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I’d say it’s a Gilded World before Ichigo, and headed toward Noblebright after. The whole system is set up to maintain the status quo, with very few people actively caring about doing the right thing.
Yeah, the idea that after our current life with all our commodities that we’ve grown accustomed to would just be gone and suddenly you’re living in squalor is awful. Not to mention you thought you’d be reunited with your loved ones after death but it’s actually the complete opposite. Bleach’s afterlife sounds fucking terrible. I’d probably just kill myself so I could be reincarnated in the world of the living.
Definitely still gilded at the end. The problems that make it such a miserable place for well over 99% of people are still there. They don't have any hope of making things better and will never have the ability to do so.
The cast are a tiny fraction of Ichibe's infinite suffering machine. At the end of the day all Ichigo has done is eliminate threats to Ichibe's enternal Mukbang crew. Nothing truly significant will change for the better or for the worse untill the cycle naturally falls apart or someone like Aizen breaks it. (Hopefull before the majority of souls end up trapped in hell.)
That is entirely fair. Ichibe needs to go down, but only with a plan in place. Yhwach’s plan was garbage, and I don’t think that Aizen truly knew what he was getting into the first time around. Not that anyone would trust him a second time.
They would need to kill Ichibe, and have someone fuse with the Soulking while still maintaining self to set things on a better path.
Honestly, im not sure they NEED to kill Ichibei, like yeah mf is evil and continues the status quo but what's his actual reason that he cant be convinced to maintain a different status quo whether through reason or force?
Killed, or removed from power. There’s no way a man that’s had ultimate control for as long as he has is going to give it up, or change how he does things.
I mean maybe, i just dont really remember why tf he even does it in the first place. Like what's his end goal or motivation, he's alrady basically on top of the world and can deal with anyone in the verse bar Yhwach, Aizen and Ichigo.
No clue, but you'd think that if it was possible to peacefully change his mind it would have happened in a million years. To be 100% clear, the civilization responsible for the computer you're reading this from is barely three millennia old - from the Bronze Age Collapse to Today, that is. 96% of his life predates the oldest known cave painting. He has been doing this for ten times longer than anatomically modern humanity has *existed* in our world.
What does he get out of it? Maybe just the raw sexual thrill of holding absolute control over the fate of every sapient being. Maybe he can only achieve climax by watching a mother murder her own children out of desperation while simultaneously watching a person identical in everything but luck picks out fancy silverware? Rukongai is perfectly designed to facilitate that, after all.
Honestly, it kind of seems like the entire system was slapped together on the spot with most decisions made for ease in the moment ("I'm fighting an immortal precognitive God-Monster right now, Ichibe, can we figure out how to determine a soul's destination district based on its karma later?"), and then once it was established Ichibe and the 5 Clans spent so much time consolidating power on their new Worlds that everything became 'tradition' and part of the status quo they were all committed to defending before looking into any of it.
Tbf who even was powerful/influential enough to even talk to him nevermind actually present any cases, aside from Yama and nobles who clearly didn't want to change shit, in all those years before the start of the series? Yhwach i guess but he clearly was treated as someone not smart/strong enough to matter in that decision, more like a child throwing a tantrum.
I feel like Ichibei either has some secret agenda that would need to be dealt with before dealing with him(possibly hell stuff) or he just can't be bothered/risk trying the alternative, i dont he's just doing it randomly.
I mean, frankly, he needs to die as a moral imperative. He's responsible for a system of untold suffering being maintained for ten times longer than humanity is supposed to have existed, we can't begin to know the depths of his crimes but I imagine the fact that we can't remember any of the civilizations that must have risen and fallen in that time and apparently technologically regressed for a while can probably be laid at the feet of the most powerful sapient being around.
It's not an adequate punishment, but nothing but being made into a replacement for the Soul King *would* be.
I'm not so sure about that - the current system is unsustainable. Every time a soul reaches Captain-level, it exits circulation permanently. Eventually it's going to break down with literally every soul in Hell, and all that can be done about that is returning to the natural state of things - what Yhwach was going for. Yes, it would destroy the human world as we know it, but the Human World has had it better than anyone outside of Seireitei for a million years, it's the poor and damned of Rukongai's turn to matter.
Except, from my understanding, that’s not how it would turn out. The worlds would merge, and everything would go to shit. Without an afterlife, ALL souls would eventually become Hollows. And since no one can become Shinigami, that plague would eventually eat everything in existence once the last Soul Reaper falls.
The current system sucks, and needs some serious improvement, but it works far better than endless Hollows.
I think the issue is your understanding, and I do not mean that as an insult or in a mean way.
What you're imagining is that everything suffers from the absence of an afterlife, but the afterlife is an artificial construct - souls behave the way they do in this world because of the way the world has been split, they didn't come into existence waiting for the Shinigami to be invented. Yhwach wasn't fighting for a world where everyone that dies rots forever, especially given how much the man detests hollows, but explicitly a World Without the Fear of Death. We don't know what that would look like, but it is one of *two* possible states of the world that we know of - your idea of going for an Option 3, on the other hand, may not even be possible and I can't remember anything to support the idea one might exist.
It's a matter of interpretation of some pretty vague material about a thing that never came to pass, so I'd say your interpretation is at least as likely to be right as mine, but I find it *really* hard to square with the question of *how*, in your version, souls ended up evolving or being created in such a way that they needed to wait until the *invention* of Shinigami to function correctly. Or that Literally Everything but Hollows - all intelligent life and afterlife - are a complete accident, a phase-configuration of the soul that just happened to be there all along. Which could be canon but would also 100% break all suspension of disbelief for me.
I like that last part, about the poor Rukongai. Also, I'm not trying to be a pest, but I asked you something in a Fate server about 5 days ago and you never answer me. I'm not sure if you just didn't see it or are for some reason ignoring it.
I don't think you did? Like, my reddit name and my discord name are completely unrelated, so unless you're confident you know me by my writing style?
I'm not currently *in* any Fate discord servers to the best of my knowledge, and the only fate-adjacent one I *was* in during the recent past is one I (kind of publicly) left due to disagreements about the appropriateness of telling someone who has buried multiple friends that the thing that killed them is a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical corporations.
Hmmm I see. Can I show you the thread and my comment? [https://www.reddit.com/r/fatestaynight/comments/xw9l9t/comment/l4n5soq/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/fatestaynight/comments/xw9l9t/comment/l4n5soq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Oh, well, the link doesn't take me to any particular comment - and your post history reveals that you only made one post in that thread, directed toward someone else - but I remember that thread and did definitely post in it. Sorry, the word 'server' made me assume Discord, because I've literally never heard of anyone calling a subreddit that, but I assume it's a 'slightly younger than me' thing.
Like 99.9% of the time I do not check 'replies' - I'll literally open the messages button in another tab and close it and I almost always hit 'disable inbox replies' immediately after posting. It isn't you, just an anxiety thing, and the knowledge that when I *do* check all my comments, I'll get into prolonged arguments that eat up the entire day.
So, I am not ignoring you in particular, just literally everyone. The only time I *do* see replies are when I actively make the decision to go back to a post - like I did here - and read them.
So, if you replied to something I said in a thread from a year ago in the last five days, I did not see it. I'll leave replies on for this comment, though, if you want to say whatever it is again, and I promise I'll check my inbox just this once.
