Was bleach really that popular during its original run? I read up to fullbringer arc ending and the whole story was ridden with plot holes. How did we go from Toriyama "I don't like this villain, go introduce another one" to Kubo's "Drop the plot not even 10 chapters later"?
Was bleach really that popular during its original run...
pleasecareaboutbleach
pleasecareaboutbleach
pleasecareaboutbleach
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pleasecareaboutbleach
It was the original hype and aura moments: the manga. All hype, no substance.
I still remember my ichigo profile picture on random forums back in the day.
There were other better series when it run, but it's still fun nonetheless.
Was bleach really that popular during its original run?
yeah it was. Someone recently made a youtube vid showing an average of the rankings of shonen jump series throughout the decades. And as the term "big 3" described, for a long time Naruto, OnePiece and Bleach covered the top 3 for years. Of course at some point bleach dropped in ratings, but how liked the last or second to last arc is has no bearings on its overall popularity.
make no mistake. I may read bleach up to chapter 483 but I'm still not Kubo's fan.
Identical formula to Kengan Asura/Omega only 100x as popular. Make a bunch of cool characters and put 0% effort into an actual story.
Yes but it also fell off the fastest and hardest out of the Big 3. The Fullbring arc was the great filter and it just never recovered.
You could tell Kubo really had no plans for a long running series.
Was bleach really that popular during its original run?
yeah
Yep I had the Ichigo half hollow mask from the SS arc.
so where's Aizen's bankai?
Ichigo is his Bankai.
Bleach op and ed was the goat back then. Even normies listen to them.
BRAAAAAAAAAAAAP
Fullbringer was the worst arc in the series. It tanked both the anime and the manga and the anime was full of filler. War arc was pure kino....until the 2nd half.
People were already wary as the Arrancar saga dragged, but Kubo's good will from SS mostly didn't run out until FB started, as all the dissatisfactions from the Winter "War" (like not a single casualty from the good side lol) started to settle in. TYBW started promising, but quickly devolved into a mess in the second half, which only got worse and worse as Kubo had to rush the ending. The pairings (and lack of for may other characters) were just the cherry on top that sealed the deal.
Yeah I used pic-related as my profile picture on msn messenger back in the 2000s.
like not a single casualty from the good side lol
Not only that but I think the bigger sin was how pathetic the fights were for the top 3 Espada, there was no danger, no oomph.
Harribel vs Toshiro was literally filler, they just cancelled each other's attacks and nothing else happens until Kubo decided to move things along and had Aizen decide to -at the time as far as we knew- kill her for literally no reason.
Barragan was forced to sit afk the entire time after Soifon's bankai did nothing because otherwise he would kill Soifon and everyone else there not named Aizen with his Respira and time hax like he showed vs Soifon before his resurrection.
Starkk literally didn't try at all, he's a cool character but his powers are incredibly boring -he didn't even shoot gran ray ceros or cero oscuras- and his fight is boring as fuck because Stark doesn't try at all and gets less invested as more of his allies die and he gets more depressed.
The pairings (and lack of for may other characters) were just the cherry on top that sealed the deal.
Anon Babble really overestimates how much of a deal the shipping wars were (and I'm not gonna lie, Bleach's HOAD is funny to this day). It couldn't have saved the story even if Kubo canonized all popular pairings.
They don't care as much in Japan about shipping which is the only country that matters for these discussions about Manga but shipping was pretty big for Bleach in the west and this is a western website so it's no surprise it gets talked about so much.
Japan absolutely cared about the shipping, what are you talking about? The meltdown wasn't as mediatized due to the language barriers and also partially because RenRuki was actually liked there, softening the impact of IchiHime.
Kids generally don't really care about cohesive plots, they like cool stuff and big tits and Bleach had those in spades. The anime also had an excellent soundtrack from what i remember and good music will always get people into something.
They don't care as much in Japan about shipping which is the only country that matters for these discussions about Manga but s
Bro they were burning bleach manga copies over it.
It was just as popular as Naruto and OP everywhere except Japan( Nowadays it surpassed Naruto )
nonexistent stakes for the good guys with all the fake deaths and injuries
Vizards do nothing (bar Hachi), even though they were setup from the beginning as this cool rogue faction
Orihime does nothing except bail out Ichigo's ass with her screams, even though this was supposed to be her character development arc; do I even need to bring up all the dropped plot referrals regarding her?
