#soul king

[biggs-regretti]

Brook just wants a little bromance! 

[gallusrostromegalus]

An Elephant Is Warm And Mushy Episode 3: Me, Myself and Eye.

Shinso and Ichibei learn more about Nobody. Shinso learns A Lot more!

Please note: This chapter contains explicit content, not for audiences under 18.

[dullday]

#4 𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘵 𝘲𝘶𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘴

[soulkingpilled]

that was funnier in my head (not a ship just transbian besties)

[casualfr1days]

Brook!!! I like the funny skeleton man

[littleeyesofpallas]

Okay okay catching up on Bleach because I was putting it off...

So the soul king has an actual name now and it's apparently Adnyeus(?*)[アドナイェウス] which at a glance I thought was some kind of weird mashup of Hebrew Adonai[אֲדֹנָי] and Latin deus as a kind of play on Yhwach's name being based on the tetragrammaton. But actually it's just the name Aidoneus[Ἀϊδωνεύς] which was an old epithet for the Greek Hades, supposedly meaning "The Unseen" which somewhat superficially fits for the Soul King as a king of the dead/underworld.

*(I have no idea where anyone is getting these romanizations I see flying around...)

It's actually not the first time the name has come up. some eagle eyed fans caught that what appears to be "ADNYEUS" was shown back in episode 6 of TYBW in Ryuuken's notes, above the illustration of the castle Silbern. And then at the end of the previous season the anime added a chant to Yhwach's Auswählen that ran:

Kakageyo Gin no Monshou, Haiiro no Sougen, Hikari ni Uzumoreta, Enkan no Michi, Menou no Gankyu, Ougon no Shita, Zugai no Sakazuki, ADNYEUS no Hitsugi. Kakageru mono wa, Omae no Shinzou: AUSWÄHLEN [掲げよ 銀の紋章 灰色の草原 光に埋もれた円環の途 瑪瑙の眼球 黄金の舌 頭蓋の盃 アドナイェウスの棺 掲げるものは お前の心臓 聖別(アウスヴェーレン)] "Raise up Crest of Silver, Ash-colored(gray) Meadow, Circular Road hidden in (the) Light, Eye(s) of Agate, Tongue of Gold, Grail* of Skull, Coffin of Adnyeus. That which is Raised up is Your Heart: Auswählen."

*notably in one of Uryuu's German chants, the Japanese word for a [杯]:"sake cup" was paired with the German word Gral:"Grail", and [盃] and [杯] are alternate kanji for the same word. At the most literal the chant in Japanese just uses the word for "sake cup" like the one he uses for the schrift eucharist, but I feel like the more implicitly western imagery evoked by "skull Grail" or maybe "...chalice" is more in line with the ongoing aesthetic of Quincy spells

I'm not actually in a position to go doing a real deep dive on this but it does seem like at a glance there are associations with that alternate title with a specific incongruous variation of the god of the underworld--that is to say: characterizations of him under this epithets are not consistent with other more common interpretstions-- where he's actually got a lot of strong sun iconography. This of course maps almost perfectly with a bunch of stuff I've ranted on about a few different times in my Bleach ramblings.

Incidentally it is also the scientific namesake of the Papilio aidoneus... a black butterfly... In the first place Bleach's hell-butterflies were already a play on the real world association of butterflies and death, often either as psychopomps or themselves the souls of the dead. That they tie back in to the Soul King himself isn't too big a stretch.

As for this "triplet world" thing... We were already told that Hueco Mundo isn't actually it's own formal realm, it's the interstitial realm that just naturally exists in the space between one world and the next. So it kinda annoys me that this feels like it's really only being acknowledged because after the fact it's just where a big chunk of Bleach's plot happened, rather than actually being cosmologically on par with the other two.

Anyway the translations going around I notice are a little sloppy, mostly in that a few are clearly just machine translated and so ignored the use of Bleach specific terminology, like "reishi" and "kishi" so here's my quick breakdown of it (thank god it's short...)

原初の海から分かたれた尸魂界,現世, 虚圏の三つの世界。 The Three Worlds of Soul Society, This (the mortal) World, Hueco Mundo divided* from the Sea of Origin. 遍く魂魄の流れを司る礎であり, かつ世界の楔たる存在によって, The universal flow of spirits is the foundation to control, as well as the lynchpin of the world which is due to existence, 霊子の世界,器子の世界,砂の楽土の三世界が分離され, the Three Worlds of The World of Reishi, The World of Kishi, The Paradise of Sand are detached*, 『生』と『死』が隔てられた。 "Life" and "Death" were isolated*.

*so interestingly all three of these different words could be translated into english as "separated" but seem to be fairly distinct contextual differences: the first means like cutting one big thing up into smaller things the "A came from B" dynamic being the focus, the second means to be separated out almost like being categorized, and the third is to be isolated or alienated.

So first it's saying the three worlds came from one sea of origin, and that the flow of spirits between those three worlds is the key to existence being what it is, which is to say three distinct realms where death and life are these things that can never coexist. All of which is stuff we really already knew.