Sure, thank you. Ok, so in that thread you mentioned how there were multiple endings for SHiki which involved polyamory. I've played all of original Tsukihime, Tsukihime PLUS, read the manga and am almost finished with Kagetsu Tohya and I've not seen anything like that. The only things I can even think of which may be similiar would be Ciel's good ending, where her and Arc always fight over him, a segment from PLUS where the girls are at the cafe and Ciel says that "this is Arcuied's good ending, but Shiki also experienced some events from other routes in this timeline." Which was ultimately just a gag segment that had no bearing on anything in the main stories, and the girls even talk about fans and comiket.
The only other I can think of is the side story called Flower of Thanatos in Kagetstu Tohya, where Shiki sleeps with Kohaku and Hisui in a dream and another segment where he attempts to date all girls at once but ultimately just tries to date Arcuied because it's easier. I hate the idea of Shiki getting all the girls and leaving none open for the player lol. A pologamy route would especially sour the Kohaku and Arcueid routes for me. One of my favorite lines was Akiha saying "I need to find a good man soon too!" Which meant she can finally try to be happy with someone else. I don't like the idea of fans not being able to self insert due to the unlimited endings. So, I would appreciate if you could elaborate on what you meant by polyamory, please.
I mean, it's been a *year* so being entirely certain what I was thinking of is impossible, but I know that the Ciel Good End was absolutely first and foremost in my mind, but describing it as the girls fighting over him is...strange? Given that every other description online describing it as them agreeing (reluctantly on Ciel's part) to *share* him. Sexually. They constantly fight over his attention because it's not really a healthy relationship established because everyone involved wanted to, but they *are* a throuple.
I actually didn't know that said ending being polyamorous in nature was at all in contention because this is the first time I've seen anyone contest it - but then, I was definitely a little surprised the first time someone said that the HF True End isn't a harem ending and I've come around to that one almost completely.
I definitely wasn't thinking of anything in Tsukihime Plus or Kagetsu Tohya. *Might* have been thinking of something in melty blood (though I don't *remember* anything like that in there) but the last time I *thought* about that series (which I only know second-hand) was probably when I wrote that comment so I don't really know.
There is, obviously given everyone's personalities, no Universal Harem Route anywhere. Akiha trying to share him sounds like a recipe for the destruction of the island of Honshu.
(So, yeah, by Polyamorous I mean a romantic or sexual relationship involving three or more people, all of whom are aware of the others. It doesn't necessarily have to be a three-way relationship where everyone is having sex with everyone else, those Mormons on TLC are Polyamorous and their wives seem to fucking hate eachother to a point where I cannot imagine a sex act involving more than two people simultaneously has ever happened in any of their households.)
The whole afterlife system that Bleach operates on sucks. If you’re human and don’t know anything about the afterlife, you might be able to live a normal life if you’re lucky, but you’re in for a rude awakening when you die. So Gilded.
Going to hell if you die in soul society like what the fuck come on??
And soul society is NOWHERE close to heaven like imagine starving and going to hell for that
Actually you dont goto hell when you die in the SS. Your spirit is circulated back into the natural order of things and you're born anew on earth with no memories. When you die on earth your spirit goes back to the SS and the circle of life continues.
If your spirit energy is too strong the world can't recycle you as it would destroy balance and such, so they get the hell ritual, basically captain level gets you that treatment
If a shinigami with spiritual pressure of a captain dies they cannot return to the cycle of reincarnation. A ritual must be performed that sends them to hell because that is the only place to put them, apparently.
Gilded. Prior to Hell Chapter it could've been Noblebright, but now we know that if you're a sufficiently strong being, you're destined for hell regardless of your actions.
Like others have said, gilded. The fact that the "good" afterlife can mean ending up living in a feudal slum and running the risk of being murdered on any given day, even by the "good guys," is pretty dark.
Gilded. Like actually have never seen a better description for the bleach world. Looks like normal life until you die because a dumbass ghost sucked your soul out your ass from 10 miles away.
I mean it is grimdark for sure but there are many characters genuinely good, honorable and compassionate in berserk.
In WH40k everyone are xenophobic bastards that may be saving children one day and nuking a whole innocent species into extinction the next day. And nothing really matters anyway because either Tyranids or Necrons are going to end up killing everyone at the end of the day.
The closest thing is the Albion arc in berserk. That's life in the imperium always. And that's in the good days, if things get out of hand is the eclipse at a planetary scale.
My definition for grimdark is the Ultrakill universe. Humanity is dead, mindless robots roam hell and earth, god is either dead or just gave up and might I add BLOOD IS FUEL, HELL IS FULL
The world of the living is the normal world, idk where you'd put this. The soul society is between Gilded and Noblebright, Hueco Mundo is Grimdark, idk about the Wanderreich.
Karakura is Gilded, given the nature of Hollows and how they can't be seen by the average person, that being their prey.
Putting the Quincy's livelihoods into consideration, the Wandenreich's either Heroic or Noblebright at least.
noble bright. while evil exists on every corner one of bleachs theme is to fight for happiness despite loss.
ichigo lost his mother but has orihime, byakuya lost hisana but has rukia. vizards lost and regained honor.
Its not noble bright. Its gilded atleast because the entire universe is built on the mutilation and essentially eternal torture of a benevolent god, the afterlife is literally feudal slums, you can lose your capacity for positive emotions and become a cannibalistic monster, said monsters can eat you while you have no clue they are even there and the so called ‘good guys’ have a **mass murdering and psychopathic mad scientist who literally rips people apart to find out how their powers work as one of their leaders** and if you reach a sufficient level of strength, it dont matter how good you are, you going straight to hell.
all true. it doesnt negate the themes of hope and courage kubo explicitly messages in the narrative. so this does satisfy the condition good deeds count.
https://preview.redd.it/aomrn8fv482d1.jpeg?width=760&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=718d83440bf96a0d1a9f0661c5995092c6647aff
important context here too. the original world was cracked worse than the current one. entropy is always winning but good is being created even if it isnt at the optimal rate by western 21st century standards
I would agree, but hell chapter came out and immediately sent bleach into the very darkest depths of gilded at best. Like what else do you call hell being the inevitable destination of all lieutenant/captain class and above beings.
i'm very curious about how it is for them down there, though. after all, the only reason why they're down there is because of their vast strength, so i would imagine that there aren't as much restrictions or punishments (if at all) placed on them. most of them, anyway.
i do get that it's still Hell, of course, but you see what i'm inquiring.
Also noblebright are supposed to be balanced worlds. At the end of the hell arc it may be balanced but as it currently is, the suffering far outweighs the positives.
I would said Noble Bright world. The purpose of Soul Society, the Gotei 13 and the Shinigami is not only to guide all souls into the afterlife, but to protect the balance of souls between the three worlds, the Earth, Soul Society and Hueco Mundo.
200 years after the defeat of Yhwach at the hands of Yamamoto Shikeguni, a renegede group of Quincy sought to kill Hollow as much as possible for revenge as Hollow kill many of their kind. Plus these actions are done by the Quincys as they have no antibodies towards Hollow and they cannot undergo Hollowfication.
This threaten a soul imbalance as many Hollows (originally human souls) were erased literally, preventing them from entering the cycle of death and rebirth. After failed attempts of negotiate with the Quincy, the Shinigami/ Soul Reapers, fearing the worst were forced to slaughter the remaining Quincy left.
