to Ichigo, to awaken & evolve his powers, but still concealed. maybe Rukia's gigai was never meant to turn her fully human (he would recognize the name Kuchiki and know she'd be missed were she to disappear); it simply used a similar composition to Isshin's gigai, so that a shinigami soul with a "dose" of human would balance out Ichigo's hollow.

that leaves room for Kisuke to have still been using Rukia and Ichigo like pawns on a chessboard, so it's not like he's totally innocent and absolved of guilt - but it makes him guilty in a way that both 1. patches the plothole and 2. makes Aizen even more petty, spiteful and dickish, which is delightful to me. it also leaves room for Rukia's powers not coming back after she transferred them to Ichigo to be because of the hougyoku's influence instead of gigai tampering - subconsciously, she wanted to stay in the world of the living, and she knew she could only do that while Ichigo was still taking on her shinigami duties. the consequence of a magical wishing stone that grants desires is that it doesn't only grant the desires you consciously voice (which is ALSO delightful to me).

5:

i love finding ways to explain Kisuke's Weirdness. like, sure, maybe he's just a weird person - but with the power of projection on my side, he, too, can be ADHD and maybe autistic! has trouble making eye contact, so he wears his hair in a way that lets him hide his eyes, and starts wearing a hat and using the fan to hide his face even further! Only One Outfit Syndrome isn't just an artifact of the episodic visual medium, it's because he's so particular about the types and cuts of fabric he wears! his favorite food is plain white rice and his dislikes are "too many to list," for heaven's sake! he just like me fr!!!

as a rukongai street rat transplanted into one of the most prominent noble households in all Soul Society, i can only imagine he and Tessai adopted their default polite modes of speech under relative duress - if they were ever found to be out of line, the "proper" nobles (obviously barring Yoruichi, who wouldn't give a fuck) wouldn't hesitate to put them in their place. in Tessai this evolved into pure formality; in Kisuke it evolved into a mild, polite register that he pointedly refused to make any more or less formal - a.k.a. "just polite enough to piss everyone off" lmao.

also on the subject of speech, i found out where Kisuke's "atashi" comes from!! it's shitamachi ("lower city") dialect, the old working-class dialect of Edo/Tokyo. in TBTP he still says "boku," so he picked it up only after he and the Visored came to the human world (Karakura is supposed to be somewhere nearish to Tokyo) and set up the shouten. as far as i can tell, "atashi" is the only aspect of that dialect that Kisuke uses - other more common aspects, like turning the ending vowel sounds of adjectives into -ee or -ii sounds ("urusai" -> "urusee", "warui" -> "warii", etc.), are actually used in Ichigo's speech to make him sound like a delinquent tough-guy shonen protag, lol. how and when "atashi" went from working-class street hawkers' slang to a feminine pronoun used almost exclusively by young girls, i have no fucking idea lmao... (also i have no idea if canon bears this out in their dialect, but the Ishidas are totally yamanote in contrast, right?? high-class, well-to-do, prim and proper, Old Money™, etc etc - they gotta be!)

one more thing and then i'll actually end this post jdfksjdf but! years ago i saw a post from @saranel about why, at the beginning of the arrancar arc, Kisuke talked about the Visored to Isshin as if he didn't know them that well. obviously the most likely explanation is "kubo hadn't finalized their backstory at that point yet" lol, but filling in doylist plotholes with watsonian pavement is part of what makes fandom fun! and her theory (i can't find the post 😭 sorry) was that Kisuke'd had a falling out with the Visored at some point during their exile - probably, given the Visored's initial animosity toward shinigami, regarding Kisuke using the shop to help the shinigami in Karakura. this is SUPER juicy to me, because i can imagine how shinji, hiyori etc. would've taken it as a betrayal, a backstabbing, from one of the few people in their world they thought they could trust - and how kisuke never, ever intended it that way, probably didn't anticipate it could be taken that way at all, he was just trying to help out - everyone involved is walking away from that confrontation emotionally scraped raw and bleeding, and i am LIVING for it 🥰

i don't have a good conclusion here so uhh. if u read this far pls have a gold star for putting up with my rambling ⭐