Aizen-wank so off the rails he finishes Harribel mid-fight to speed up pacing
he just chills in the fire cuck cage with Gin and Tousen so the top 3 Espada have their little irrelevant matches (they never mattered btw, Aizen is stronger than all of them combined lol)
Ichigo finishes everything with his asspull power-up that would've been much better if reversed with TYBW's HoS form, so he can defeat Yhwach with his equivalent of Letzt Still and a Final Getsuga
zero closure for the Arrancar, we needed the databooks and Kubo's interviews to tell us what happened to the likes of Grimmjow, Nel and Harribel, as well as the aftermath from Las Noches' POV
Really, the only real highlights of the Arrancar saga were Grimmjow, Ulquiorra and Gin. But the last two are gone from the story (presumably so Kubo couldn't ruin them further) and the panther is literally forgotten until the final arc where he doesn't do much, and even is humiliated. I will never understand Kubo's character bloat. Keeping all those irrelevant side characters, not doing more with main characters like Orihime and Sado, and introducing even MORE characters in FB and especially TYBW is dreadful when you're on a tight schedule and have to keep the gravy train going; you'll basically satisfy nobody.
Was bleach really that popular during its original run?
Yes
I read up to fullbringer arc ending and the whole story was ridden with plot holes
And?
I was expecting something with more substances. It's not even air filled balloon I was eating, it was illusion.
Bleach has ALWAYS been style over substance; the manga.
Was bleach really that popular during its original run?
Where? Japan? U.S.A.?
Also, the answer is yes.
Since when were you under the impression that you were reading a real manga?
I'm getting hyped all over just looking at that image. Dammit, Kubo, just leave me alone already!
Kubos art is so fucking nice to look at even if he got lazier over time.
Fullbringer worst arc
Lolno. Absolutely not.
Worst arc was Hueco Mundo. Tite was absolutely failing to maintain his audience with the regular cast and then clearly got pressured by editors into doing the SOULSOCIETYHIJACKLOL which hurt things further with tons of little fights that tiringly extended things and even led to Chad and Orihime losing their spotlight as growing fighters long term and Ishida taking a huge backseat narratively to do more soul society slop.
Hueco Mundo had higher peaks than Fullbring, but it was too lengthy and threw away a chunk of the cast for the Soul Society gang instead of actually letting them do their thing.
The Grimmjow fight was good and Ulquiorra had his moments, but the arc as a whole was a massive drag.
Fullbring had a lot of potential and the new cast was likable enough, but it ended up doing the same thing by calling in the Soul Society goons to crush the plot and kill off most of the new characters instead of doing anything with them. There was room to do stuff with the hometown gang and they were clearly more involved in the plot just based on how Xcution dragged them into things, but much of that drama went unresolved.
Was bleach really that popular during its original run?
lol it was popular which is why its one of the best selling manga but it was nowhere near naruto or one piece levels of popularity which is what ppl usually think. naruto has about 100 million more in manga sales and one piece has triple that...
Was bleach really that popular during its original run?
Yes, it was. It was one of the biggest series in WSJ. However because it ran alongside One Piece and Naruto, it was doomed to never rising above #3 in any ranking, and other series occasionally pushed it out of that spot in the weekly magazine ratings. As it went on this became more common, with Bleach falling off the weekly ratings pretty hard during the Fullbring arc.
However, despite that, the tankobon sales remained very strong for Bleach. Is to this day the 7th best selling WSJ manga of all time. It used to be 6th best but Kimetsu no Yaiba zoomed past it when it had its little moment a few years back.
Is to this day the 7th best selling WSJ manga of all time.
JJK might surpass it once we get updated data. The final two JJK volumes sold over a million, no Bleach volume ever broke a million.
Bleach fans crying about OP on tiktok trying their hardest to stay relevant lmao
The last season of the anime might push the manga sales past Bleach, but it's still just barely in the 100m+ club. Bleach rests at 130 mil, it's kinda like the gatekeeper into the upper echelon of Jump legends.
Bleach's story is just about shocking reversals, betrayals, and reveals. Any time Kubo needed to build hype he just had a character show up that hadn't been in the manga for a while, or unveiled a new bankai.
And like the dumbass teenager I was, it worked on me.
It's at 100 million with just 31 volumes, Bleach is at 130 million with 74. 31 million might seem like a lot, but when Bleach finished in 2016 the sales were lower. It was at 120 million back in 2018, but reached 130 million in 2022.