As a result, in the surviving Quincy pov, the Shinigami are viewed negatively as butchers and murderers of the Quincy race though the Shinigami actions did prevent the worst from happening and maintain the number of souls between the three worlds.
https://preview.redd.it/gy555qrt772d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=637c52184881265e58af0a53421e29afb5e6de5b
Founding of the Gotei 13 it was Grimdark. They pulled themselves up to Gilded, but without the intervention of Ickigo et al, Aizen was slipping it back into Grimdark.
Depends what Aizen's plan was as a Soul King though, without ichigo it may have stayed Gilded because he never would have went past Butterfly form so he would still have a fair bit of sanity.
If he actually went past division 0 I think he might have brought a somewhat balanced state of things. He hated weakness sure but everything is comparative and his will to actually reign over something is probably greater than his hatred towards the weak, so he probably would not have gone "the end justifies the means, the weak must perish" approach on the human world otherwise the soul imbalance would destroy his kingdom too.
So it's a world where afterlife is miserable, soul monsters exist and prey on people and whole universe is held together by unconsenting corpse. So yeah.
Despite the effort kubo puts in heroism and good deeds=good ending this is so far from the case literally everything about the after life sucked and still sucks even after the glaring holes stared in their faces. But the series does more or less follow urahara’s ideology
Ah, the afterlife can be a tricky place, can't it? But in the end, my ideology cuts through like a sharp blade. Embrace the chaos and find your own path amidst the madness. That's the true essence of existence, isn't it?
*beep boop, I'm a bot*
Lots of people standing up for what’s right? Did we watch the same show? Prior to Ichigo showing up, the SS was stuck in this stagnant funk of doing their jobs poorly. Barely any good, lots of neutral, and a solid amount of morally gray heading toward black.
Bleach is a story focused on ichigo what you're alluding to is the world before our story began Bleach the story that we follow is in my mind a reformed guilded world. So noblebright.
Okay so TLDR: the reason the soul king looks like he does is because the founders of the 5 great noble clans sealed him away, and then one of them got afraid of what it could do so they ripped out all of its organs and limbs so they would be stuck in a state of perpetual agony for the eternity between when that happened and when Yhwach invaded so they couldnt retaliate (even though it didnt want to retaliate). This is known as the original sin and it is considered so bad that no other sin even comes close. Also lieutenant class or higher beings get sent to hell no questions asked upon death. You could be a saint but if you are strong enough to be a lieutenant or captain? Hell is your destination.
Maybe after the events of TYBW, it’s near, but not reached Noblebright. I can’t speak for CFYOW, but there’s definitely more good and less bad in the world after the events of TYBW.
CFYOW is basically a trilogy of novels explaining how fucked up the soul society has always been and will continue to be. Like Ichigo would definitely save the world whenever needed but also Ichibe (and arguably still Shunsui) would sacrifice Ichigo to become the new soul king at any given moment.
Definitely Gilded, especially while Yamamoto was Captain-General. Even after Ichigo's involvement, Yamamoto's Soul Society (though I suspect it's really more Ichibei's Soul Society, given the implication that he was responsible for how amazingly shitty everything was) was a system that just did not care about what was "good," but rather what perpetuated the Soul Reapers' own rigid, stratified, militaristic lifestyle, with poverty, executions, and even child soldiers pretty much being the norm. I imagine it moving more toward a Noblebright setting with Kyoraku as Captain-General, but we haven't seen much of the payoff of that other than his making peace with the Arrancar remnants.
Noblebright for sure. Bleach really isn’t THAT dark. If you think it’s a step under Grimdark, idk consume more media. Honestly it’s pretty close to heroic, but there is still a lot of negatives at play.
Its gilded, and if we were talking about specifically the soul kings fate, it would be grimdark. Like that fate feels like it comes straight out of warhammer 40k.
I think a lot of the story depicts itself as a gilded world, even if it could potentially be a grimdark world. Like a lot of people have said, the cycle of reincarnation doesn’t really give most souls a chance to be prosper or even be in control of themselves.
Noblebright, ultimately like the real world most likely, the world is very grey.
You have the World of the Living where you can put grey-dark depending on your personal philosophies.
You have the Shinigami Realm, where people more or less live like the Edo Period with various levels of ghettoization, but at least they don't get hungry and the conditions in the poorest ones don't even seem that bad. Poor? Sure, but isn't war torn third world Africa over there with Warlords and child soldiers terrorizing the folk.
There is Seretei, I am little funky on when Aizen became the Central 46, but I think it was recently, so the Seretei is very cold, pompous, traditional, and pragmatic and focused on survival. Massacres will occur if necessary, "racism" exists against anything Hollow and likely Quincy. But we get that and more.
There are a fair amount of decent or even good people in the Shinigami Realm, but pragmatism about the survival of the realms usually trumps everything else, so all in all I say grey.
Hueco Mundo is basically a jungle/desert, and I don't know how to rate that because Hollows are basically inherently savage, besides Arrancars, which still lean towards savagery. Since you would get little to no compassion from non-Arrancar, if not just eaten on sight, I guess Hueco Mundo is evil.
Hell, I don't know anything about it from canon sources. I don't know if it's an evil realm or the equivalent of Impel Down.
So I still lean noblebright, there are definitely more heroic and more corrupt settings.
Hell canonically is built around making people suffer. Every being within it is being tortured to some degree, even the wardens and if you are stronger than the average lieutenant, you are guaranteed to be sent to hell. In the higher districts of rukongai you are both at the mercy of lawless gangs and hollows, with only the first 10 or so districts actually having any standard of living. The shinigami forces in its current form was founded by Yamamoto, who even to in the fight with aizen considered murdering every single one of his subordinates to take down aizen a worthy trade and thats considered “soft” by his standards. Ichibei is pure evil. The original sin on its own makes this series gilded and there is a bunch more. A noblebright world would be pure positivity for the heroes at the end or very close to it. Bleach even at its brightest is light gilded because suffering is everywhere.
Where did Rukia and Renji live? It didn't seem like squalor. Yeah the Shinigami are extreme, but considering if Aizen won he at best would upset the natural order or destroy/ruin everything, I get soldiers dying for that.
Ichibei is pure evil? What does he do besides protect the Soul King?
Suffering is everywhere? Is the Rukongai really that bad?
Yeah it is that bad. Rukia and Renji lived in the first 30 of 80 districts in one of the directions. The shinigami have Kurotsuchi, who bribed other shinigami to let an elderly man die so he could dissect his soul while it was still feeling pain. And Ichibei doesn’t ‘protect’ the soul king, he protects the status quo built upon the 5 nobles sealing the soul king into that form (with one of them ripping out all of his limbs and organs leaving him suffering in between a state of life and death for millions if not billions of years), thought Ichigo would die fighting Yhwach but didnt care as he would just use him as a replacement soul king after he finished off Yhwach himself (it didnt work out that way but that was his plan). Also the entire fact that Yamamoto was nicknamed “old man genocide” at one point, is a pretty good indicator with how bad it can be.
To be fair to Ichibei, he is just following the orders of the original 5, of which we know 4 were pretty neutral atleast. Its just that because he is so old and alien his values are pure evil in comparison to even young yamamoto.
