#this post brought to you by 'blorbo thoughts screaming to get out' my daily fevered chanting is when is Internet time when is Internet time

[bleachbleachbleach]

Yesterday someone was showing me the archive and artifact rooms for their museum, and while fascinating in their own right, I was just like... b l o r b o s ... because of course. We were looking at contemporary artifacts--objects from a historic building that had burned down, objects from when they put the People Mover in (the slowest least popular train known to man me). And we were talking about funding and human capital and the fact that so much of this stuff is either not being collected at all (they're trying to reach an agreement with the city that all new building must require an archaeological survey first) or isn't catalogued or organized in a way that anyone can realistically access or use--like, it'll be organized by date input, or by provenance (Mr. Archive's Boxes O' Stuff that he donated), but not by topic, like here's all the stuff about this fort, or that hospital.

It makes me think about the differences in shinigami perception vs. human (my perennial happy place). Their lifespans are longer than a human's, which might suggest they have better memories for history, having been there. In some ways this is probably true--easier access to this or that part of stuff that happened 1000 years ago by default--but I also wonder if, in remembrance and analysis of history, their lifespans also work to their detriment. Because it's still something they lived, are living, through. It's not "history" enough, or it's still part of some active story, of the sort that are difficult to parse and understand holistically. Having been there gives you one important form of understanding/remembering, and a view from a distance another. But aside from that, what of the archive? Like, in the sense that it's like, oh, this is just some drywall from 1987, it's not really important, not like that piece of leatherwork from the Roman Empire they just found. Except so much of Soul Society's (or even just the Seireitei's) history would still be that drywall from 1987, mentally. No one REALLY knows it but it also doesn't seem ancient enough to be worth knowing. And there's data being lost even though it'd be easier to trace and record now because the perception is that it's not yet important enough to know.

idk man I'm just really tickled by the idea that rather than longevity-> less knowledge turnover across generations, the shinigami lifespan might instead hold history in abeyance.

I mean, my personal headcanon is that so much of Soul Society's work is tied to humans (and by extension their timescales) shinigami have unconsciously trained their brains into... expecting? working with that timescale, so beyond a human's natural capacity for memory it's counterintuitively somewhat difficult for shinigami to remember any of that shit, either. This hc was developed mostly in response to TBTP, which was only 100 years ago and inasmuch as it was all happening in a shroud of real secrecy/lack of knowledge, and also willful forgetting on the Gotei's part, I still feel like it's probably actively difficult their little shinigami brains or reishi constellations or whatever to meaningfully remember things 100+ years old, minus the general sense of it or particular flashbulb memories, the ghosts that persist.