cothurnus | Thoughts: Chapters 443-479 (Reply)

I’ll admit, I don’t think the Fullbringers ever stood a chance of my liking them. They struck me as a little … bland? A little tacked-on and rushed? Of course, this was because, after the final showdown with Aizen at first I felt like Tite Kubo would not be able to do anything right unless he stopped. The way I saw it, any villain whom the mangaka could possibly create from this point onwards would have the feel of one from an anime filler arc, i.e. they’d be visually quite uninteresting and we’d be left wondering how in the heck this had gone completely unmentioned before.

And, at first I took Tsukishima to be the perfect example of this. I mean, seriously, look at his face, with its blank eyes:

It was almost as if he were a parody of my vision. The rest of the fullbringers, I also felt lukewarm about. Though, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if I was being unfair. The Vizards had sort of been treated similarly, in that they were an aesthetic mish-mash of misfits about whom we learn very little for a while, except for certain personality quirks, like Hiyori’s hot-headedness and Shinji’s casual affect, and who serve a purpose in getting Ichigo from plot point A to plot point B.

But then, I thought harder again: there were several differences between the fullbringers and the vizards that made me like the former group immensely, other than their position relative Aizen. I’ll do a list:

Their powers have been strongly implied before they even show up – We’ve already had Ichigo’s hollow mask pop up time and again before he or we understand what it is. We’ve had confirmation from Aizen that, not only is a blend of shinigami and hollow possible, but he has done research into the field himself. We know this from Kaien’s story. By contrast, the only hint we have of the fullbringers’ powers before they arrive on the scene is Chad and the way that his power is somehow similar to that of a hollow. I suppose, if nothing else, they put to bed the weird theories about whether Chad was half-arrancar or something.
The backstory that we are eventually given for them is just better – But, to return to the idea of Aizen’s involvement with the vizard’s formation, not only did this link them more strongly, as I have already said, to the over-arcing story-so-far, but it helped with their characterisation. It meant that we got the ‘Turn Back the Pendulum’ mini-arc, which was full of richly and subtly characterising interactions. And, then, the fact that these guys were once part of the Gotei 13 spoke volumes in itself. Because, by this point, the reader has absorbed the idea that there are a few inherent characteristics of a full-fledged shinigami, in that they have to have, at some point, made a conscious decision to become a shinigami and have been part of the academy and have had a history as part of the divisions, forming relationships and reputations for themselves. Those details don’t even need filling in, necessarily. We can just happily assume they exist. The fullbringers, on the other hand, don’t get this luxury. Their backstories have to be fed to us as flashbacks.
Their characterisation is more organic somehow – That leads me onto my next point, which is that, while the individual stories are all really interesting insights into characters whom we don’t well understand (Yukio was my favourite), there’s just too damn many of them. The fact that we could assume many things about the vizards just due to their shinigami background meant that this wasn’t a problem for them. I also felt, though, that the story reasons, so far as I could discern them, why the vizards were a group were somehow more engaging. They were a group, it seemed primarily to me, to give a sense of a rich and detailed universe, through their interactions with one another. The mangaka seemed to be trying something similar with the fullbringers but came up a little short to me. The others seemed to exist in order prove that Ginjou, Chad and Tsukishima’s powers weren’t too statistically rare.

But, enough of this negativity. I want to finish by mentioning what I did like about this arc, and it boils down to little moments. Such as when Byakuya (shock, horror) actually admits to having enjoyed an adrenaline kick from his fight with Tsukishima. Or when Kyouraku and Ukitake consider the great wisdom Ichigo has shown in his choice to stay allied to the shinigami, despite their not being entirely trustworthy. I quite liked this part in particular, as it elevated what could have been the mere plastering-over of a plot hole (namely, that, while the Seireitei freaked the hell out that Rukia had conferred powers on a substitute shinigami, they apparently already had the position available) into something profound.