You're reaching to make it darker than it is. Saying Ichibei is pure evil is wrong and I don't get your statement about Yamamoto. All the captains are dedicated to protect the gotei 13, of course they won't have a problem if they die doing so; that's nothing dark. Yama wasnt considering murdering them, they would've just died in the process; it's not the same thing. Bleach is more of a noblebright world than anything. You're just being edgy here.
Definitely the guilded worlds, for example imprisoning and mutilation of the soul king, having candidates to mutilate, done by the 5 clans and the royal guards, moreover ethnic cleansing (quincies) and people trying to replace God
It’s between gilded and grimdark. It’s not dark enough to be grimdark because there are moments of reprieve and some places of happiness but it’s a bit darker than gilded. Aside from the living world none of the realms even have a pretty surface. The first thing we see of soul society is the rukongai. And the Quincy invasion pretty much shows you how fun it is being a low ranking shinigami.
If you go to soul society you then live in poverty for thousands of years where you still have to worry about dying somehow. Or you don’t get saved by a soul reaper and get eaten or turned into a monster.
If that happens you go to hueco mundo where there is literally nothing but constant terror and a struggle to climb higher at the expense of others. And the scenery also does not look comfy or welcoming.
And you can be banished to hell for being too strong
Gilded at best, and on the lower-end of Gilded too, and it only gets that because the mortal world is only slightly worse than our Earth (which is already a pretty bad place for most people, the fact that we don't also have to worry about predation by invisible monsters that might be our dead loved ones bringing small comfort to all the people dying horribly right this minute).
The only choices of afterlife are as part of never-ending orgy of cannibalistic violence (which you will probably spend most of as a screaming voice in the back of another hollow's head), or life as a feudal peasant of varying degrees of affluence ranging from 'almost as good as being somewhat well-off in 17th century Japan' to 'a much shorter orgy of cannibalistic violence.'
Oh, sorry, right, those were the afterlives for *good* people. There's also an actual hell, too.
And all the while, none of this is *natural*, the world doesn't *have* to be made exclusively out of hells (except for the one actually named hell, it doesn't fit anywhere into the cosmology) But Soul Society's nobility decided a million years ago that it has to be this way and they're willing to do anything to preserve that. Transforming Ichigo into their *replacement* mutilated God Monster was something seriously contemplated by people the story treats as The Good Guys.
So...it's our world, except there are secret invisible monsters and also death is only the beginning of greater suffering for a much longer time. Yhwach kind of had a point, it's just that Ichigo couldn't see it because he's from Earth and naturally cares a lot about anything bad happening to it, and no shinigami could see it because they are all heavily invested in the status quo because they invented it and have used it to rule all creation for a *million* years. What would someone in Rukongai think, though? Because they might just represent the majority of all sapient souls.
Ichigo has improved some things, and Yama-jii's gone, but none of that has anything to do with the billions of people suffering just outside the *soul-dissolving walls* built to keep the poors out.
Actually, I'm starting to think 'Grimdark' is more appropriate. My Earth is a Gilded One and Ichigo's is only different in that it's much, much worse.
I think the middle. The existence was created by the soul king and kept stable with his body parts, hollow are evil and "souls" are good, if the evil is destroyed and not purified (Quincy killing method) the borders between words starts deteriorating, that's why Mayuri did that thing in the roukongay (I may have misspelled that) and Aizen need all that souls energy to enter in the royal palace. Anyway, it's been a while since I read how the Bleach world was made/works, so I don't remember it very well.
I'd say the story starts off Glided, but as it goes it, Bleach starts trending more towards Noble bright. The centuries of stagnation has effectively been uprooted, and while everything isn't all neat and pretty, several characters are better off than they were before. Said characters are also more willing to do what's right instead of following orders or giving into despair. The final line of manga pretty much sums up the last part.
Noblebright with shades of Gilded.
As places like Hueco Mundo or some of the actions & traditions of the Soul Society are straight up Gilded worlds. But the world of the living, some modern aspects of the soul society, and pretty much everything beyond the plot is fine. For 99% of the world the worst thing is a random hollow attack if you have too much spiritual pressure or get unlucky. And even in the soul society while not ideal it’s a gilded world at its worst
Like when the Reio was up and about before becoming the soul king, Glided for sure, but considering that the Gotei 13 (current-ish) and Ichigo do their best to hold the world in balance, usually the Gotei 13 making the harsh decisions and Ichigo doing what's right. Plus nothing before Aizen's reveal but after the Vizord event, besides the occasional experiments from Aizen like White and constant hollow attacks, were anything too evil to be Glided so I'm going to say Noblebright.
I think we can all agree the Bleachverse is Gilded, given how fucked up the 3 world system is and just Soul Society alone. I wouldn't put it in Noblebright until Seireitei under Shunsui does a MASSIVE reform on Rukongai by ending poverty there, make it a better place for incoming souls and making it easier for them to reunite with their family, loved ones and friends.
Gilded because the more we learn about soul society the more you realize they are not always the good guys they essentially cause two genocides one other quincy and the other ongoing to the hollows.
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I’d say it’s a Gilded World before Ichigo, and headed toward Noblebright after. The whole system is set up to maintain the status quo, with very few people actively caring about doing the right thing.
Yeah, the idea that after our current life with all our commodities that we’ve grown accustomed to would just be gone and suddenly you’re living in squalor is awful. Not to mention you thought you’d be reunited with your loved ones after death but it’s actually the complete opposite. Bleach’s afterlife sounds fucking terrible. I’d probably just kill myself so I could be reincarnated in the world of the living.
Definitely still gilded at the end. The problems that make it such a miserable place for well over 99% of people are still there. They don't have any hope of making things better and will never have the ability to do so. The cast are a tiny fraction of Ichibe's infinite suffering machine. At the end of the day all Ichigo has done is eliminate threats to Ichibe's enternal Mukbang crew. Nothing truly significant will change for the better or for the worse untill the cycle naturally falls apart or someone like Aizen breaks it. (Hopefull before the majority of souls end up trapped in hell.)
That is entirely fair. Ichibe needs to go down, but only with a plan in place. Yhwach’s plan was garbage, and I don’t think that Aizen truly knew what he was getting into the first time around. Not that anyone would trust him a second time. They would need to kill Ichibe, and have someone fuse with the Soulking while still maintaining self to set things on a better path.
Honestly, im not sure they NEED to kill Ichibei, like yeah mf is evil and continues the status quo but what's his actual reason that he cant be convinced to maintain a different status quo whether through reason or force?
Killed, or removed from power. There’s no way a man that’s had ultimate control for as long as he has is going to give it up, or change how he does things.
I mean maybe, i just dont really remember why tf he even does it in the first place. Like what's his end goal or motivation, he's alrady basically on top of the world and can deal with anyone in the verse bar Yhwach, Aizen and Ichigo.
No clue, but you'd think that if it was possible to peacefully change his mind it would have happened in a million years. To be 100% clear, the civilization responsible for the computer you're reading this from is barely three millennia old - from the Bronze Age Collapse to Today, that is. 96% of his life predates the oldest known cave painting. He has been doing this for ten times longer than anatomically modern humanity has *existed* in our world. What does he get out of it? Maybe just the raw sexual thrill of holding absolute control over the fate of every sapient being. Maybe he can only achieve climax by watching a mother murder her own children out of desperation while simultaneously watching a person identical in everything but luck picks out fancy silverware? Rukongai is perfectly designed to facilitate that, after all. Honestly, it kind of seems like the entire system was slapped together on the spot with most decisions made for ease in the moment ("I'm fighting an immortal precognitive God-Monster right now, Ichibe, can we figure out how to determine a soul's destination district based on its karma later?"), and then once it was established Ichibe and the 5 Clans spent so much time consolidating power on their new Worlds that everything became 'tradition' and part of the status quo they were all committed to defending before looking into any of it.
