Imagine having a burning passion for something. Imagine hearing, seeing and feeling things that if you were to tell someone, they'd laugh and call you insane. Our passions, our loves, they drive us to create, to achieve feats we would not ponder upon without passion. And with this passion comes a great need to protect it. No matter what happens we never want to see our creations, our babies be picked apart and destroyed. One man stepped up, he looked his baby in the face and tore it apart to create a legacy, something that we would look up to for eternity. That man's name is Tite Kubo and he created an amazing child in BLEACH.
The Thousand Year Blood War marked the end of BLEACH. We all knew, we all felt it, this would be the end of BLEACH forever. What we did not know was that Kubo was planning a war that would tug at our lungs and push down on our hearts. Kubo looked at his baby in the face and destroyed everything we knew about this child.
I'm 25 years old. I grew up watching BLEACH. I'lll never forget the day it aired on Adult Swim. I hated it. I don't know why but I did not like it compared to other anime that I grew up watching on Toonami and Adult Swim. I always avoided it, even turning the tv to Disney Channel or Nick at Nite. But there was one evening the series caught my eye. Uryu vs Kurotsuchi. I had no investment in these characters but I could feel the desperation in Uryu's heart to win at all costs. I applauded his shoddy victory in the middle of the night and since then I was hooked. From there to Bounts to Arrancars and finally Quincys. I invested so much time and energy watching this series. I fell in love with all the characters and I know its father, Kubo did as well. So seeing him take everything that we all loved and killing it is a gut-wrenching feat.
Here I am watching the final arc of BLEACH years after reading it in my highschool computer class. I cried then, and I'm crying now. These characters that I've grown to love are being killed. They have fear in their hearts. They know that they can not beat these Quincy without their Bankai but they use it knowing it will be stolen from them. Yet despite these circumstances, they keep fighting. Byakuya, one of the calmest characters in the series. The greatest support character I've ever seen in any piece of fiction, feared. He feared for Seireitei, for Rukia, for Renji. In his final moments he cried and begged Ichigo to save everyone. I never thought we would see such an emotion and scene from a character such as that. Kubo evoked fear and despair into his characters which passed on to us, the readers yet he was not scared. He was not scared to kill, mutilate and shame the characters he brought to life. He was not scared to take everything he created, everything we loved away from us so that we would cherish it even more.
I know what its like to take something you created and have to pick it apart so that it comes out better, stronger than it was before. To see a creator coming from the genre that is Japanese comics gave me the strength to do it with my own work. To see Kubo destroy his own work for our entertainment left me with a new found appreciation for the series as well as respect for him. Not many creators of any genre or medium have the self awareness or attitude to look at what they've created and admit it can be better. Works of art they've spent decades working on shattered so that it can rise again in better shape.
As big of a BLEACH fan as I am, I have to admit that during its last run, the series wasn't doing so well. We all knew, Kubo knew. Yet he didn't give up. "Fear is never born from nothing. It is born from the tiny insecurities that linger within our hearts". Kubo taught us that it is okay to have fear, to have insecurities but we must soon face these demons and wield our swords to defeat such evil and become better. Kubo was a man who had fear, but he beat his fear and passed on joy and love to all who read BLEACH.
Garser Dismuke is a writer for Blerdsonline.com as well as Garserspoetry.com
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