Also we're supposed to have just completely forgotten about Hell since it's not the current plot line, I guess? I anything the Three Worlds should be Soul Society, the Material World, and Hell, with Hueco Mundo as the interstitial void/aether, like it was originally defined as. That would at least map more sensibly onto the buddhist 3 realms of Form(Humans & animals: those bound by their physicality), Formless(Deva & Asura: those who exist in a hightened mental/spiritual state), and Desire(Preta & those in Hell: those defined by their strong need for what they lack)

Maybe that only real point of interest is the reference to Hueco Mundo as suna no rakudo[砂の楽土], a "paradise of sand." In this voice I think the idea is that if life and death being separate realms is a bad thing that Yhwach seeks to rectify, then by being an inbetween realm, Hueco Mundo is a paradise, because it's a place of neither life nor death? But if it is a place of rest and comfort then I wonder if that doesn't validate my thoughts on the Vastolorde being the natural path of development for a soul in reincarnation afterall?

That aside, this mostly just lines up with existing Buddhist/Hindu parallels that were always pretty obviously implied but not so directly touched on. Once again things I've babbled about in some form or another already... I'm not about to go digging them all up right now.

[djmoad]

some old brobin doodles

[distinguishedshoeduckdonut]

Preview of "BLEACH: Thousand-Year Blood War Cour 3" Episode 3!

[livingtelevisionart]

Something… something… Soul King 😼

[cldhead]

one piece characters in my style 2/8

💀BROOK🎸

[1 | 3]

[badly-drawn-doflamingo]

Y’all ever think about the fact Brook literally knew those 200 plus men for longer than he’s known the Strawhats by 10+ years?

Like, he rode with those men for a decade or more, he grew up, lived with, trained, cried, and loved those men.

We see how much by the dedication to the skulls, all of which he dislodged as to fill the caskets without over flowing.

The Sunny could not canonly carry that many skulls because “it would sink from the weight.” [ Franky stated so mindlessly. ]

How many souls does soul king carry, and what makes him ruler of them vs the other way around?

[ check reblogs for my additions please, there’s more ]

[gallusrostromegalus]

So for AEIWAM, how does the whole Ukitake thing work? I’m still fuzzy on how it was in the manga (and that’s not even touching the ‘epilogue’/Echoing the Jaws of Hell why are these arc names like this) but wasn’t he essentially reverse faith healed-slash-possessed for death? I see you keep mentioning gods so like- what does that whole situation make him?

I need you to imagine a Self-Propogating Cryptocurrency Mining Computer. Whenever it's hardware starts to burn out, it creates a little man to build it a new machine and port it's memory over, keeping the machine alive and solving equations.

In An Elephant Is Warm And Mushy, that's God.

I may need to back up.

If you're not familiar with how Cryptocurrency Mining works, essentially, a computer thinks very, very hard about how to solve an extremely complicated equation, and when it solves it, it gets a little bit of money (or it gets a receipt saying that it has money that uh. nobody will accept, because the money aspect is a scam but the math, at least is real).

Anyway, thinking very, very hard like that runs through the computer's hardware- it's especially hard on the graphics cards. So eventually, if it want to keep solving equations, it needs new hardware. But a computer can't replace it's own parts, and this Ultra-complex, reality-generating God-computer is no different.

So when it starts to get old and degraded, the God-Computer does a neat little trick: it builds itself a programmer. That programmer learns all about the God Machine and how it works and the way it's powered- it moves souls through three planes of existence- each enormously complicated question is representative of the shape of a lifetime- each time a soul completes it's life and is reborn, the God Computer gets a little burst of extra energy. The larger and more complex the soul and longer and richer lifetime, the more energy the God Computer gets. So for the last millions of years, many, many generations of God-computer have made the universe richer and more complicated to generate larger and more complex souls to power themself (themselves?) further.

The programmer learns all about how the God-Computer works, and sets about building the next Generation of God-Computer to keep the universe running.

Due to a slight miscommunication, the programmer is colloquially known as the "Soul King" this time around.

Anyway, the Soul King was doin' his thing, when he happened to start chatting with a cool guy online and agreed to meet up with him. And it was fun! They hung out, Soul King showed him the true nature of reality, they stayed up late eating junk food and talking bullshit, good times. Later, The Soul King's cool friend from the internet said he had some other friends who wanted to meet him, and Soul king thought "BALLER. SLUMBER PARTY!!!" and told everyone to come on over!

-and then the new guys beat the shit out of Soul King's buddy and dismembered the Soul King for parts to sell as part of an organ-harvesting scheme!

Whoops.

Now, Soul King's buddy DID manage to get up and stop one of the organ thieves, the guy absconding with his hands, and tackled him off the Balcony. One of the psuedo-god hands (the one with the power of stagnation) fell into the Spirit World,took the name "Mimihagi" and became a minor kami because he's really bad at this Witness Protection thing.

Eventually, some parents with an extremely sick kid came to the hand's shrine and asked him to save the kid, and Mimihagi went "Well, I can't cure him, but I can hang out in his body for the next few centuries and prevent his disease from getting worse with constant effort?" and they said "...Please?" and Mimihagi said "Yeah OK.

-And ever since then Ukitake has had the left hand of The God Machine's dead repairman living in him and (mostly) stopping his super-tuberculosis from getting worse, like a benevolent tapeworm!

:)

The God-Machine is still dying this whole time, BTW. Might want to do something about that.

(the best part is, that of the three-to-five-and-a-half living pieces of the Soul King, Mimihagi is actually probably the least weird and definitely sanest of them)

[jayvrontio]

Here he is the ICON, the LEGEND, the SOUL KING BROOK

I love my boney man 🥰

[soulkingpilled]

BEETLEBROOK BEETLEBROOK BEETLEBROOK

[pixel-atlas]

now its brook

[akashis-waifu]

The Soul King, (probably) watching Ichigo slice him in half like ham