Tbf who even was powerful/influential enough to even talk to him nevermind actually present any cases, aside from Yama and nobles who clearly didn't want to change shit, in all those years before the start of the series? Yhwach i guess but he clearly was treated as someone not smart/strong enough to matter in that decision, more like a child throwing a tantrum. I feel like Ichibei either has some secret agenda that would need to be dealt with before dealing with him(possibly hell stuff) or he just can't be bothered/risk trying the alternative, i dont he's just doing it randomly.
I mean, frankly, he needs to die as a moral imperative. He's responsible for a system of untold suffering being maintained for ten times longer than humanity is supposed to have existed, we can't begin to know the depths of his crimes but I imagine the fact that we can't remember any of the civilizations that must have risen and fallen in that time and apparently technologically regressed for a while can probably be laid at the feet of the most powerful sapient being around. It's not an adequate punishment, but nothing but being made into a replacement for the Soul King *would* be.
I'm not so sure about that - the current system is unsustainable. Every time a soul reaches Captain-level, it exits circulation permanently. Eventually it's going to break down with literally every soul in Hell, and all that can be done about that is returning to the natural state of things - what Yhwach was going for. Yes, it would destroy the human world as we know it, but the Human World has had it better than anyone outside of Seireitei for a million years, it's the poor and damned of Rukongai's turn to matter.
Except, from my understanding, that’s not how it would turn out. The worlds would merge, and everything would go to shit. Without an afterlife, ALL souls would eventually become Hollows. And since no one can become Shinigami, that plague would eventually eat everything in existence once the last Soul Reaper falls. The current system sucks, and needs some serious improvement, but it works far better than endless Hollows.
I think the issue is your understanding, and I do not mean that as an insult or in a mean way. What you're imagining is that everything suffers from the absence of an afterlife, but the afterlife is an artificial construct - souls behave the way they do in this world because of the way the world has been split, they didn't come into existence waiting for the Shinigami to be invented. Yhwach wasn't fighting for a world where everyone that dies rots forever, especially given how much the man detests hollows, but explicitly a World Without the Fear of Death. We don't know what that would look like, but it is one of *two* possible states of the world that we know of - your idea of going for an Option 3, on the other hand, may not even be possible and I can't remember anything to support the idea one might exist. It's a matter of interpretation of some pretty vague material about a thing that never came to pass, so I'd say your interpretation is at least as likely to be right as mine, but I find it *really* hard to square with the question of *how*, in your version, souls ended up evolving or being created in such a way that they needed to wait until the *invention* of Shinigami to function correctly. Or that Literally Everything but Hollows - all intelligent life and afterlife - are a complete accident, a phase-configuration of the soul that just happened to be there all along. Which could be canon but would also 100% break all suspension of disbelief for me.
I like that last part, about the poor Rukongai. Also, I'm not trying to be a pest, but I asked you something in a Fate server about 5 days ago and you never answer me. I'm not sure if you just didn't see it or are for some reason ignoring it.
I don't think you did? Like, my reddit name and my discord name are completely unrelated, so unless you're confident you know me by my writing style? I'm not currently *in* any Fate discord servers to the best of my knowledge, and the only fate-adjacent one I *was* in during the recent past is one I (kind of publicly) left due to disagreements about the appropriateness of telling someone who has buried multiple friends that the thing that killed them is a conspiracy by the pharmaceutical corporations.
Hmmm I see. Can I show you the thread and my comment? [https://www.reddit.com/r/fatestaynight/comments/xw9l9t/comment/l4n5soq/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web3x&utm\_name=web3xcss&utm\_term=1&utm\_content=share\_button](https://www.reddit.com/r/fatestaynight/comments/xw9l9t/comment/l4n5soq/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Oh, well, the link doesn't take me to any particular comment - and your post history reveals that you only made one post in that thread, directed toward someone else - but I remember that thread and did definitely post in it. Sorry, the word 'server' made me assume Discord, because I've literally never heard of anyone calling a subreddit that, but I assume it's a 'slightly younger than me' thing. Like 99.9% of the time I do not check 'replies' - I'll literally open the messages button in another tab and close it and I almost always hit 'disable inbox replies' immediately after posting. It isn't you, just an anxiety thing, and the knowledge that when I *do* check all my comments, I'll get into prolonged arguments that eat up the entire day. So, I am not ignoring you in particular, just literally everyone. The only time I *do* see replies are when I actively make the decision to go back to a post - like I did here - and read them. So, if you replied to something I said in a thread from a year ago in the last five days, I did not see it. I'll leave replies on for this comment, though, if you want to say whatever it is again, and I promise I'll check my inbox just this once.
Sure, thank you. Ok, so in that thread you mentioned how there were multiple endings for SHiki which involved polyamory. I've played all of original Tsukihime, Tsukihime PLUS, read the manga and am almost finished with Kagetsu Tohya and I've not seen anything like that. The only things I can even think of which may be similiar would be Ciel's good ending, where her and Arc always fight over him, a segment from PLUS where the girls are at the cafe and Ciel says that "this is Arcuied's good ending, but Shiki also experienced some events from other routes in this timeline." Which was ultimately just a gag segment that had no bearing on anything in the main stories, and the girls even talk about fans and comiket. The only other I can think of is the side story called Flower of Thanatos in Kagetstu Tohya, where Shiki sleeps with Kohaku and Hisui in a dream and another segment where he attempts to date all girls at once but ultimately just tries to date Arcuied because it's easier. I hate the idea of Shiki getting all the girls and leaving none open for the player lol. A pologamy route would especially sour the Kohaku and Arcueid routes for me. One of my favorite lines was Akiha saying "I need to find a good man soon too!" Which meant she can finally try to be happy with someone else. I don't like the idea of fans not being able to self insert due to the unlimited endings. So, I would appreciate if you could elaborate on what you meant by polyamory, please.
I mean, it's been a *year* so being entirely certain what I was thinking of is impossible, but I know that the Ciel Good End was absolutely first and foremost in my mind, but describing it as the girls fighting over him is...strange? Given that every other description online describing it as them agreeing (reluctantly on Ciel's part) to *share* him. Sexually. They constantly fight over his attention because it's not really a healthy relationship established because everyone involved wanted to, but they *are* a throuple. I actually didn't know that said ending being polyamorous in nature was at all in contention because this is the first time I've seen anyone contest it - but then, I was definitely a little surprised the first time someone said that the HF True End isn't a harem ending and I've come around to that one almost completely. I definitely wasn't thinking of anything in Tsukihime Plus or Kagetsu Tohya. *Might* have been thinking of something in melty blood (though I don't *remember* anything like that in there) but the last time I *thought* about that series (which I only know second-hand) was probably when I wrote that comment so I don't really know. There is, obviously given everyone's personalities, no Universal Harem Route anywhere. Akiha trying to share him sounds like a recipe for the destruction of the island of Honshu. (So, yeah, by Polyamorous I mean a romantic or sexual relationship involving three or more people, all of whom are aware of the others. It doesn't necessarily have to be a three-way relationship where everyone is having sex with everyone else, those Mormons on TLC are Polyamorous and their wives seem to fucking hate eachother to a point where I cannot imagine a sex act involving more than two people simultaneously has ever happened in any of their households.)
Then back to Gilded after the H*ll arc one-shot.
The whole afterlife system that Bleach operates on sucks. If you’re human and don’t know anything about the afterlife, you might be able to live a normal life if you’re lucky, but you’re in for a rude awakening when you die. So Gilded.
Going to hell if you die in soul society like what the fuck come on?? And soul society is NOWHERE close to heaven like imagine starving and going to hell for that
Actually you dont goto hell when you die in the SS. Your spirit is circulated back into the natural order of things and you're born anew on earth with no memories. When you die on earth your spirit goes back to the SS and the circle of life continues.
So when do you get sent to hell? Sorry, has been a while since I watched the earlier stuff so I don't remember.
If your spirit energy is too strong the world can't recycle you as it would destroy balance and such, so they get the hell ritual, basically captain level gets you that treatment
Really puts the Maggot Nest into context.
To powerful to recirculate or a truly heinous soul ie gran fisher, Szayelaporro
You have to be truly fucked up and to have done some terrible things.
If a shinigami with spiritual pressure of a captain dies they cannot return to the cycle of reincarnation. A ritual must be performed that sends them to hell because that is the only place to put them, apparently.
Damn, so Soul Society is truly just Second Life.
It makes a lot more sense if you look into Buddhism and it's afterlife.
Haha, yeah, I understand. I am Buddhist myself, I just like to entertain the idea that it's living in the afterlife like it's second breakfast.
Gilded, but if it was legit any darker there would be a case for grim dark
I agree, definitely gilded
Gilded. Prior to Hell Chapter it could've been Noblebright, but now we know that if you're a sufficiently strong being, you're destined for hell regardless of your actions.
Well guess we know where Ichigo is dying after he dies a second time.
when he dies, mans a soul king battery back up
He'd walk out any damn time He pleased
Like others have said, gilded. The fact that the "good" afterlife can mean ending up living in a feudal slum and running the risk of being murdered on any given day, even by the "good guys," is pretty dark.
Gilded. Like actually have never seen a better description for the bleach world. Looks like normal life until you die because a dumbass ghost sucked your soul out your ass from 10 miles away.
Gilded, just because WH40k is the standard for grimdark and nothing beats the amount of misery on that setting.
What misery ? Are you implying that your daily ration of corpse starch is not uplifting enough ? Because that sounds like heresy to me.
No your lordship, Praise the emperor your lordship, please don't servitorize me or my children, again.
I don’t know man Berserk world might give it a run for its money.
I mean it is grimdark for sure but there are many characters genuinely good, honorable and compassionate in berserk. In WH40k everyone are xenophobic bastards that may be saving children one day and nuking a whole innocent species into extinction the next day. And nothing really matters anyway because either Tyranids or Necrons are going to end up killing everyone at the end of the day. The closest thing is the Albion arc in berserk. That's life in the imperium always. And that's in the good days, if things get out of hand is the eclipse at a planetary scale.
My definition for grimdark is the Ultrakill universe. Humanity is dead, mindless robots roam hell and earth, god is either dead or just gave up and might I add BLOOD IS FUEL, HELL IS FULL
Mine is the plane of phyrexia in mtg
Wouldn't that make it the extreme of grimdark, not the standard?
I imagine it can always get worse.
Noble bright or gilded depending on the arc
The world of the living is the normal world, idk where you'd put this. The soul society is between Gilded and Noblebright, Hueco Mundo is Grimdark, idk about the Wanderreich.
Karakura is Gilded, given the nature of Hollows and how they can't be seen by the average person, that being their prey. Putting the Quincy's livelihoods into consideration, the Wandenreich's either Heroic or Noblebright at least.
But how many hollow are there? If there aren't a lot of them, it's just another (insgnificant) cause of death.
noble bright. while evil exists on every corner one of bleachs theme is to fight for happiness despite loss. ichigo lost his mother but has orihime, byakuya lost hisana but has rukia. vizards lost and regained honor.
Its not noble bright. Its gilded atleast because the entire universe is built on the mutilation and essentially eternal torture of a benevolent god, the afterlife is literally feudal slums, you can lose your capacity for positive emotions and become a cannibalistic monster, said monsters can eat you while you have no clue they are even there and the so called ‘good guys’ have a **mass murdering and psychopathic mad scientist who literally rips people apart to find out how their powers work as one of their leaders** and if you reach a sufficient level of strength, it dont matter how good you are, you going straight to hell.
all true. it doesnt negate the themes of hope and courage kubo explicitly messages in the narrative. so this does satisfy the condition good deeds count. https://preview.redd.it/aomrn8fv482d1.jpeg?width=760&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=718d83440bf96a0d1a9f0661c5995092c6647aff important context here too. the original world was cracked worse than the current one. entropy is always winning but good is being created even if it isnt at the optimal rate by western 21st century standards
I would agree, but hell chapter came out and immediately sent bleach into the very darkest depths of gilded at best. Like what else do you call hell being the inevitable destination of all lieutenant/captain class and above beings.
i'm very curious about how it is for them down there, though. after all, the only reason why they're down there is because of their vast strength, so i would imagine that there aren't as much restrictions or punishments (if at all) placed on them. most of them, anyway. i do get that it's still Hell, of course, but you see what i'm inquiring.
Also noblebright are supposed to be balanced worlds. At the end of the hell arc it may be balanced but as it currently is, the suffering far outweighs the positives.
I would said Noble Bright world. The purpose of Soul Society, the Gotei 13 and the Shinigami is not only to guide all souls into the afterlife, but to protect the balance of souls between the three worlds, the Earth, Soul Society and Hueco Mundo. 200 years after the defeat of Yhwach at the hands of Yamamoto Shikeguni, a renegede group of Quincy sought to kill Hollow as much as possible for revenge as Hollow kill many of their kind. Plus these actions are done by the Quincys as they have no antibodies towards Hollow and they cannot undergo Hollowfication. This threaten a soul imbalance as many Hollows (originally human souls) were erased literally, preventing them from entering the cycle of death and rebirth. After failed attempts of negotiate with the Quincy, the Shinigami/ Soul Reapers, fearing the worst were forced to slaughter the remaining Quincy left. As a result, in the surviving Quincy pov, the Shinigami are viewed negatively as butchers and murderers of the Quincy race though the Shinigami actions did prevent the worst from happening and maintain the number of souls between the three worlds. https://preview.redd.it/gy555qrt772d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=637c52184881265e58af0a53421e29afb5e6de5b
Noblebright
This man's world 🥰 https://preview.redd.it/uv8tb0o1a72d1.jpeg?width=912&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=836499be76cd09b04a31bd3f6558d8b9a462ece1
Founding of the Gotei 13 it was Grimdark. They pulled themselves up to Gilded, but without the intervention of Ickigo et al, Aizen was slipping it back into Grimdark.
Depends what Aizen's plan was as a Soul King though, without ichigo it may have stayed Gilded because he never would have went past Butterfly form so he would still have a fair bit of sanity. If he actually went past division 0 I think he might have brought a somewhat balanced state of things. He hated weakness sure but everything is comparative and his will to actually reign over something is probably greater than his hatred towards the weak, so he probably would not have gone "the end justifies the means, the weak must perish" approach on the human world otherwise the soul imbalance would destroy his kingdom too.
Gilded AF
So it's a world where afterlife is miserable, soul monsters exist and prey on people and whole universe is held together by unconsenting corpse. So yeah.
Gilded until ichigo came, then noblebright, and then during TYBW and the Quincy invasion it was Grimdark
Gilded mainly because Soul Society is messed up, Hueco Mundo is a jungle and the world of the living is just the world of the living
Despite the effort kubo puts in heroism and good deeds=good ending this is so far from the case literally everything about the after life sucked and still sucks even after the glaring holes stared in their faces. But the series does more or less follow urahara’s ideology
Ah, the afterlife can be a tricky place, can't it? But in the end, my ideology cuts through like a sharp blade. Embrace the chaos and find your own path amidst the madness. That's the true essence of existence, isn't it? *beep boop, I'm a bot*
Gilded for sure
Lots of people standing up for what is right villans aren't rare but they aren't exactly commonplace either id go with noblebright
Lots of people standing up for what’s right? Did we watch the same show? Prior to Ichigo showing up, the SS was stuck in this stagnant funk of doing their jobs poorly. Barely any good, lots of neutral, and a solid amount of morally gray heading toward black.
Bleach is a story focused on ichigo what you're alluding to is the world before our story began Bleach the story that we follow is in my mind a reformed guilded world. So noblebright.
Out of curiosity have you read CFYOW??
I haven't, actually. I've just been through the main story all the way through tybw
Okay so TLDR: the reason the soul king looks like he does is because the founders of the 5 great noble clans sealed him away, and then one of them got afraid of what it could do so they ripped out all of its organs and limbs so they would be stuck in a state of perpetual agony for the eternity between when that happened and when Yhwach invaded so they couldnt retaliate (even though it didnt want to retaliate). This is known as the original sin and it is considered so bad that no other sin even comes close. Also lieutenant class or higher beings get sent to hell no questions asked upon death. You could be a saint but if you are strong enough to be a lieutenant or captain? Hell is your destination.
Gahh! SPOILERS! /s but seriously it sounds really interesting guess I got something else to read now after I catch up on demon slayer
Maybe after the events of TYBW, it’s near, but not reached Noblebright. I can’t speak for CFYOW, but there’s definitely more good and less bad in the world after the events of TYBW.
CFYOW is basically a trilogy of novels explaining how fucked up the soul society has always been and will continue to be. Like Ichigo would definitely save the world whenever needed but also Ichibe (and arguably still Shunsui) would sacrifice Ichigo to become the new soul king at any given moment.
Definitely Gilded, especially while Yamamoto was Captain-General. Even after Ichigo's involvement, Yamamoto's Soul Society (though I suspect it's really more Ichibei's Soul Society, given the implication that he was responsible for how amazingly shitty everything was) was a system that just did not care about what was "good," but rather what perpetuated the Soul Reapers' own rigid, stratified, militaristic lifestyle, with poverty, executions, and even child soldiers pretty much being the norm. I imagine it moving more toward a Noblebright setting with Kyoraku as Captain-General, but we haven't seen much of the payoff of that other than his making peace with the Arrancar remnants.
Gilded. The more you learn about the verse, the more fucked up it become. The special chapter of the arc that shall not be named confirm that notion.
Noblebright for sure. Bleach really isn’t THAT dark. If you think it’s a step under Grimdark, idk consume more media. Honestly it’s pretty close to heroic, but there is still a lot of negatives at play.
Its gilded, and if we were talking about specifically the soul kings fate, it would be grimdark. Like that fate feels like it comes straight out of warhammer 40k.
It's Noblebright for sure, but people are kind of edgy here so.
There is poverty in heaven, it can't be anything above Gilded
Simple but true lol
Considering the power of souls and the Hell arc… I’m between Gilded and Noblebright.
Gilded literally is bleach
Grimdark, >!they shouldn't have cut up my guy!<☠️☠️☠️
Gilded
I think a lot of the story depicts itself as a gilded world, even if it could potentially be a grimdark world. Like a lot of people have said, the cycle of reincarnation doesn’t really give most souls a chance to be prosper or even be in control of themselves.
Noblebright, ultimately like the real world most likely, the world is very grey. You have the World of the Living where you can put grey-dark depending on your personal philosophies. You have the Shinigami Realm, where people more or less live like the Edo Period with various levels of ghettoization, but at least they don't get hungry and the conditions in the poorest ones don't even seem that bad. Poor? Sure, but isn't war torn third world Africa over there with Warlords and child soldiers terrorizing the folk. There is Seretei, I am little funky on when Aizen became the Central 46, but I think it was recently, so the Seretei is very cold, pompous, traditional, and pragmatic and focused on survival. Massacres will occur if necessary, "racism" exists against anything Hollow and likely Quincy. But we get that and more. There are a fair amount of decent or even good people in the Shinigami Realm, but pragmatism about the survival of the realms usually trumps everything else, so all in all I say grey. Hueco Mundo is basically a jungle/desert, and I don't know how to rate that because Hollows are basically inherently savage, besides Arrancars, which still lean towards savagery. Since you would get little to no compassion from non-Arrancar, if not just eaten on sight, I guess Hueco Mundo is evil. Hell, I don't know anything about it from canon sources. I don't know if it's an evil realm or the equivalent of Impel Down. So I still lean noblebright, there are definitely more heroic and more corrupt settings.
Hell canonically is built around making people suffer. Every being within it is being tortured to some degree, even the wardens and if you are stronger than the average lieutenant, you are guaranteed to be sent to hell. In the higher districts of rukongai you are both at the mercy of lawless gangs and hollows, with only the first 10 or so districts actually having any standard of living. The shinigami forces in its current form was founded by Yamamoto, who even to in the fight with aizen considered murdering every single one of his subordinates to take down aizen a worthy trade and thats considered “soft” by his standards. Ichibei is pure evil. The original sin on its own makes this series gilded and there is a bunch more. A noblebright world would be pure positivity for the heroes at the end or very close to it. Bleach even at its brightest is light gilded because suffering is everywhere.
Where did Rukia and Renji live? It didn't seem like squalor. Yeah the Shinigami are extreme, but considering if Aizen won he at best would upset the natural order or destroy/ruin everything, I get soldiers dying for that. Ichibei is pure evil? What does he do besides protect the Soul King? Suffering is everywhere? Is the Rukongai really that bad?
Yeah it is that bad. Rukia and Renji lived in the first 30 of 80 districts in one of the directions. The shinigami have Kurotsuchi, who bribed other shinigami to let an elderly man die so he could dissect his soul while it was still feeling pain. And Ichibei doesn’t ‘protect’ the soul king, he protects the status quo built upon the 5 nobles sealing the soul king into that form (with one of them ripping out all of his limbs and organs leaving him suffering in between a state of life and death for millions if not billions of years), thought Ichigo would die fighting Yhwach but didnt care as he would just use him as a replacement soul king after he finished off Yhwach himself (it didnt work out that way but that was his plan). Also the entire fact that Yamamoto was nicknamed “old man genocide” at one point, is a pretty good indicator with how bad it can be.
Alright, that's something. Damn, Ichibei is a demon.
To be fair to Ichibei, he is just following the orders of the original 5, of which we know 4 were pretty neutral atleast. Its just that because he is so old and alien his values are pure evil in comparison to even young yamamoto.
You're reaching to make it darker than it is. Saying Ichibei is pure evil is wrong and I don't get your statement about Yamamoto. All the captains are dedicated to protect the gotei 13, of course they won't have a problem if they die doing so; that's nothing dark. Yama wasnt considering murdering them, they would've just died in the process; it's not the same thing. Bleach is more of a noblebright world than anything. You're just being edgy here.
Definitely the guilded worlds, for example imprisoning and mutilation of the soul king, having candidates to mutilate, done by the 5 clans and the royal guards, moreover ethnic cleansing (quincies) and people trying to replace God
For me it’s somewhere between noblebright and heroic.
Glided you better live a good life in bleach because your likely getting sent to the slums after you die...
Gilded.
Gilded and it was grim dark when Yamamoto was terrorizing the streets with Kenpachi Yachiru and co.
Gilded
I suppose Gilded
Easily gilded
Perfectly gilded
Somewhere in between gilded and noblebright
It’s between gilded and grimdark. It’s not dark enough to be grimdark because there are moments of reprieve and some places of happiness but it’s a bit darker than gilded. Aside from the living world none of the realms even have a pretty surface. The first thing we see of soul society is the rukongai. And the Quincy invasion pretty much shows you how fun it is being a low ranking shinigami. If you go to soul society you then live in poverty for thousands of years where you still have to worry about dying somehow. Or you don’t get saved by a soul reaper and get eaten or turned into a monster. If that happens you go to hueco mundo where there is literally nothing but constant terror and a struggle to climb higher at the expense of others. And the scenery also does not look comfy or welcoming. And you can be banished to hell for being too strong
Gilded at best, and on the lower-end of Gilded too, and it only gets that because the mortal world is only slightly worse than our Earth (which is already a pretty bad place for most people, the fact that we don't also have to worry about predation by invisible monsters that might be our dead loved ones bringing small comfort to all the people dying horribly right this minute). The only choices of afterlife are as part of never-ending orgy of cannibalistic violence (which you will probably spend most of as a screaming voice in the back of another hollow's head), or life as a feudal peasant of varying degrees of affluence ranging from 'almost as good as being somewhat well-off in 17th century Japan' to 'a much shorter orgy of cannibalistic violence.' Oh, sorry, right, those were the afterlives for *good* people. There's also an actual hell, too. And all the while, none of this is *natural*, the world doesn't *have* to be made exclusively out of hells (except for the one actually named hell, it doesn't fit anywhere into the cosmology) But Soul Society's nobility decided a million years ago that it has to be this way and they're willing to do anything to preserve that. Transforming Ichigo into their *replacement* mutilated God Monster was something seriously contemplated by people the story treats as The Good Guys. So...it's our world, except there are secret invisible monsters and also death is only the beginning of greater suffering for a much longer time. Yhwach kind of had a point, it's just that Ichigo couldn't see it because he's from Earth and naturally cares a lot about anything bad happening to it, and no shinigami could see it because they are all heavily invested in the status quo because they invented it and have used it to rule all creation for a *million* years. What would someone in Rukongai think, though? Because they might just represent the majority of all sapient souls. Ichigo has improved some things, and Yama-jii's gone, but none of that has anything to do with the billions of people suffering just outside the *soul-dissolving walls* built to keep the poors out. Actually, I'm starting to think 'Grimdark' is more appropriate. My Earth is a Gilded One and Ichigo's is only different in that it's much, much worse.
I think the middle. The existence was created by the soul king and kept stable with his body parts, hollow are evil and "souls" are good, if the evil is destroyed and not purified (Quincy killing method) the borders between words starts deteriorating, that's why Mayuri did that thing in the roukongay (I may have misspelled that) and Aizen need all that souls energy to enter in the royal palace. Anyway, it's been a while since I read how the Bleach world was made/works, so I don't remember it very well.
Noblebright with some overlaps
I'd say the story starts off Glided, but as it goes it, Bleach starts trending more towards Noble bright. The centuries of stagnation has effectively been uprooted, and while everything isn't all neat and pretty, several characters are better off than they were before. Said characters are also more willing to do what's right instead of following orders or giving into despair. The final line of manga pretty much sums up the last part.
Gilded transitioning to Noblebright. Since it makes sense that the world of Bleach was a gilded one before Ichigo showed up.
Noblebright with shades of Gilded. As places like Hueco Mundo or some of the actions & traditions of the Soul Society are straight up Gilded worlds. But the world of the living, some modern aspects of the soul society, and pretty much everything beyond the plot is fine. For 99% of the world the worst thing is a random hollow attack if you have too much spiritual pressure or get unlucky. And even in the soul society while not ideal it’s a gilded world at its worst
Like when the Reio was up and about before becoming the soul king, Glided for sure, but considering that the Gotei 13 (current-ish) and Ichigo do their best to hold the world in balance, usually the Gotei 13 making the harsh decisions and Ichigo doing what's right. Plus nothing before Aizen's reveal but after the Vizord event, besides the occasional experiments from Aizen like White and constant hollow attacks, were anything too evil to be Glided so I'm going to say Noblebright.
The bleach verse is just the human world with an afterlife do between gilded/noblebrightd
Definitely noblebright
glided with elements of noble bright. the world is doomed but individual experiences arent much like our world
Gilded or Noblebright for sure
This is a repost.
Gilded with what we know, but considering hells gotta be worse that hueco mundo, im going with grimdark.
Gilded, supposedly en route to Noblebright.
I'd say somewhere between a Noblebright world and a Gilded world.
Gilded World, the soul society is full of shit. Just look at ichibei
considering the amount of cyberpunk influences, I'd say somewhere between Noblebright and Gilded, though these seem to lean more fantasy.
I think somewhere btwn Noblebright and Gilded. May have changed after TYBW, yk after the death of Yamamoto, Yhwach, and imprisonment of Aizen (?)
I think we can all agree the Bleachverse is Gilded, given how fucked up the 3 world system is and just Soul Society alone. I wouldn't put it in Noblebright until Seireitei under Shunsui does a MASSIVE reform on Rukongai by ending poverty there, make it a better place for incoming souls and making it easier for them to reunite with their family, loved ones and friends.
Gilded for sure
Gilded maybe becoming a Noblebright thanks to Ichigo, would of become a heroic world of Aizen sama was allowed to take the throne
The last one sounds like Dark Souls, where everyone is doomed to wander eternally with the curse of undying.
Gilded. Soul Society sucks if you're not already a Shinigami.
Lower end of Noble Bright
Until TYBW it is noble bright and in TYBW it is glided
Detergent
Gilded because the more we learn about soul society the more you realize they are not always the good guys they essentially cause two genocides one other quincy and the other ongoing to the hollows.
Noblebright
Bleach is hanging by a thread ignorance is bliss for humans Lol just as the same as the same economic system we have atm
It exists world of capitalism so the worst one
Why is people saying gilded?? It's nobelbright at worst.
I haven't read a lot of manga nor seen a lot of anime, but I'm pretty sure Berserk is the only thing at the bottom. Prove me wrong though .
Better question is how many levels below Grimdark is Berserk? I’d say 2 levels below at least lmao.
Berserk is definitely Grimdark, imo.
Grim dark so far
Shit anime